Best Sales Channels for your E-commerce Website and Marketplace Integration

In today’s day and age, in order to achieve stability in the E-commerce ecosystem and to get ahead of the competition, it has become imperative to choose a robust and powerful marketplace or sales channels for your business.

The pandemic has pushed the increase in availability of most products over the internet which in turn has changed the way things are bought and sold, with the increase in online shopping and digitization, retailers are now obliged to have a flexible approach to tap into this vast pool of potential customers.

Even though prerequisites to enter the online marketplace are much lower than what they used to be, the sheer number of options to choose from, mean that choosing the best sales channel plays a crucial part in determining the success of your business.

Ecommerce Marketplaces

Ecommerce marketplaces are the websites that allow you to sell your products alongside other sellers. While they do take a cut of your revenue, they give you a chance to expose your product to a large number of their already existing customer base.

To give you a head start, we have curated a list of top sales channels that can give your business a deeper penetration to the minds of your target audience.

Check out these top eCommerce marketplaces:

Amazon

No introduction needed here. Amazon is probably the first name that comes to mind when anyone thinks of selling their products on an eCommerce marketplaces. This eCommerce giant helps you to reach a huge audience base. But you need to have an uphill battle to get your product ranked good on amazon as the volume of sellers on the platform is equally large.

Etsy

Etsy is a large marketplace for handmade products. Every product listed on the platform needs to be made by the seller only. The number of buyers and sellers has increased drastically over the years on Etsy.

Flipkart

Flipkart is India's first and, probably, most successful online retailer. Flipkart started up as a multi-vendor bookstore, comparable to Amazon, but now sells almost anything.

Own Ecommerce Stores

On the opposite side of the coin are owned e-commerce stores. If you have the pockets to invest both on the technology and human resources to build and maintain your own online store, it means that you won't have to worry about marketplace restrictions, fees, or rules, along with granting to the ability to go all out on branding and customer recall. Naturally, creating and maintaining your own website/online store does take a lot of time and money.

Listed below are the most popular ecommerce platforms that can be used to set up an online store: 

Shopify

Shopify is an ecommerce platform that makes it simple to create an online store without requiring any prior knowledge of coding or a large budget. The Shopify platform powers over a million businesses and is known for attractive website designs, and useful marketing tools.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a platform to create an eCommerce store easily for the people using wordpress. WordPress websites are small, quick to develop, and easy to maintain. WooCommerce, which has a 30% market share, is one of the most popular eCommerce store builders. 

Magento

Magento is a popular eCommerce website building platform that can store thousands of products and handle high traffic with ease. Its modular structure enables for extensive front-end and back-end customisation.

Prestashop 

You don't have to worry with a lot of technical concerns or complicated code when you use PrestaShop. It's free, light, and simple to use. Furthermore, it provides language assistance, allowing you to sell your goods or services on a global scale. 

Opencart

One of the key advantages of OpenCart is the ease with which it can be customized. Websites built using OpenCart are exceptionally lightweight. It supports approximately 14000 extensions that may be brought in to improve the online store's functionality.

Shipping for your eCommerce website

One of the major challenges that eCommerce sellers or retailers face is the shipping of their products. There are a lot of aspects which need to be considered while choosing the shipping method for your business. 

There is a lot of documentation to be given along with a substantial initial setup fee as a prerequisite, if you want to have your own courier contract with carriers like FedEx, BlueDart, Delhivery, etc. At the same time even if you are willing to pay the initial cost there might be issues later with Pin-code availability with your selected carrier provider. Your carrier provider might not have a hyperlocal delivery option or might not have accessibility to the rural parts of the country.

It is far more beneficial to your business to have accessibility to multiple carrier providers so that you can tap their distribution network in order to get your product delivered to any corner of the country.

eCourierz provides your business with flexibility of choosing from 24+ courier partners serving in more than 27000 pin codes across the country, the best part of eCourierz is that it allows you to integrate all the above-mentioned sales channels and dispatch your shipments with absolute ease and transparency.

Interested? Hop on with us by creating your account here.