8 Best Practices for Marketplace Selling for Long-Term Success

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Which e-commerce reseller doesn’t dream about getting to the point where they’re raking in a record number of sales day after day without spending their entire day on growing their business? Even if that sounds like a pipe dream to you right now, we’re here to tell you that it’s possible.

It won’t happen in a day, a week, or even within a month. But, if you follow these 8 best practices, you can (and will) achieve long-term success with marketplace selling. What’s more – potential customers will even choose you over your competitors! 

1. Sell on multiple marketplaces

Don’t just stick to one. Because multi-channel selling gives you more visibility, helps you target new niches and customers, and increase your sales! 

For instance, some people may prefer shopping on Etsy, while others might like sticking to eBay. So, if you stick to only one of these e-commerce platforms, you miss out on an entirely new group of customers. The solution? Sell on both! 

It also diversifies your risk by giving you other streams of income to fall back on just in case something goes wrong with one of the marketplaces.

💡 Pro Tip: When dipping your toes into multi-channel selling, a cross listing tool like Crosslist is going to be your best friend. Click here to learn why.

2. Differentiate yourself from your competitors

To get ahead of your rivals, you need to offer your customers something more valuable – a process that starts with competitor research. 

• What are their product offerings? Is there any feature you can add to make the products more valuable for your customers?
• What are their delivery times and shipping costs?
• What are their price points? Use an e-commerce price monitoring tool to check this and price your own products competitively.
• How do they package their products? Can you improve upon this by adding some freebies or personal notes to your packaging? 

Once you have the data, use it to your advantage to position your products as the ones that offer more bang for your customers’ buck. 

3. Build an email list

Connecting with your customers through email is like inviting them to an exclusive party at your home. 

✔️ The guest list is limited, making them feel appreciated. 
✔️ The interaction is personalized, forging better connections.
✔️ By sending emails about abandoned carts, you can close more sales.
✔️ And you get to reward their loyalty with some limited-edition discounts.

All of this is pretty easy by using tools that automate the whole process for you. While MailChimp is the tool that everyone immediately thinks of when it comes to email marketing tools, there are several cheaper MailChimp alternatives.

4. Optimize your e-commerce stores

Let’s say you sell sneakers on eBay. It’s a guarantee that you’ll have a lot of competitors. To get ahead of them, your products need to appear on top of the search results whenever someone searches for sneakers.

To make this happen, you need to optimize your store for SEO by:

• Including the keywords related to your product in your titles and descriptions
• Adding high-quality images to your listings (and maybe even some short-form videos) that showcase the items from all angles
• Including a detailed breakdown of your products
• Highlight the value of your products as well as the unique experience they offer in the description
• Categorizing your products accurately by using specific tags
• Fill out the “About,” “Store Policy,” and “FAQ” sections

These steps will increase your store’s visibility, leading to more sales. 

5. Advertise yourself

While SEO does work wonders in getting more eyeballs on your products, to expand your reach even further, you need to get the word out there by advertising yourself. 

Many e-commerce platforms (like Etsy and eBay) allow you to advertise yourself within the platform for a small fee. These paid ads will appear on top of the search results whenever customers search for the keywords you want to target. 

You can also make use of the external ads promotion policy offered by marketplaces where your listings will be promoted outside of the platform to anybody who’s searching for your products. This helps you target potential customers who use Google, Instagram, or other avenues to search for products to buy. 

You can also build backlinks to your e-commerce store as an organic marketing strategy. In addition to these, you should definitely have separate social media pages (and maybe even your own website) for your brand. This way, you’ll get to target diverse customer groups and increase your visibility! 

Don’t forget to link to your e-commerce storefront from your social media pages, though. 👇

6. Put your customers first. Always

Letting your customers know that you care about solving their problems actually goes a long way in getting you repeat customers. It also increases the word-of-mouth referrals you’ll get, because, let’s be honest – a combo of high-quality products with excellent customer service? Always worth a recommendation to our friends (and our social media followers).

And, hey, putting your customers first also gets you these cool badges, giving potential buyers the trust that you’re reliable! 👇

Here are some easy ways to let your buyers know that they’re valued:

• Be quick, kind, and personalized with your replies
• Have very clear and detailed store policies, such as delivery times, returns, and refunds
• Work with the customers to answer their queries and solve their problems without making them wait for too long
• Made a mistake? Happens to the best of us! Just take accountability and work on fixing it
• Reply to all the reviews you get – yes, even the negative ones
• Network personally with your target audience on social media
• Offer free shipping
• Delivering to multiple regions? Offer multiple payment methods according to the preference of your customers

7. Highlight positive customer reviews

Reviews are one of the top ways through which potential buyers gauge whether to buy from you or not. Why? Because reviews give them the social proof and trust they need that someone else has already tried out the product and loved it, making the risk on their part very minimal.

And if they want to buy the product in the hopes that it’ll solve a specific problem they’re having, reviews let them know whether it works or not. So, ask for customers to leave reviews and highlight the product feature that they liked the most. 

Additionally, share these testimonials on your social platforms, too. Just grab a screenshot of the review, write a few words about how grateful you are for your customers, and promote the product! You can also attract repeat purchases from those who left you a glowing review by giving them a personalized discount coupon for their next purchase. 

If you’re having a sale on that particular product, make sure to mention that, too. Or give an exclusive discount coupon code to the next few people who use that link to make a purchase. 

8. Monitor your performance

You won’t know how well you’re doing till you actually track your performance. Most marketplaces will give you an overview of your sales. Use this to find out what your best (and worst) performing months were, which products were popular (and which ones weren’t), and how most of your customers found you. 

Double down on the strategies that have worked well so far and tweak the ones that could do with some improvement. For instance, if you find that certain products aren’t very popular, conduct some market research or talk to your customers directly to find out why. Maybe it’s a certain feature or the design. Once you find out the cause, fix it. 

If you’re not sure what the problem is, conduct some A/B testing on different platforms to see what works best. Bottom line: keep analyzing your sales data frequently to stay on top of your game!