MaineBusiness.com

For many people having an online store was the way to reach the world yet, once their store went online; they began to wonder where those sales were going to come from. It can be lonely online. One sale a month is not uncommon for merchants that projected ten sales a day. So, what is the trick to getting your products out there?

Pipe your products out of your store and in to the online world using marketplaces. By joining online marketplaces, your products will be added to international search engines and will be shown on tens of thousands of websites worldwide. It’s relatively easy to do and it’s very effective.

Online marketplaces are in the business of promoting products. If you sell, let’s say, Maine Made Furniture, your products will be made available whenever someone searches for them (based on your keywords) and, when promotions hit, they can be included in large and expensive promotions that most Maine merchants could never afford to do themselves. Online marketplaces push your products out to an international audience in ways you could never afford on your own.

Online marketplaces will charge a “pay per click” cost or a monthly fee, or a combination of the two. This should not scare you away though. When you pay for a click here it is super targeted. In a typical search engine, clicks could be anybody searching for anything. They might just be bored and clicking ads. But in a marketplace, the person is more qualified because they have gone through a few pages first and rather than just seeing some short text ads, they have seen your product photo, description and price before they click through to your site.

Ironically, the pay per click prices for many products is lower in the marketplaces than on search engines. And, because of the pictures, description and price being shown to the person searching, being number one is not as important. People buy because they like the product and they like the company.

There are two ways to join a marketplace. The smaller ones (who still have incredible reach) are as easy as signing up and loading your products. It may take a long afternoon to get all of your products loaded but once you have them online, it’s easy to manage.

The larger marketplaces like Amazon and Yahoo, require that you set up a separate store or provide a data feed. Setting up a separate store is not too tough and is usually worth the effort. Setting up a data feed may be a bit too technical for many but there is no reason to extend yourself until you try a few marketplaces to see if they work for your products. If they do, you can have a data feed created and pipe your products in to the marketplaces automatically with regularly scheduled updates. With some initial success, setting up data feeds is worth investigating.


Here are links to ten of the top marketplaces:

The Big Guys:

Amazon – this will list your products in the main Amazon store.
http://webstore.amazon.com/Sell-on-Amazon-and-WebStore/

Yahoo – this will list your products in YahooShopping
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/

Google Base – FREE! Google just reworked Google Base in to Google Merchant Center. Here’s a link to the blog announcement.
http://googlebase.blogspot.com/2009/09/introducing-google-merchant-center.html

eBay –you don’t have to have auctions – this is a “Buy It Now” storefront.
http://pages.ebay.com/storefronts/openbenefits.html

Etsy – one of my favorites – everything must be handmade.
http://www.etsy.com/how_selling_works.php


The Smaller Marketplaces (not to be overlooked – Nextag was my highest producer):

Nextag
http://merchants.nextag.com/serv/main/advertise/Advertise.do?cmd=productshopping

Shop.com
http://www.shop.com/about-merchantinfo-a.xhtml

Shopping.com
https://merchant.shopping.com/enroll/app?service=page/PartnerWelcome

Shopzilla
http://merchant.shopzilla.com/oa/registration/

Gifts.com
http://www.gifts.com/merchant/public/welcome?redirect=%2Fmerchant

You don’t need to join all ten marketplaces to test the results. Look in to them all and choose three or four. Loading three or four marketplaces with your products can be a fair amount of work initially but it can be amazing how one marketplace will sell nothing while another will bring in daily sales.

Using online marketplaces makes the ten sales a day scenario more realistic. In fact, for my old website, I occasionally enjoyed over a hundred sales a day from Amazon alone.
Keep in mind that you’re selling a product and you’re a Maine merchant. I believe Maine is a strong brand and there are a lot of people that would buy from a smaller Maine merchant before they would buy from a large NY company. Promote your products and promote who you are.