Emerging marketplaces across geographies are trying to establish their presence. They need sellers to come on board with them to get more consumers onto their portals. That generally cannot happen unless significant traffic/transactions are taking place to ensure we have a robust number of sellers on the platform. One of the ways to help attract sellers could be to provide seller tools which help sellers manage intelligence on multiple marketplaces and help promote articles.
For inspiration, we need to look at Amazon and some of its selling tools. It has tools which enable Amazon sales in areas including price, feedback, finance, shipping, tax, payments, listing, sourcing, advertising and customer service. Most of these tools are either specific to Amazon and are always paid. If some version of these tools can be provided as a part of the seller acquisition, it can be a wonderful proposition for sellers to join emerging marketplaces.
Here, we outline certain areas where some of these tools can be helpful.
Feature category#1 – Pricing tools
Price is so important to customers in today’s world. It is and still remains one of the top deciding factors in e-commerce purchase decisions. Managing pricing competitively is one of the easiest ways to help you increase your online sales and profit. CamelCamelCamel, Amazon Repricer tool and Amazon Seller App helps in monitoring and managing amazon pricing. DeepFlux AI tool can also help you in monitoring pricing over multiple marketplaces at an attribute level within your select marketplaces
Feature category#2 – Advertising
Facebook is a great platform to help incept demand and then retarget customers for brands. Amazon advertising is also catching up especially since purchase initiation is increasingly taking place on the platform instead of Google. However, brands need to concentrate on ROIs of these marketing spends given the need to constantly optimize these. There are tools within the Amazon ecosystem – Ad Badger and for Facebook there are tools like MadgicX and Adext which help in improving ROI. DeepFlux AI tool has a feature which helps users optimize campaign spends and get their targeting right across granular products or categories.
Feature category#3 – Review Software
Feedback is a hot topic with sellers (esp. in larger marketplaces like Amazon). Amazon also recently introduced its customer dissatisfaction rate metric adding fuel to this topic. Software tools such as AMZFinder can help you communicate better with your customers. You can email customers automatically to ask for a positive review. The software will also alert you when you get a negative review allowing you to take action quickly to minimise any disruption to your business.
Feature category#4 – Payments and Compliances
There are tools like Taxjar, which help in managing sales tax across marketplaces. Tools like Avalar are available which help in tax compliance with automation. Forecastly is an FBA inventory replenishment tool focused on Supply Chain Efficiency, Prevention of Stockouts. For enterprise customers, DeepFlux provides forecasting across different styles and also provides granular level forecasting on multiple size options.
Feature category#5 – Inventory Management and Forecasting
Track inventory, shipments, manage orders, customers, finances on Amazon with tools like Brightpearl and RestockPro.
DeepFlux with its inventory management solution integrates to multiple leading inventory systems like Unicommerce as well as inventory information available in all major marketplaces to provide a view to the user of “inventory at risk” as well as “out of stock inventory”. It does this by constantly tracking the rate of sales of individual pieces based on sales velocity and identifying revenue risk. This helps users not just identify revenue at risk but also ensure marketing campaigns are working with products which have sufficient inventory.
Forecast.ly is a popular tool available for Amazon sellers to identify the right quantities to order, timeline of the same as well as location of shipments. DeepFlux has also built an algorithm which helps its clients to plan their inventory assortments at a granular level. This is currently only offered as a service.
Feature category#6 – Keywords and RankingAmazon customers tend to have a higher intent to purchase, selecting the best keywords for your products is a vital component of your marketing strategy. Bidding on the right keywords for your products can improve your page sales rank and organic listings, and will ultimately influence your product sales. There are a number of tools available for identifying keywords and their performance. Some of the most used ones are Helium10, amztracker, datahawk, sellics (sonar). Additionally, Google Keyword planner can alo be used to identify important keywords. It also provides a number of segregations which are available to isolate keywords at product category level. DeepFlux also has a tool which integrates with Google Adwords as well as Amazon panel to ensure monitoring of keyword performance. The user can then select the best and low performing keywords to take the appropriate action.
Feature category #7 – Product Research
Sellers use various tools to identify product niches across categories, price points, sales estimates and competition intensity. You can also track competition as well in these tools. Some of the popular tools are Jungle Scout, Viral Launch, camelcamelcamel, AmzBase, amzscout. DeepFlux currently offers assortment reports for fashion sellers on popular ecommerce websites (including Amazon). It scores over other seller apps on product discovery by providing granular assortment and sales estimates (including amazon) at a product attribute level so that sellers can identify assortment gaps and profitable niches and manufacture these.
There are many popular tools available for helping online sellers to sell better on Amazon. These tools also help establish the foundation on which D2C brands are created. These tools however, come at a cost for the sellers. If these tools which are provided at nominal rates by emerging marketplaces to their sellers, it can aid in attracting more sellers on these marketplaces. DeepFlux can help sellers in multiple dimensions and might become a cost effective way for emerging marketplaces to attract more sellers.
Contact DeepFlux for a demo of our AI SaaS solution for e-commerce retailers at contact@deepflux.io
This article has been written by Aviral Mathur, Co-Founder, DeepFlux.