Critical Gaps in eCommerce Marketplace Optimization That Is Hurting Your Sales

Even though online marketplaces play an important role in connecting brands with consumers, they are very intricate, oversaturated, and ever-changing. Demand from customers, levels of competition, and general market trends are always shifting, and these shifts frequently occur independently of one another. Thus, it's important to understand these gaps to avoid mistakes and survive in this highly competitive landscape.

Source: Freepik

Modern optimization platforms and technological solutions are designed to do the same thing: implement rapid adjustments across pricing, advertising, and inventory in order to achieve a certain objective. However, doing so is not as easy as it looks, especially when you don't have proper knowledge of it. Find out how companies and retailers can improve their strategy to see the whole picture and make more informed choices.

A Comprehension of the Connected Metrics of Online Marketplaces

Of course, data is crucial to any online store's success, including keeping track of it, figuring out what it means, and putting it to use. But brands and retailers need to look at the right data and take action based on it. If you want to expand your business as much as possible, you need to know everything that can affect your sales and profits, from the price of products to the rate of customer returns.

Most people consider the return on ad spend (RoAS) and click-through rate as important advertising indicators for their business. But what do these indicators reveal about the health of their business, the success of their products, and their bottom line outside the scope of the campaign's objectives and results?

Many metrics need to be considered; however, in the current market, tools, data, and business decisions are constrained by the metrics they measure and work against. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the linked nature of all aspects of business performance in order to utilize technology and insights more effectively.

Problems Built Into the System

It's not so simple to comprehend genuine performance and make the proper decisions when businesses need to track and evaluate data from various unrelated disciplines and sources.

For instance, at Saffron Edge, we help our clients get a bird's-eye view by categorizing their SKU-level data:

• Statistical information gathered from actual operations (profit, sales, margins)
• The Data on Prices ( buy box price, listed price, buy box share)
• Stats on traffic (sessions, conversions)
• Information on advertising (including costs, revenues, and metrics like Ad Cost of Sales and Return on Ad Spending)
• Discovery metrics (search queries, share of voice, impression share)
• Inventory data (inventory velocity, available inventory, days in stock)
• Stats on successful deliveries (referral fees, FBA fees, shipping costs)

The breakdown of these data points illustrates the difficulty of the situation: advertising info is not available on the SKU level, traffic data is only available in business reports, and data on inventory and orders is frequently out of sync with one another.

Organizations can only assess their operations thoroughly, find areas for improvement, and maximize their potential if they have a complete picture of everything that goes on in their company.

The Conceptual Limits of E-Marketplace Optimization

Although improvement is possible with the current toolsets, they only provide a partial picture, primarily addressing just two areas: pricing and promotion. Because of the mismatch between these features and the KPIs that matter, companies struggle to thrive.

Whether they are a buy box rival or a brand/private label, all sellers who employ price optimization technologies have the same overarching goal: to boost sales. While price optimization can help determine what price would generate the most sales, it cannot improve a product's visibility in search results or attract more buyers to the listing. Even if their conversion rate is rather good, their sales won't increase much if they aren't attracting enough people to their offerings.

On the other hand, when it comes to advertising optimization for brands and sellers, the focus is often on efficiently directing visitors to product pages. To do this, we must first determine which keywords and goods have the greatest potential and then optimize our bidding to maximize our returns.

However, current solutions do not permit advertisers to optimize their conversion rates for the traffic they generate. Brands and retailers need pricing technologies to accomplish this. Imagine these optimizations as a series of cogwheels all turning at once to provide power to their enterprise. Thus, they must consider not only RoAS or ACoS but also the price and margin of their goods.

The Importance of a Holistic Optimisation Strategy for Online Market Businesses

If you want to succeed in the e-marketplace, you need to think about more than just your own company's requirements; you also need to map and scan the landscape of your competitors to gain a complete view of the market and pinpoint your consumer base.

Brands and sellers should assess their positioning and performance relative to the competition as part of adopting a comprehensive marketplace optimization strategy and knowing the health of their business from end to end. Since e-marketplaces level the playing field for brands and merchants of all sizes, a product's competitive area can include established brands and retailers from more traditional sales channels, up-and-coming brands, private label sellers, and resellers. When you look at the whole inventory, there are many more competitors.

Undoubtedly, gauging the extent to which key competitors are maximizing their presence is crucially important, yet doing so calls for collecting copious amounts of data from all market pull factors. As brands and sellers battle to differentiate and dominate the digital shelf, it is important to understand how they optimize pricing positioning and assortment, boost social proof via ratings and reviews, use keyword tactics, design their brand store and landing experiences, and raise their share of voice.

Indeed, the speed and sophistication of online marketplaces will only increase. If you want to stay competitive, you need a flexible and cohesive approach that can quickly adapt to changes in the market by utilizing a comprehensive collection of tools, data, and optimization skills. Brands and sellers can only realize their full potential when they take a 360-degree view of their business rather than being limited to either ACoS or RoAS when setting and achieving their goals.

There Are Three Essential Methods for Increasing Conversions

Creating remarkable instances of online purchasing requires careful attention to a wide variety of details. Three factors must be implemented to improve eCommerce conversion rates and obtain exceptional SEO: Product Discovery, an enterprise content management system, and content development.

Here are their most up-to-date ideas for how to optimize your online store for maximum profit:

Employ Cutting-edge SEO Tactics to Boost Traffic and Sales

To keep your items and services at the top of search engine results pages, you'll need to employ cutting-edge SEO strategies.

When a business offers satisfying user experiences on its website or app, the time and money spent on SEO are well worth it. Enhancing and customizing the customer experience is one key benefit of upgrading from a bare-bones e-commerce platform to a sophisticated content management system.

Adding a Content Management System to Your e-commerce Platform Has Been Shown to Increase Sales.

Several brands and online marketplaces compete for consumers' attention, so a successful eCommerce platform of the future will need to have both interesting and helpful content to foster expansion. Many online stores struggle because they use antiquated technology that can only provide their customers with subpar digital offerings.

To better serve customers and advance the digital buyer experience, today's e-commerce platform architectures are built on a foundation of composable microservices that permit the seamless blending of robust content management systems and transactional processes. You can use an API-first, content-driven commerce platform to optimize your content creation and delivery strategy, enhance personalization, and function smoothly within your organization's existing IT ecosystem.

Advanced Product Discovery Increases Conversion Rates and Decreases the Length of the Buyer's Journey.

A company's digital services require continual care, especially if it hasn't been audited recently. Shopping hurdles are inevitable when customer and product journeys expand in complexity and breadth; this could explain why the organization sees a rise in the number of abandoned carts. According to a recent Harris Poll, the US loses $300 billion annually due to cart abandonment.

To attract online buyers, marketers must give their wares prominent digital displays. Optimizing an online store's performance is impossible without using a reliable Product Discovery tool.

Takeaway!

The success of your online store is determined by your ability to turn a profit, regardless of the products you sell. Test the shopping cart and payment methods for usability and search engine optimization. The advice mentioned earlier will help get you far in the direction of perfecting your online store's conversion rates. We've discussed various gaps in eCommerce marketplace optimization that you should need to address to succeed. You can take help from our experts in order to optimize your marketplace and keep an eye on the latest trends. We have a team of skilled professionals with years of excellence in managing and optimizing marketplaces. Contact us now to know how we can help you.