Today's online seller can easily spend countless hours spinning their wheels attempting to manage all their sales channels (and make no mistake, social media is a sales channel). It is easy to fall into the trap of spending all your time posting deals to twitter, and yet garner no sales.
Successfully using multi-channels to sell your items requires that you split your focus without giving up your core competency and the path to success requires discipline, knowledge, the right tools for the job and a plan that you stick too.
Creating a plan for managing ecommerce requires a wide range of planning. Typically, a seller will begin with one channel and their strategy looks like the below chart:
Typical Seller Starting Point is 100% in a Marketplace
For someone just starting out, focusing on one market makes sense. There is a pretty large learning curve for beginners and mastering the large markets like eBay or Amazon can cut initial investment and expenses. Some sellers never get beyond the point of selling on one market.
The downside in staying in one channel is that you can end up a slave to the marketplace policies, pay a significant portion of your sales in fees, and give up control of your business.
In order to move into multi-channel selling, sellers need to develop a plan to move into additional channels. Without a detailed plan, it's easy to end up spinning your wheels and spending time on what seems important, but doesn't deliver. It is also easy to fall into the "give up" trap.
Initially, when you open your own website, for example, you cannot expect hundreds of sales on your first day with no effort.
The key to having a good plan is to create your strategy and set realistic goals. Spend time every single day focusing on what drives sales and grows your business.
Example of Multi-Chanel Strategy
Creating Your Plan of Attack
When you begin developing your plan, you'll want to concentrate your efforts on two areas: Automation and Growth. Whatever you are doing today, look at every avenue available to automate. One way to save time and energy is to automate inventory, allowing you to seamlessly manage products - whether you are selling through Facebook, eBay, Amazon, or your online store. Look at all the ways you can automate EVERYTHING. Every area that you automate, give you additional time to move to the second step which is GROWTH.
Automation and Growth Example
When you are planning on expanding into multi-channel, try to maintain the sales in your existing channel(s) and grow new sales for the new channel. For example, if you are selling $1000 per week on eBay and want to move to Amazon, don't end up with $500 of sales on eBay and $500 of sales on Amazon. Remember that social media is a sales channel and should be treated as such. If you're not measuring your ROI based on the hours spent creating content and interacting with users, then simply put - you're wasting your time. Social media is an effective sales vehicle, but only when you use it as such. It's too easy to allow your personal needs - chatting, tweeting, liking to get in the way of your business needs.
Use every opportunity to grow your business, but temper your time accordingly. Knowing that it will take some effort to build your own website, don't shut down your existing markets and go full force on your website.
To be an effective multi-channel online seller, you'll need to plan to automate all your processes, plan and execute, and schedule time for growth opportunities.
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About Helen Fang
Helen Fang is a Marketing Manager at Vendio. She works with entrepreneurs and small businesses to grow their profits through effective multi-channel selling. With Vendio you can open a free online store and sell through sites like eBay, Amazon and Facebook - with one, easy to use interface.