Brian had long been a successful eBay seller and actually started his Outdoor Lifestyle and Camping Equipment business on eBay before creating his own online store with Shopify. When he launched on Shopify his eBay store was never integrated. This meant Brian and his team had to independently and manually manage two sales platforms. This often led to selling out-of-stock items, constant refunds, unhappy customers and inconsistent pricing which created a total nightmare for ordering, warehousing and overall inventory management.
Brian knew he was missing out on sales and reaching over 40% of the market and if he was to grow his ecommerce business he would have to expand his catalogue onto eBay, Amazon and other marketplaces. However, the complexity of successfully bulk listing a vast array of products was proving extremely time consuming, inefficient and technically beyond his already stretched for time team.
Since its inception over 6 years ago, Brian’s Outdoor Lifestyle and Camping Equipment business has captured a solid piece of this growing yet competitive market.
Not wanting to open bricks and mortar stores, Brian found himself needing to find ways to expand his online business beyond the boundaries of this current online store and limited eBay operation. After meeting with Brian and running through a detailed roadmap for growth, Phase 3 Ecom was tasked with expanding Brian’s Shopify and marketplace presence.
In January 2024, Brian engaged Phase 3 Ecom to implement a solution to increase his Shopify sales, eliminate his eBay chaos and expand his catalogue across multiple marketplaces.
The first step was to understand exactly the goals Brian had for his business.
Brian’s business had such a wide and diverse range of products, each with its own size, colour and other variants, Brian needed a consistent process to ensure the product data was optimised across his entire catalogue for all marketplaces.
Brian’s previous manual process frequently saw product listing changes accidentally overwritten, incorrectly mapped products, wrong pricing, child and parent SKUs disconnected, missing data and a host of other problems with managing his product listings.
“I could see as our SKU numbers and listings grew, we were creating more and more issues for ourselves. The amount of time we wasted was really holding us back as we had to spend unproductive time sorting out what seemed like a never ending list of problems due to unscaleable processes”.
Brian was a self-professed “old school” operator when it came to his approach in managing his business and was cautious in moving from his very hands on manual listing process to a software driven programmatic approach.
However, Brian could see that his processes, which had served him well as a small merchant, weren’t scalable and were holding back the growth of his business and his then 3,400 and ever expanding range of products.
Brian also recognised that his team spent an enormous amount of time trouble shooting listing issues and needed regular support. More often than not the support was slow to resolve issues and cost the business plenty in lost sales.
After Brian had received a number of eBay account suspension notices due to rules and policy violations, he decided an urgent change was needed.
Working with Phase 3 Ecom , Brian now has a dedicated manager that sets up the rules and data feed requirements to ensure product data from the webstore is correctly mapped and transformed into optimised titles, bullet points, images, and other required sales attributes.
To ensure that each marketplace was receiving exactly the right data in the format it required, a number of additional metadata fields were added to Brian’s Shopify product page template. This ensured that for every product there was a complete list of the required metadata fields for each marketplace.
“The images, product titles, descriptions and bullet points are now perfect, exactly how we need them to be. All our data across all marketplaces is finally complete, fully optimised and compliant. It really is a relief to finally have it all sorted”.
“Having customised the product pages for the extra metadata fields made it really quick and easy for the team to add new products to the website and then have them quickly synced across to the marketplaces with no errors”.
“A lot of times we’d get orders for products that weren’t even in stock and sometimes deleted lines. It was just a nightmare”.
Prior to engaging Phase 3 Ecom, Brian was consistently faced with marketplace issues, which made him question if he wanted to continue using these channels at all. Because of the inefficiencies in Brian’s manual process he was frequently missing orders, late orders, cancelled orders and many unhappy customers. Worst of all, listings were getting suppressed and on a number of occasions Brian faced having his account deactivated.
“Having local support is a big deal for us. Having a dedicated Phase 3 Ecom manager and a team of channel experts who understand the ins and outs of selling on marketplaces, especially Amazon is priceless. We just couldn’t have done it on our own.”
With the Phase 3 Ecom Marketplace system fully implemented, any price changes are quickly synchronized to Amazon, eBay and all other marketplaces. The automated order management also ensures that order and inventory data is shared between Shopify and all marketplaces so that stock and product data remains consistent and accurate across Brian’s entire tech stack.
An integral component of Brian’s growth was PPC marketing on specifically eBay and Amazon. Despite previously not having any luck at all with Google and other PPC platforms, Brian was not unsurprisingly sceptical and hesitant to enter into the marketplace PPC arena.
Over 70% of products purchased from marketplaces actually start from searches conducted on the marketplace. This essentially means that having prominent sponsored listings is critical in the ability to drive traffic to specific products and drive sales.
“Forget anything you think you know about Google PPC, Amazon and eBay PPC marketing is a different beast altogether. Without the PPC component we wouldn’t have seen the full benefit of Amazon and eBay and experienced the increase in sales we did”.
The huge success of the sales expansion via local Australian marketplaces now sees Brian extending his business globally via international marketplaces and 3PL providers.
Brian understood that going the local and international marketplace route alone was a step too far for his already operationally stretched business. Brian knew that issues would arise going down the DIY path that they simply had no time or expertise to be able to resolve.
“I’ve got to say, if we hadn’t seen the massive success with the local marketplace sales, I wouldn’t have considered launching this strategy internationally with you guys. But the fact is that we went from an average of maybe 250 orders a month, to now over 2,000, I’m talking big volumes and the Phase 3 Ecom guys have handled it flawlessly.”
Within the first three months, the business experienced its greatest sales period on eBay. Within the same period Amazon sales went from zero to over $100k. Traffic on marketplaces had almost tripled and order volumes more than doubled.
“Increasing total Shopify & Marketplace sales by over $250k in just three months was just amazing. Having the complete range of products listed on eBay and the introduction of the products onto Amazon really made a huge difference to the first quarter of the year. There is no way we could’ve achieved that on our own, it wouldn’t have happened without the team at Phase 3 Ecom”.
“We’re now on track to increase our total marketplace revenue by over $1.3 million dollars by the end of the year. I knew it could be done, I just didn’t know how to do it. The team at Phase 3 Ecom has really set our business up for ongoing growth by implementing a really super-efficient marketplace listing, marketing and management system”.
Finally, would you recommend Phase 3 Ecom and their marketplace service?
“Absolutely, from our experience, if you want to be a serious ecommerce business, you’ve got to embrace marketplaces, no question about it. You can’t put your head in the sand, marketplaces are here to stay and they are only going to get more and more prominent. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when you jump on-board. Whether you have a small catalogue or one the size of ours, you’re going to need help and these are the guys to do it.”
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