What do Boden and House of Fraser share in common ? They are high profile players amongst the raft of retailers now actively selling on marketplaces. According to Channeladvisor some 95 per cent of the retailers it polled via Redshift Research in the summer were selling on eBay or Amazon and, of those, many are now leveraging marketplace sites to test the waters overseas. ChannelAdvisor’s sample found that 86 per cent of the UK retailers it polled were selling via Amazon and 68 per cent via eBay.
“We need to take ourselves to where the traffic is, rather than invest a lot of money trying to bring traffic to our own sites,” said a senior marketer from a UK fashion label. “We attract a lot of European and Russian customers into our London stores when they are over here but we’re not ready to start developing dedicated sites yet for each country. We’ve a lot still to achieve with our UK site to get it to where we want it to be . Marketplaces give us the chance to benefit from visitor searches for our brand,and to determine which countries have the greatest potential to offer us. We have found that eBay has been particularly good for this. We have tested both full price current season ranges as well as full price past season limited offers and special clearance sale offers. To our own credit it is the pre-awareness of our brand that gets potential customers searching for us – then coupled with the wide visibility we achieve via eBay it is really working well for us, as we don’t have to do any more than manage our product feed and keep an eye on currency exchange rates to be out there in front of millions of people. A few years ago we’d never have considered eBay as being right for us but even with the high fees our customer acquisition via eBay is profitable from day one.”
Share