Bricks & Mortar to online sales: get started easily via marketplaces and social networks

Recently, our clients and prospects have been asking for our advice on how to reduce the impact of the crisis on their business, prepare for recovery and accelerate the implementation of new growth levers. According to Forrester, following the Covid-19 pandemic, bricks & mortar retail is expected to decrease by 20% worldwide while online sales will remain stable. According to the report, retail sales in 2020 will decline by an average of 9.6% globally, compared to Forrester's forecast pre-pandemic, representing a loss of $2.1 trillion. Online, on the other hand, the signals are pretty good. According to Content Square, online traffic increased by 30% in early June vs. the pre-pandemic (January-February 2020). Transactions increased by 40% over the same period. During this difficult period, marketplaces have performed particularly well and continue to do so. For example, while the fashion sector suffered during the months of lockdown, 17% (year over year) of the marketplace Zalando's 32 million active customers are new, recruited during the crisis.

According to Forrester, marketplaces will account for 66% of e-commerce sales by the end of 2020, whether through generalist players, or specialist such as Zalando or La Redoute. Today, there is no doubt surrounding the potential of marketplaces:

• Your products gain in visiblity on these highly frequented platforms that are considered by many consumers as trusted intermediaries.
• You diversify your sources of income.
• You can discover a new audience that does not interact with the sales channels where your products are already available.
• The time required and the financial and human investment to get started are low compared to other projects (on-site acquisition, launching a CRM, store management, etc.).
• Marketplaces offer important prospects for rapid, if not immediate, international development.
• For brands, marketplaces allow you to regain control of your image in the face of distributors who sometimes neglect product sheets and, through this Direct-to-Consumer approach, you learn more about your consumers.
• Marketplaces also allow you to sell stocks, to make volume...

Before you start, however, it is crucial to carefully choose the marketplaces on which you want to sell your products. This choice must be made according to your sector and the countries in which you want to distribute your catalogue. You should also take into account the expectations and requirements of each of these marketplaces. Visit our Marketplace Finder for a global view of the market to help make your decision.

Frequently asked questions:

• Am I required to have an e-commerce store? No
• Do we have to manage the marketplaces specificities in advance? No
• Can we decide which products/prices/stocks we send to each marketplace? Yes
• Does the Lengow platform centralise order management for multiple marketplaces? Yes!

You already have the data: a product catalogue (CSV, XML, TXT, JSON), from one or more sources (PIM, e-commerce shop, CRM, ERP, etc). They will contain these mandatory prerequisites: ID, EAN, categories, title, description, price, URL, stock, costs and delivery times. Lengow helps you get started in a few days: Step-by-step accompaniment:

• Set-up (recovery of your product data and intial advice)
• Onboarding (training and coaching in the first steps)
• Technical support and account management

Automatically send your product catalogue Our tools allow you to quickly match your data to the requirements of each marketplaces, allowing you to optimise your visibility and increase your sales while synchronising your stocks. Centralise and manage your orders Use our CMS modules (Prestashop, Magento, Shopify...) or our API to automatically manage your orders from the different marketplaces. You can also manage them manually in our tools. Activity monitoring: Monitor your sales by country, marketplace, category or product to get a complete overview of your online business.

Showcase your products and content on the channels most suited to your sector. Here again, technical, financial and human investments are very limited. Become a partner of all the major players such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest and TikTok, all of which are showing dazzling success in the world of e-commerce. For example, Instagram now has more than 1 billion monthly active users and 72% of its users report having purchased a product after seeing it on the application. It is therefore essential that you are available on these media in order to develop your own audience and thus boost the sales of your products!   Lengow is here to support you:

• Up-to-date qualitative data

Take advantage of the optimal connections Lengow has with these channels

• Structured campaigns

Simply adapt your catalogue to the requirements of each diffuser. Create an organised and well-structured product feed with our channel matching. Finally, segment your product catalogue to choose which products to publish.

• Effective campaigns

Manage your product catalogue by creating rules and filters based on the performance of each product.   Would you like to know more? Do not hesitate to contact our team!

Image: rupixen.com