Success with your own online shop – this is how the multichannel strategy succeeds

Marketplaces like Amazon , eBay & Co. offer an immense range due to their popularity and thus a good basis for entering e-commerce. However, the providers dictate their own rules, and there is also increasing competition between retailers. Having your own online shop as an additional sales channel can be a good way to free yourself from being dependent on the marketplace and create an individual platform for your own products. In this article, we show how your multichannel strategy can succeed and how you can become competitive with your own online shop.

What does a multichannel strategy mean and why is it useful?

A multichannel strategy provides for sales through several sales channels. Many online retailers are not only active in different marketplaces, they also operate their own online shop. This has several advantages:

range increase

The more channels you can serve, the more reach you can generate overall, which has a positive effect on sales volume and revenue.

corporate identity

In addition, the online shop is an ideal opportunity to build up your own corporate identity and to retain customers in the long term. While there is little scope for traders to identify themselves on marketplaces, a separate shop allows the free design of design, product presentation and programs for customer loyalty (e.g. discount campaigns and/or newsletters).

Reduction of dependency

Since the barriers to entry for sales on marketplaces are low, more and more competitors are pushing towards Amazon & Co. Having your own shop reduces dependence on marketplaces and can serve as a stabilizer if sales drop due to this competitive pressure.

Your own online shop or Amazon and eBay: In this blog post, we took a closer look at where retailers should sell.

Be seen on the web: This is how visitors get to your online shop

While marketplaces naturally have high visitor numbers, this is not the case with your own online presence. Here, customer visits must be gradually built up. Social media channels are ideally suited to building your own brand story and to create the proximity to that is needed for prospects to become customers . The planning effort of a social media channel should not be underestimated! In order to be able to post regularly, forward-looking content planning is recommended.

In the medium and long term, search engine optimization, or SEO for short, can also contribute to a sustainable increase in traffic. There are numerous instructions on the web for the essential SEO basics, most of which can be implemented without any programming effort. However, SEO measures need time before they take effect. If traffic growth is to be faster, Google Ads are a good, albeit paid, alternative. The so-called cost-per-click (CPC), i.e. the price that has to be paid per click on an advert, varies considerably depending on the industry.

Amazon SEO: Find out here how retailers can achieve a better ranking on Amazon through targeted SEO optimization.

Google Shopping and comparison portals as traffic magnets

In order to be seen outside of marketplaces, comparison portals such as Idealo, billiger.de and Google Shopping are a good address for retailers. When searching for products, the results page is enriched with shopping ads and entries from the comparison portals. For this, the portals submit bids to place ads for through outplay dealers they represent. However, retailers can also run Google Shopping ads themselves. (Source: Google Help ) In this way, search engines are suitable as traffic magnets .

Prerequisite for use is that the portals and/or Google Shopping are provided with product information from the shop. A classic procedure for this is to upload a CSV file that contains all relevant information such as prices or product descriptions. Depending on the system, synchronization with the shop is also possible. This is recommended, as your data stored in the portals will change automatically if there are changes to the product information.

Pricing for your own online shop

Since a high percentage Since product searches take place via search engines, shopping ads are a tried and tested means of increasing sales in your own online shop. However, this is not free of competition. In order to make the offer for searchers as diverse as possible, an ad within the same search usually only played once. Market-oriented pricing is therefore required here so that one’s own products are competitive with the competition.

For marketplaces, there is SnapTrade , which enables a dynamic price strategy and automates price adjustments , if desired, even within fixed price upper and lower limits. Your own online shop does not offer such mechanics. Accordingly, you would have to manually check comparison portals for the prices of your competitors. Since prices change rapidly in the fast-moving e-commerce environment, this review must be carried out regularly and at short intervals.