It has never been a better time to be an eCommerce seller. The world is online and the proliferation of mobile devices enable constant engagement. People are browsing the Internet on the train or bus ride to work, during coffee breaks and in between classes. And thanks to secure purchasing processes and fast, reliable shipping options, more purchases are made online than ever before. With the growth of a mobile-enabled population that prefers to make purchases online, it’s not surprising that eCommerce sales are estimated to reach almost $2 trillion this year and will continue to experience double-digit growth through 2020.
eCommerce sellers have access to a number of marketplaces to easily access a wide audience of engaged shoppers including eBay, Amazon, Walmart, and Google. But to be successful, eCommerce sellers need to gain a calculated, clear understanding of what to sell, where to sell it, and how much to sell it for. These are critical data points that can make or break a business.
What You Need to Know
Making the decision to sell online is a business decision that offers big opportunity and a big risk. To mitigate this risk, it is critical to carefully choose what to sell and where to sell it. Making the wrong decision can result in hefty overstock fees and a direct negative impact on your bottom line.
To understand this in more detail, it’s important to look closely at three critical components to succeeding online:
- Demand. Understand the geographies and marketplaces products are most in-demand. For example, you received a price quote for a certain model of sunglasses and the overall demand on eBay Germany was €20K per month. This might not be very interesting for you but if you found out that this model had €2M in monthly sales, you’d be interested. You need to know what the real demand is – in each market you’re interested in selling to for each product you sell. Guessing just won’t cut it.
- Expenses. Produce accurate insights about the anticipated expenses incurred for each of the marketplaces and countries where you sell to avoid surprise expenses. Consider that the shipping costs to a domestic customer still make the sale profitable – what about shipping to overseas customers? In addition to the shipping costs for any geography, you might sell it, you also need to have a clear understanding of other costs like clearance costs, taxes and marketplace fees like “Final Value Fees”.
- Competitiveness. Should you buy this product or not? When you have a clear understanding of a product’s demand and an accurate breakdown of the expenses you’ll incur selling it, you can determine whether you’ll be able to compete with other sellers offering the same product.
As you receive offers from suppliers, it’s up to you to do the necessary research in order to determine which products to buy, where to sell them and on what marketplaces.
In the past, eCommerce merchants spent significant time performing in-depth research to obtain the information they needed to make purchasing decisions that would improve their bottom line. Beyond taking up a lot of time, this research can and often does yield inaccurate results. Worse, merchants who don’t have access to better data sometimes resort to “guesstimating” on which products to buy from suppliers. What happens as a result is an eCommerce seller’s nightmare: low sales volume, low margins and perhaps worst of all, heavy overstock fees. Did you know that overstock and out-of-stocks cost retailers $1.1 trillion in lost revenue last year?
Today, the truly successful online merchants – those who have even succeeded in growing their eCommerce business internationally – use data to help them navigate the online playing field and reach their goals successfully. Accurate data can be obtained quickly and easily by any ecommerce seller regardless of the business size with free tools like Algopix that provides up-to-date product market analysis.
How Data Can Help You Expand Your Business
With access to actionable data, eCommerce merchants can quickly optimize their profitability and see exponential growth in their business. One of the key benefits of product market data is that it often uncovers untapped demand in different marketplaces or regions of the world that the seller didn’t previously consider. Packed with accurate, real-time data, eCommerce sellers can confidently choose the right market and the right products, understanding exactly what kind of profits they can expect to see.
Obtaining Product Market Data
Free tools like Algopix not only take the work out of product market analysis – they also eliminate unknown factors that leave eCommerce merchants with little choice but to flip a coin and hope for the best. Instead, eCommerce sellers are able to make business decisions backed up by real-time, accurate analyses that clearly outline all of the variables associated with selling online.
Let’s take a closer look at some of these variables:
- Real prices. Using an automated analysis tool like Algopix, you can instantly see the real prices for your product across all relevant marketplaces.
- Related costs. Selling products online involves a lot of expenses; some you can predict and others that might surprise you. Within minutes, you can review a comprehensive breakdown of all of the related costs you can expect to incur, including selling fees, shipping costs, taxes and more.
- Country-specific sales stats. Your product may not be as popular stateside as it is in other countries around the world. An automated product market analysis will reveal the sales segmentation for your product according to country and marketplace so you can identify better opportunities that might exist elsewhere or on different channels.
- Interest over time. With graphs charting a product’s popularity over time, you can quickly deduce whether a product is at the beginning or end of its lifecycle and whether it makes sense to start or continue selling it online.
With Algopix, all you need to do to obtain this information is enter a product identifier like ASIN, EAN or UPC and within minutes, your Algopix dashboard will be populated with easy-to-read, information-rich tables, charts and graphs giving you all the information you need to make data-based business decisions. Best of all, backed with real, accurate insights into product performance, your decisions will help you cross borders and grow your business internationally in no time—bringing your profits to new, previously unattainable heights.
