Brands on marketplaces - unlocking opportunities

Brands and wholesalers are increasingly selling directly to consumers, shortening the corporate supply chain. Selling through online marketplaces is therefore often a choice for these organizations.

Market conditions change rapidly and opportunities can present themselves just like that. Consider:

• As a brand, you want to sell on marketplaces yourself.
• You don't want to sell yourself, but you do want to know what happens to your brand on marketplaces.

In both cases, you want to maintain control over your brand, only the approach is slightly different.

Selling as a brand yourself on marketplaces

Marketplaces are a great way to target a large audience. However, one of the first questions that comes up when you want to sell on marketplaces yourself as a brand is, "how do I avoid a channel conflict with my resellers?"

There are several solutions to this:

• You can choose to differentiate by offering different or exclusive products yourself that are not available through resellers. This way you avoid competing with your own resellers.
  
  
• Make clear agreements with your resellers. Include brand expectations towards your resellers.  For example, agree on minimum sales prices to avoid "race to the bottom" prices.

We use marketplaces to boost our brand awareness considerably. So consumers first become customers through marketplaces and eventually they become Vonroc customers.

Albert Kamphuis - E-commerce director bij Vonroc

Are you not working with resellers, but do you think it's especially important to sell your assortment with the best possible brand experience through marketplaces? There are plenty of opportunities for that, too.

• Marketplaces such as bol.com and Amazon offer the ability to create brand pages. This is a variation on a shop-in-shop principle, so you can set up a complete page with your products in your brand experience.
  
  
• When you as a brand share product information with marketplaces, you can be sure that the information fits your image and the way you want to present your brand.
  

Control over my brand on marketplaces

When you're a brand that is working with resellers to sell your products to consumers, it is recommended to keep track of who's selling what products on which channels, regardless of whether you're actively selling on marketplaces yourself or not. Important questions to answer are:

• Do you know all your resellers?
• Do you know which marketplaces they are active on?
• Do you know what products they offer?
• And at what price?
• What content do they use to offer your products?
• Does it conform to your guidelines?

Did you know that you can use marketplace integration software to do this? You don't even have to sell products on marketplaces yourself, but use the software to get answers to the questions above. All in one central system. This will give you insights you can use to take control of your brand.

Want to know more? 

Want to know how our platform can help your brand gain the above insights? Then request a discovery call here.

• In this conversation, we'll bring your current situation and IT landscape into focus.
• In addition, we show you how you could use our platform to get a 360-degree view of your brand presence and marketplace sales.