We’ve already introduced in this series the advantages of OnBuy as a key marketplace within online multichannel commerce, before going into more detail on this fast-growing and increasingly high profile trading arena. In this post we’ll talk about how you can manage this marketplace centrally along with your other online channels.
To register your interest with OnBuy, you can use this special Volo referral link here.
If OnBuy is your first marketplace to sell on, then you’re probably managing directly from the marketplace. If it’s your second channel, perhaps an addition to your web store, or even your second marketplace, then you’re officially an online multichannel seller.
That brings with it the requirement to make sure you’re driving these additional revenues and servicing this additional business in a cost effective way, a way that doesn’t translate into 18-hour working days from now until 2021 for you and your staff. And when it comes to sustainable growth, you need to embrace a way of centralising your common business processes within a platform that might become your entire ERP platform, and which the marketplaces and channels might refer to as ‘middleware’.
If that’s you, how can you make OnBuy an integral part of your multichannel ecommerce strategy? Let’s use the example of Volo Origin and Volo Vision, our commerce trading and reporting platforms respectively, to walk you through this process.
Your first step, if you haven’t done it yet, is to register to sell with OnBuy. Here’s a link to do that. There’s a short form to fill in with some basic information and the good folks at OnBuy will set you up pronto so you can start listing and selling your products. OnBuy operates a catalogue system, similarly to Amazon, so multiple sellers can add listings to existing products via barcode matching.
You can create your listing using your unique GS1 barcodes manually, or by CSV file, or through OnBuy’s API, or a supported integration like Volo Origin. If you own a UK or EU trademark for your brands, OnBuy deploys a brand ownership feature whereby other sellers can be restricted from listing on these products.
Once you’re set up on OnBuy, from your account you can go into imports and integrations and pull your OnBuy account into your multichannel management system like Volo Origin, using your OnBuy Seller ID and the relevant authentication keys from the OnBuy API area. You test your connection and you’re set up, in two minutes flat.
From there you’ll be able to pull in your data from OnBuy. Depending on your multichannel system, you’ll either create the listings in OnBuy and do pricing and quantity updates centrally, or else you’ll be able to create listings and manage the order and post-order processes – order management, shipping, refunds, customer service and so on – centrally along with your other marketplaces.
In Volo Origin, for example, the Channel Profile area of the platform allows you to push information directly onto your various channels from one place. Furthermore, one of the main advantages of a centralising system is that as you sell your products it automatically updates your stock levels for each product across all your channels.
We’ve written a fair bit lately about the importance of data you can use to improve your business. See here for an example. When you’re active on a number of channels, it’s important to have complete visibility of how each channel is performing, and how suppliers, products and regions perform across each channel. That way you can take good things and learnings from one marketplace and apply them to your other marketplaces.
Once you have OnBuy integrated into your multichannel management system, you’ll want to analyse your performance and report on OnBuy performance straight away. This is especially important when you’re just starting out on a new channel, so you can react quickly and adjust your approach if necessary. With systems like Volo Vision, which sits on top of Volo Origin, you’ll see your OnBuy data straight away and have access to the same dashboard, report and filtering capabilities as your other channels.
Sustainable growth across multiple channels is about being on the right channels for your business, streamlining your processes to protect your margins, and having data visibility so you can act knowledgeably and decisively. Get these things right and you’ll be glad you added the world’s fastest growing marketplace to the places where you sell.
To register with OnBuy, click here, which lets OnBuy know that you came from us. To open the discussion about streamline the management of your OnBuy presence as well as your other online presences, please get in touch.
