Tech Spotlight: Simplifying Marketplace Integration With ChannelEngine
For far too long, businesses have turned to setting up their own website if they’re eyeing a piece of the online shopping traffic.
Today, that no longer needs to be the first step. In fact, the marketplace model has grown tremendously, with 67% of e-commerce sales now happening on marketplaces. You no longer require a website and can simply set up shop on a marketplace to start selling online directly to consumers anywhere in the world.
That said, entering any new marketplace, especially more than one, will add to the operational complexities that brands already face. For example, brands would now have to take on additional responsibilities such as managing stock or tracking and changing prices to stay competitive across multiple marketplaces for hundreds or thousands of products manually.
This becomes such a resource-intensive approach that some brands would think twice before entering more marketplaces. Rivièra Maison, an international furniture and homeware brand, faced the same struggle as they “quickly discovered that manual inventory and order processes were a serious constraint on growth.” According to Rivièra Maison’s Online Specialist, Brenda Schenkius, “Before, everything was done by hand, and this was a lot of work – so it wasn’t good for expanding the business.”
So how can businesses enjoy the fruits of scaling or growing internationally without burning out their employees from doing laborious tasks?
Meet ChannelEngine, an innovative e-commerce solution that connects multiple marketplaces so brands can easily manage their marketplace business in one place and connect with consumers wherever they are.
Who Is ChannelEngine?
Founded by Jorrit Steinz, ChannelEngine’s story starts in 2013 with the desire to help any brand, distributor or retailer sell from anywhere by connecting them to over 200 marketplaces around the world, all with just one integration.
Jorrit has been active in the e-commerce world for over 20 years and has developed platforms for various businesses – both large and small. After helping hundreds of businesses launch their web stores, Jorrit soon saw an opportunity in marketplaces and how he could connect brands seamlessly to the big marketplace platforms such as Amazon. This idea and desire crystalized into ChannelEngine as it operates today.
Effectively, ChannelEngine enables brands to utilize a single, unified platform to list and sell products, manage stock, update product information, and more in a synchronized manner across marketplaces. So now if a customer buys the last piece of a product on Amazon, it will also show up as out-of-stock on all the other marketplaces the product is listed on.
Simplifying E-Commerce Operations With Seamless Integration
As the marketplace model continues to grow, ChannelEngine has become invested in helping brands discover a better way to do business and ultimately free up time. Product synchronization, effortless content mapping, setting price rules and intuitive software are just some of the ways the integration makes things easier for brands.
Take Nelson Shoes for example. As one of the largest shoe retailers in the Netherlands, they were looking to expand their revenue sources but were unsure if they could manage the business's various aspects in a fuss-free and convenient manner.
ChannelEngine stepped in to provide them with the tools they needed and according to Nelson Shoes, “with competitor monitoring, product bundling opportunities, and centralized multi-channel management, we could manage adequately priced items for each marketplace without much hassle.”
Robert Herbermann, COO Nelson Shoes also shared: "once we started to partner with ChannelEngine, we considerably grew our business. We're now not only selling our products by our own stores in the Netherlands but also via several marketplaces across Europe."
Pricing is another tricky aspect of marketplace management that brands have to navigate – especially during sale seasons. Imagine updating hundreds of products across five marketplaces manually and all with different discount mechanics. Not only is that time-intensive but it opens up to human error as well.
However, with ChannelEngine’s integration, brands can set price rules for specific products on a specific marketplace for a specific period of time, all within their back end. Simplifying these tedious operational tasks essentially enable brands to focus on the big picture – scaling their business and identifying opportunities.
Content Mapping and Optimization for Easy Online Marketplace Setups
Beyond lifting operational pressures across multiple marketplaces, ChannelEngine also enables businesses to quickly get their product list up and running according to the specific categorization within each marketplace.
This results in being able to seamlessly map products based on how each marketplace categorizes them. Product attributes are also accounted for within each marketplace to ensure the products receive the right visibility and are highly searchable.
Tommy Kriellaars, Business Unit Manager from TOM Marketplaces (TMP) had a similar experience after integrating ChannelEngine. He shared: "migrating to ChannelEngine gave us advanced attribute mapping options helping us create even better product content and making it much easier for us to fill missing attributes, thus greatly increasing product visibility.”
Supporting E-Commerce Expansion Into Southeast Asia and Beyond
Within the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, e-commerce sales are expected to almost double by 2025, reaching USD 2 trillion. Southeast Asia in particular is one of the fastest-growing digital economies in Asia-Pacific, with over 350 million digital consumers. This means almost 80% of consumers in Southeast Asia have gone digital and this trend is even set to leapfrog China’s growth.
In Singapore, the recent growth of marketplaces such as Shopee, Lazada, Zalora and Qoo10 similarly supports the rise of online shopping and offers up a variety of avenues for businesses to explore. With this enormous potential in the region coupled with ChannelEngine’s unique play-and-play solution, businesses can now easily access shoppers in APAC in an easier, more streamlined way.
Together with ChannelEngine’s growing ecosystem of partners all over the world, businesses can also set their sights on international expansion and magnify their reach on multiple global marketplaces seamlessly. With ChannelEngine, selling directly to global shoppers is now as easy as one simple integration.
About ChannelEngine
ChannelEngine is an eCommerce and Marketplace Management Suite with offices in the Netherlands, Germany, United States, Singapore, Australia, United Arab Emirates and Canada. Within Southeast Asia, ChannelEngine is connected with numerous marketplaces such as Shopee, Lazada, Zalora, TikTok, Amazon and eBay. Follow our marketplace blog and LinkedIn for the latest updates on succeeding on marketplaces.
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