What is marketplace order management to help grow eCommerce business?

There is no way around marketplace order management

Did you know that 62.5% of all global online spending in 2020 took place on digital marketplaces? The marketplace share in eCommerce is expected to rise even higher in the coming years, showing why marketplaces are a key component of your online business strategy. For the consumer, they come with the ultimate ease of shopping online in a fast, seamless experience. For online merchants like you, marketplaces can be a goldmine - when handled savvily. One of the most decisive factors when it comes to success on the leading platforms like Amazon, eBay, or Bol.com is marketplace order management.

Why a marketplace order requires constant care - or automation

When your order volume increases and/or you start selling on multiple marketplaces, you can easily lose the overview of your marketplace order management. The potential for errors when it comes to stock maintenance, such as overselling or delayed stock updates, is rising. Next to that, it is almost impossible to handle orders from various marketplaces in various backends. Leading eCommerce merchants want to centralize their incoming orders in one place to gain maximum efficiency and control.

How can this goal be achieved? With the help of a marketplace integrator! Next to the centralization of all marketplace orders, a good marketplace integration software offers different services which form a fully comprehensive marketplace management system.

What does marketplace order management entail?

Selling on third party platforms should not overwhelm you. On the contrary, the sales process on marketplaces should be as smooth and streamlined as possible. In order to achieve this, you will want an integrated solution to handle your orders and to avoid that extra manual work.

Essentially, automated marketplace order management will send your orders directly from your (multiple) marketplaces to your online shop, where you can handle everything from one place.

The order functionalities that a marketplace order management tool supports will depend on the combination of your eCommerce platform and marketplace. There are two main functionalities that can be (partially) supported by the tool: The handling of the orders and returns, as well as stock updates in real-time directly on the marketplace.

1. Information about orders and returns will be sent from the marketplace to your online shop, and status feedback (such as shipping information or tack & trace codes) will be sent back to the marketplace.

2. Real-time updates about in stock/out-of-stock information or the actual number of products in stock are sent to the marketplace as soon as something changes in the online shop.

What else does an automated marketplace integrator offer?

A marketplace integrator is not only able to retrieve and fully synchronize marketplace orders online, it usually has other features.

API connections to a variety of marketplaces serve as a two-way communication between your shop backend and your sales channel, exchanging information about your products and automatically updating your listings. This automation omits manual updates of your product offerings or stock information.

All marketplaces have different requirements for their data input and product attributes but your original product information can easily be optimized and adjusted in a marketplace tool. With rule-based optimization, “if” and “then” rules modify your product information to match the specs of every marketplace, and filter out the products you don’t want to advertise on.

A marketplace repricer completes the full marketplace automation package by enabling you to control your minimum and maximum price limits and automatically win the buy box.

3 benefits of automated marketplace order management

To sum up, here are 3 good reasons why you can scale your overall marketplace success through the use of marketplace order management software.

1. Save time while scaling your order handling

You can handle more marketplaces and orders in less time and shift your efforts to a smarter marketplace order management. You speed up the whole order process from the moment the customer clicks the ‘buy’ button to the product(s) leaving your warehouse.

2. Easily expand your multichannel strategy

By centralizing your marketplace order management in one backend, you free up resources to discover new and additional sales channels which can then, in turn, be integrated into your order handling automation.

3. Less marketplace order errors & happy customers

You avoid marketplace advertisements and orders for products that are out of stock and minimize the risk of human errors. Your marketplace orders and shop information will be synchronized so your customers can profit from correct product listings at all times and will be satisfied with their purchase experience.

What do all these benefits have in common? Right, they take you on the road to more sales and growth in the eCommerce marketplace world.

Want to save your seat on this ride? When you are a Channable user, you can discover your favorite marketplaces in the tool, or reach out to our technical support to see which order functionalities are available for your existing marketplace connection(s).

When you are new to marketplace automation, discover Channable’s marketplace APIs in a free trial.