How to successfully navigate the ever-changing online marketplace

Written by Max Riis Christensen

One of the biggest challenges for e-tailers is to get their products in front of consumers.

Every day consumers are visiting a wide range of websites, marketplaces and social media channels. This is where we, as online sellers, can find the consumer and offer our products.

Today, Amazon is a kind of "mega-mall" where you can find everything the world has to offer while Zalando, Boozt and Asos comprise the "fashion district" while unique and handmade home decor is to be found on a “street” called etsy.com.

The challenge for the future is that things can and will change. If one particular “street” or marketplace becomes very popular, the price of offering products there will go up. If it becomes too expensive for new and trendy brands, they will turn to newer and less expensive channels and the influencers will join them because "main street" gets too boring.

So how should you navigate in this world as a brand owner?

Instead of trying to guess which channel(s) to sell through this month, next month, next quarter or next year, it is much more important to create a platform of your own, allowing you to direct your products to new channels tomorrow, if it looks promising, and somewhere else next week, if it is a better idea at that point of time.

To be able to do this, you need two things:

Your own localised webshops in the countries you sell in

This is the home for your brand, this is where products are sold in your environment and surrounded by the values that you find important. This is also where your loyal customers return to see new products for themselves or to buy presents for their friends and loved ones. This is also where you can guide traffic from your own channels; newsletters, events, influencers, physical stores etc. Finally, this is where you will turn complaints and bad experiences from all the channels you sell in, into happy endings and loyal customers.

A world-class product feed 

This is the new SEO. In order to be visible in all the existing and upcoming sales channels, you need to meet the formats and have the elements in your feed, required by these channels. Your product also needs to be valued attractively by the algorithm in order to be presented to the consumers. Is your product a match for the visitor on their platform, are your prices and other terms attractive, is the product title length correct, and is the language on the landing page the same as the consumers? All these questions are asked in different ways by each channel. Your product feed needs to be compliant and easily adjustable, making it easy for you to move your products to the channels with the most attractive customers giving you the best ROI.

If you have these two things in place, you can make your products available to the world on your own terms. You can connect to end-users and you can choose between the sales channels that provide great value for you this week - and change them next week.