If you have one avenue for listing and ecommerce sales of your products, you can concentrate 100% of your efforts on that channel. With all your eggs in one basket, however, you are at maximum risk when there’s a problem. Making your stock available on additional channels puts you in front of new groups of customers, increases your sales and reduces your risk because you’ve diversified the places where you sell and made yourself less dependent on one source of revenues. Being multichannel increases your protection against uncertainty.
Marketplaces continue to grow at a rapid rate. The market is dominated by Alibaba, Amazon, eBay and Walmart, but there’s an army of other marketplaces across the globe, including the quickly accelerating OnBuy in the UK (here’s a referral link for registering to sell on OnBuy). You don’t need to spend a long time building traffic to your brand, and you can extend your brand by using marketplaces as another acquisition channel – while still keeping the control. The bigger marketplaces also provide you with a proven gateway into international sales, opening up emerging, established and less competitive markets for you.
It’s not just marketplaces that complete the multichannel picture. In addition to your websites, there’s Google Shopping and web store platforms like Magento and Shopify, There’s also Google Adwords with buy buttons, shopping comparison sites, daily deal sites, social and influencer-based shopping, email marketing, and so on. The Volo Origin platform allows you to add ecommerce channels and manage your business from one central place. From your single inventory pool Origin enables you to automatically push all your stock updates across your channels as you sell items on different channels and replenish your orders and stock availability according to rules you set.
We have standard connections to all the major channel platform providers, and we can build specialist links – sometimes through partners – to connect Volo Origin and Vision to your websites or other channels that you want to sell on. The Volo system is constantly interacting with your channels, sending listing and stock information out to the channels and receiving and processing order information from them. To close the multichannel loop, Origin also talks to your other systems like your accounts system or warehouse database, integrates with your shipping partners, and provides reporting and analysis so that you have management visibility into your end-to-end processes.
Volo customers generally find that the addition of a second channel is the point at which they need a robust system to help them grow their sales and their efficiencies. When you choose to add a channel or marketplace, we’ll give you a clear implementation plan so that you and your team understand the timings and path before your new channel goes live. We’ll guide you through the process, work with you when you’re newly live, and strategise regularly with you on how best to grow your new channel. It’s the care and attention to quality over time from our people that sets us apart from other multichannel system providers.
When you're great at channels, you've evolved a channel strategy to give you the best bang for your buck and the agility to move quickly during periods of disruption. Multichannel and multi-marketplaces ecommerce is Volo’s core business. We'll give you the knowledge you need for each channel, to increase the probabilities of your product being found and selected for purchase. We operate a number of strategic partnerships with the major marketplace and web store platform providers across the world to help you establish your channel coverage strategy for sustained growth and profitability.
