Successful websites like Amazon and eBay can be an insanely good way to gain new and higher numbers of customers. In actual fact, almost all online retailers often take an impressive amount of orders through websites such as these. However, there are always downsides to using online stores. There are many different ways to solve these problems, one being by going back to the drawing board and figuring out how to drive existing customers from websites such as Amazon and eBay directly to your website. To make this process easier, we’ve put together a list of the advantages, and disadvantages of selling online.
The advantages of large shopping websites
The fundamental and most popular reason that these sites are used by retailers is that they increase noticeability. Sites such as eBay and Amazon able customers to view products that may never be found otherwise online. This can be a great way to generate sales for companies with low Google search results. It allows customers to still be able to find the product that they are looking for. Basically, it is a huge time saver for customers who know exactly what they want.
The disadvantages of large shopping websites
- The most common disadvantage noticed by retailers is the imposed cost whilst selling on large shopping sites. More often than not, a seller will pay roughly 20% in costs to eBay by the time they sell a product and their seller fees are accepted. Although Amazon prices are more like 25%, so certainly something that a retailer should think about before going ahead. However, you will find that numerous retailers opt to heighten their product prices in order to cover these costs and still gain an acceptable profit from each sale.
- As well as the above, large retailer sites also show many different sellers’ products next to each other. In essence this can prove to be very unfortunate for many sellers. If a company have regular customers, then of course this can come as a blow due to them perhaps opting for a competitor’s product instead.
How to solve these disadvantages?
In order to solve these issues, it makes sense from a seller’s point of view to use these sites in order to get new customers but also channel customers to your own site. Usual ways to direct traffic to a website include methods such as advertising or mentioning your website. However, methods such as these do in fact go against the terms and conditions of sites such as Amazon and eBay. So, if you do get caught doing this you may well get banned from the site altogether.
To avoid getting into trouble with these sites, we suggest that you send emails to customers. There is absolutely nothing stopping you doing this. You should independently send some emails which include the link to your website and what you offer, i.e. which products you have available. You can effectively do this by sending links to similar products that they’ve been looking at via eBay and Amazon. Additionally, this can be a very good way of converting a new customer to a regular. Notice a new customer? Add them to your email list straight away!
Other methods you may want to think about using to drive traffic to your website are, social media links, discount coupons for orders, and referral links for friend’ referrals. These methods will certainly give your customers some incentive on how to change their shopping behavior.
If you follow these methods regularly, then we guarantee that you will gain more traffic just like Amazon or eBay.
