welcome to the e-commerce podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmundson, the e-commerce podcast is all about helping you deliver e-commerce. Wow. Now I am super, super excited with today's guest, who is Jessie, Ryan from comedian. But before I get into my conversation with Jesse, one of the things.
We're starting to do is give a shout out to past guests and episodes, just so you, dear listener, know what we've talked about in the past, because we are getting a lot of new subscribers to the show at the moment. Uh, and given that we are talking about should use sell on multiple online marketplaces. It's a bit of a mouthful title. Isn't it. Today. I thought it would be great to mention Lauren Gonzalez who.
Did a great conversation, a weather's on how to leave Amazon and how to set up your own website and brand. That was an awesome episode. A story. Remember that? Definitely check out my conversation with Lauren and the other podcasts you want to check out with is with my fellow Brit Mike Jones, uh, who talked to us about how to marry your business to, to a strategy and the money will follow. That was a great conversation. Being ex special forces. So, uh, do check it out.
Now, this episode is brought to you by the e-commerce cohort, which helps you deliver e-commerce well to your customers. What's the cohort. I hear you say, well, it's a brand new thing now. I'm sure you've come across a bunch of folks stuck with their e-commerce businesses. Maybe it's yourself, or maybe, uh, you've got siloed. Like I did into working on just one or two. Of your e-commerce business and miss the big picture. Well, enter the e-commerce cohort to solve this particular problem.
Oh yes. Uh, the cohort is a lightweight membership group with guided monthly sprints, that cycle through all the key areas of e-commerce the sole purpose of the e-commerce cohort is to provide you with clear, actionable jobs to be done. So you'll know what to work on and get the support. To what you need to get it done. I've no idea what was going to say that, but to get the support you need to get it done.
So whether you are just starting out in e-commerce or if like me you've been around for a while, a well established e-commerce, uh, uh, as, as I like to call them, e-commerce, uh, then check it out. I definitely want to encourage you to check it out. Just head over to. Www dot e-commerce cohort.com for more information, you're not going to want to miss it. It's gearing up for its founding member launch. So if you've got any questions, uh, that the website doesn't answer.
Well, just email me directly at Matt at e-commerce podcast.net. We'd love to hear from you. Uh, it's something that we're super proud of here. So yes, definitely check that out. Jesse is the co-founder and managing director of e-commerce Helion. He helps online retailers and D to C brands navigate the E commerce jungle. I love that phrase, navigate the e-commerce jungle. Now with a particular focus on marketplaces and international expansion.
Jesse helps online sellers to determine which marketplace in which country, uh, offers the best opportunity. For them into expansion. So if you've ever thought about selling a broad, uh, in a country, which is not native to you, check them out, the great guys, uh, with the help of the very clever IE chameleon, software and team, Jesse uses his expertise to help implement scalable market place, expansion plans for experienced and novice sellers.
Uh, like just as mission is to make it as easy as possible for online sellers to expand their business into new markets. Because when business grows everyone benefits. Yes it does. Which is why we're going to have a fantastic conversation on how to get your e-commerce business into multiple marketplaces, into multiple countries. Some of the tips and tricks Jesse has learned, you're not going to want to miss it. Don't go.
Awesome. So, Jesse, thank you for joining me on this week's e-commerce podcast. Uh, whereabouts in the world are you sir? Thanks for having me. Uh, I am in Leipzig in the oldest of Germany and Leipzig. You don't sound like you're from Leipzig. No, no, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm English. I've come by way of Australia. You have to forgive me. I still speak with a little bit of a tweaking every now and then. And I was there for five years, but I'm originally from, from wheelchair.
So wheelchair Australia Leipzig. Yes. That's a, that's a heck of a journey to get to, uh, east Germany or the old east Germany. Are you enjoying it over there? Yeah, so far I've been here just coming up on seven years. So it's. It's a beautiful city. It's it's a little bit like what Berlin was in the nineties. You got a really nice sort of arts and music scene. Great nightlife when pre COVID quite nightlife, um, and, uh, a beautiful inner city, but it's also one of Jeremy's greenest cities.
So there's lots of parks and lots of nature. And yeah, it's also a really calls every call tech scene here. Lots of startups. So it's a nice place to be. Very good. Very good. And I, I'm assuming, uh, if you've been there seven years, your German is pretty, pretty recently. It's a lot better now than it was when I landed. I still had my GCSE job and I could count to 20 and I could tell people I had a cat. That's really funny. I can still tell now I'm 13.
Yeah. Which is the last time most of the German GCSE German. Doesn't get you far into. No, no, no, no. That was my experience. I remember I used to work a lot actually with a German company a few years ago and we'd go to Germany on a regular basis and, um, And, uh, loved it, loved the people. And fortunately they, for me, they spoke fairly good English because my German sort of extended to being able to order a beer, uh, and get directions.
And as long as those directions was go straight down this road and take the first left, I was okay. That's that's generally how it worked. So what do you do in, in Leipzig? What's your date? Uh, so I I'm co-founder and managing director at the chameleon. Um, so I take care of. Most of the commercial side of the business. So sales, marketing partnerships dealing with investors. My business partner, Edward is the genius behind the show. Um, his PhD is. Something to do with data science.
And, uh, he's, he's been applying that specifically to marketplaces since 2007. So he's, he's the technical genius behind it. And he heads up the product development and making sure that we've got a good product on the market and I'm responsible for making sure that we've got people to find a new user. Wow. Well, and so, um, so it chameleon was born, uh, and, um, just a quick elevator pitch. Just tell people what you chameleon does. We are, we, we try to be a complete solution for product data.
For online sales channels. Our specific focus is marketplaces because they tend to be the most complex part when it comes to product data. Um, and what I mean by that is things like titles, bullet points, descriptions, um, attribute values, like color size material. When you, when you haven't a product that you're trying to sell online, obviously you have to provide a lot of information about it and the channel where you're trying to sell it.
Specifically marketplaces, but every channel has its own requirements about how you can do that. How long has a title allowed to be, you know, Do, are you allowed to call the product dark blue or is it Royal blue or Navy blue Marine or Marine blue and then obviously different languages come into play.
And so, um, when you start dealing with a lot of products and sometimes across a lot of categories and you want to then sell those on a lot of marketplaces in a lot of countries, It becomes very hard to stay on top of all of that work. Uh, and, and so he chameleon reduces that workload. We, we automate a lot with, we automate the things which can be automated without sacrificing the data quality.
Uh, and then we try and make it easy to you understand how to create data for a specific channel without the user having to understand specifically how that channel. Okay, so, and this is what we're going to get into now is like, um, should we sell on, uh, online in multiple marketplaces, through multiple channels? And I'm thinking, you know, we have a wide range of listeners on the show. We have guys just starting out in e-commerce and if that's you awesome. Welcome to the welcome to the team.
Uh, uh, welcome to the family. Should I say? And we have people that maybe have been around a while and maybe do do, um, some sales through different channels. Maybe they use software like channel advisor, or they've come across things like this in the past. Um, so let's start with the sort of the basics, um, and let's get fundamental. If I'm thinking about this, what, what do you mean when we talk about different market places? What, what, what is that?
Um, marketplaces the word marketplace is these days quite often used synonymously with Amazon and it, especially for most e-commerce retailers have a very technical, have a very easy technical solution for selling on Amazon mode, whether it's Magento, Brightpearl big commerce, Shopify, pretty much. Website or every a website provider or platform, however you want to call it has a technical connection to allow a seller to advertise their products on Amazon.
Um, that technical connection is only one part of the puzzle, because let's say you've got a title on your website, which is 250 characters long, but for a specific category on Amazon, you're only allowed 150 characters. You then have to decide, okay. Do I let this technical connection chop the end of my title or do I now write a specific title for Amazon? And now I have two titles in my school. So, so a marketplace then, uh, is where I'm currently selling.
So if I'm selling with my Shopify site somewhere I'm selling into versus call it the web, um, and then I have the option to also sell the same products on Amazon, which would be a different marketplace or a different channel. I think, uh, the way that I try to sort of differentiate it is I would say that sellers are typically familiar with platforms, but like I listed a few just before. On a platform, the seller themselves is responsible for generating. On a marketplace.
The, I would differentiate, I would define the marketplace as the channel, which is the channel, which is responsible, responsible for generating the traffic. And the seller only has to advertise their products, right? I'm with you. So Amazon has a captured market already. That's why you want to sell on Amazon. You know, they've already got a whole bunch of people going to their platform, so you don't have to deal with Amazon to get them to sell your product over your competitor.
Kind of thing, what you have to do is differentiate yourself. Yeah. So that's the channel. Um, so that's how you differentiate that. And I like that. And that's how you differentiate platforms. So on that platform, your Shopify platform, you have to go generate the traffic on Amazon. You don't, you have to figure out how to get at the top of the queue on Amazon. Um, so what are the, um, I guess one of the questions is how do marketplaces then create value for e-commerce businesses.
So I get that there are these different marketplaces out there. Um, how does that create value for me, especially if I'm listening to you talk about. All the different marketplaces, going to have all kinds of different rules and sets and things that I need to think about. Um, I think one of the biggest, one of the biggest ways that it's going to create value is exactly what we just talked about with the captured market. Every, every marketplace will generally already have an audience.
Um, the idea there is to go where your buyers are already shopping. Now, if a buyer is already aware of your brand or your, or your business, Of course, they probably already coming to your website. However, they've discovered it, whether they know it from a brick and mortar store, and then they go to your online shop or whether they've seen it on a Facebook ad or wherever else that they already know your business. You've got those, you've got those customers, they're yours.
You can put them into a marketing sequences and, and, and keep them as yours. Marketplaces that you find new buyers where they're already shopping now. Um, Amazon love it or hate it. Um, has a very large market share. There's a number of buyers that will exclusively buy on Amazon because they pay for a prime membership or they expect to get the, you know, they're just familiar with it. It's, it's a very easy customer experience. There are other buyers who.
Either because they're anti Amazon, or perhaps because they are simply looking for more niche products, they will go to other marketplaces, whether it's Etsy for sort of more homemade products, or maybe they're going to. Um, for DIY products or, uh, maybe the mango, which is a German marketplace specifically catered for, for like young, their target market is like young mothers. So there's lots of homemade products and baby products and things.
Um, and so if you're, if you're looking for a particular product, a lot of buyers will go specifically to a certain channel to shop around rather than going to a brand, especially if you haven't yet discovered your brand. Now, when that buyer finds your product on the market, In an ideal world, they'll be so happy with it that the next time they want to buy your product, you're going to go directly to your website.
And that's when you can then capture that buyer, you get their email address, you're allowed to keep their data, and then you can carry on staying in touch with them. And that's actually a fair point because that's probably, I mean, I get the advantage or the value, um, uh, for an e-commerce business of trading on platforms like Etsy and Amazon and so on and so forth. If that's the right marketplace fit.
Well, what you're doing, which we're going to get into, but I guess one of the disadvantages is, um, certainly with Amazon, it's their customer it's that they keep the email address. You don't, you don't get that information, right. Is that, is that true of most marketplaces? And is that perhaps the key disadvantage of trading on different marketplaces? Um, Amazon, Amazon are extremely protective of their customers. Not every marketplace is the same.
There, there there's two sides to this coin because there's the legal side. For example, if you're selling, if you're fulfilling to a consumer, to an Amazon customer yourself, you do get their name, their address, their email address, or an email address at which to reach which to contact them. You're supposed to delete it after a certain amount of time because of GDPR. Um, other marketplaces are less fussy about.
Amazon, for example, don't allow you to put things in the box that would, would attempt to get the buyer to go to your website and Amazon control that they will order items from you and have people check what's in the box. Other marketplaces don't do that as much. Now this is one of the great things about non-Amazon marketplaces is they know they're not Amazon and they do a lot to make it easy for sellers to sell on their plan. And they generally speaking most non-Amazon marketplaces.
See it as more of a partnership. They are more catered towards the seller than to the buyer. Now you can obviously debate a lot about whether or not that's the right way to go, because one of the things that makes Amazon great, or what makes Amazon successful, I should say is their focus on the buyer.
Uh, you know, we've all seen Jeff Bezos's flywheel, um, But non-Amazon marketplaces that focus on the seller, make it very easy for the seller to sell that because they know that this seller won't generate the same amount of revenue as they do on Amazon. So what they need to do is they need to make it easy for them to generate any revenue there so that they continue to sell that because without the products they won't then get the buyers, which attracts more sellers. Yeah, that's interesting.
That's interesting. So there are marketplaces out there that will work more as a partnership with you. Um, absolutely than, than Amazon and I guess, um, marketplaces, um, I'm sitting here and I'm thinking, well, this all sounds great. You know, you've got all these different channels and you reeled off a few and the obvious ones are Amazon Etsy, if it's sort of homemade type stuff. And, uh, when you mentioned, um, uh, mango lamb, is that right? Yeah, the mango in Germany.
And I also mentioned Manno Manto, which is a DOA marketplace. How many? I don't know if you know the answer, how many marketplaces are there out there for me to think about. It D there's both niche. So product category specific and generalist marketplaces, there isn't really an answer to how many there are, because the, one of the things that's happened, especially since post a post COVID.
Um, it was already a trend before COVID, but it's definitely become a thing now since 2020 many established e-commerce stores and now becoming marketplaces. So I mentioned the product. It is what attracts buyers. And if your, for example, um, uh, German, another German example is a business called Galleria. They are kind of the German version of like a house of Fraser and they had the, you know, a company like this or media market, which is like the German version of.
When they're thinking, how do we get more buyers? They think what? We need to offer more products. We need to expand our, expand our range, have more categories, have more products within the existing categories. Um, how do we do that quickly and effectively? Well, if we go and just buy a bunch more products, we've got a massive cash outlay and realistically, we're just another seller offering the same products. So how do we differentiate? It's very hard for them to do that and very expensive.
The easy way to do it is to open the doors to their established website that already gets traffic because it's a well-known brand. And, and, you know, in, in Germany media market, it's the place to go for electronics, just like Curry's PC world. Um, they opened the doors and they let other sellers advertise their products on their own. And those sellers benefit from the captured audience at that.
Now marketplace has, um, the marketplace gets to see that the traffic, they get to see which products are doing well, which categories are doing well. They get the customer information shortly and you get 15% on average of the sale. They keep their commission and the seller obviously keeps. The proceeds of the sale for them, although the majority of it. Um, but it's a very quick way for them to expand their product range.
And so to answer your question, there's new marketplaces popping up all the time and there's technology now specifically developed to help make this transition seamless. So there's companies which exist yesterday, which are now suddenly a marketplace. Um, and it means that there's forever more opportunities to be selling on marketplaces. That's a really interesting thought.
I mean, I, I get as an e-commerce business owner, I would want to sell onto the marketplaces and find the channels to sell at. Um, I get that it's not all sunshine and rainbows that there are some pros and cons to doing this that I have to think through. But I'd never actually thought, um, on one of my established business websites to become a marketplace itself to say, right, actually, if you want to sell on our website, you can, these are our terms. We're going to take 15% off.
Um, you're going to fulfill it or whatever the specific ones of the marketplace are. That's a really interesting idea. And I can see why, why, why you say since post COVID, a lot of people have now started to look at this as a, as a real sort of possibility. And it's who. The idea is who or who is it, that's actually doing that. And it's a lot of the established household names.
It's the brick and mortar businesses that have a well-known presence within a country or within a region, um, that had to pivot to a more of an e-commerce model. Some of them were further along in that process than others. Some of them are just pure play brands. Um, some of them are more traditional retailers, but either way they had to do something to try and. Survive through, through the pandemic. And it's a step that a lot of them have taken and are doing quite well with.
Yeah. And it's something I think there is demand for as well, because you know, we're in a, we're in a day and age when Amazon gets a lot of negative press and there, there is a, a large number of the buying population who actively avoid buying on Amazon and they need somewhere else to go. Yeah, no, they do. And I, and you're right. I think, and there are more and more of these sort of niches sort of popping up online.
So to take your example of, um, I mean, it seems an obvious platform where it's an issue it's homemade, it's, it's a niche there where I would automatically think to go to if that's the kind of product that I want more so than that. I'm guessing. And I, I'm going to assume that if I'm in a various different niche niche, and I'm, I'm pretty keyed up in that area, I will know what those marketplaces off of that nation. I'm going to be much more inclined as a customer.
I'm guessing to go and buy from those marketplaces because they're going to be much more tailored products. I'll get the community. The community will get me. The values will be the same. Um, I can see the, I can see the benefits of that. Um, okay. So, uh, I quite liked that, that little rabbit trail there of, uh, and as you, as you were talking, actually have companies such as net marketplaces.
Um, the one example that came to mind is next here in the UK, um, next have done it and they sell an awful lot more on their website than they do in their stores now. Um, and being BNQ have just announced they're gonna do it as well. Right. Okay. Um, so there's, it's really happening and I think, um, Another another very relevant factor to, to these companies, which are building out marketplaces is, as I said, their role is to now make it easy for people to start selling on these channels.
Um, so even this, this is probably less relevant for your listeners who, for small businesses, but perhaps for some of the larger ones or, or businesses with larger inventories, just because a marketplace has a niche doesn't necessarily mean that they intend to always have that niche. Case and point is if you go into being cute and as we're being Q store, you've got products from the garden center to hardware to pats, you might think of being Q as a hardware store.
Yeah. But they still sell products in other categories. Now, if you were to go to a marketplace or if you see a marketplace and you know that it's a good one. But you think maybe it's not relevant for you? There's no reason that you, as a seller, can't reach out to the partner, to the team at that marketplace specifically, and just say, Hey, look, I've got 150,000 skews in this category. Want to sell them?
Yeah. If you can get a technical connection that works well between the two and it's, you know, you maybe do a little bit of investment in the biggest. To get that, to get those listings live there suddenly you're the only seller on that marketplace in that category. And you know, that that marketplace gets traffic.
And if somebody is going on there to buy a box of screws and sees it jumper with a guy with holding a hammer on it or something that's, you know, slightly relevant or even, you know, you can be clutching at straws there, but it's about having your product shown where your buyers are already looking. That's really good. Well, Jesse, I have several questions now going through my head. I'm like, uh, well, how do I get started? How do I find these marketplaces and how do I make it work?
So we're going to get into those questions right after we have heard from this week's show sponsors. Hey, there, are you a business owner here at orient digital? We know firsthand that running an e-commerce business can be really hard. As the online space gets more competitive. It is becoming even more challenging to stay ahead of the curve. We totally get it.
So we want to help you succeed by offering a wide range of services from fulfillment marketing, customer service, and even coaching and consulting, just so that you can do what matters most, save yourself the time and the money, and let us handle the day to day tasks. This way you can run your business without having to worry about the boring stuff. So what do you say, are we a good fit for you? Come check us out@oriendigital.com and let us know what you think. So I am back with Jesse.
Uh, we're talking about marketplaces and channels, Jesse, I guess the big question for me, I'm listening to you talk and it's all very great. And my head is swimming with possibilities. Where do I start? How do I find these marketplaces? Because they're popping up all the time. What's the best way for me to get. There's a lot of ways. Um, you can either reach out if you know which marketplaces are there. You can always reach out directly to the marketplace. Most of them will have.
And there's a good way of finding out if a website also offers a marketplace. If you, when you're looking on their website, pick control F to find and just type sell with or sell it on. And usually in the photo, there'll be some little bit hidden away that says, sell with us or sell on our marketplace or partner with us. And you can just look there and then that will take you to a form where you can apply. Um, Generally speaking with these larger marketplaces or.
Any channel, which is either just transitioning to a marketplace or marketplaces, which have a little bit more clout, there is a bit more legwork involved in getting an account. Um, you know, oftentimes when you fill in that form on the website, you'll land in a queue somewhere, and it might be six months until you hear back from them. Because quite often, what will happen for all the reasons that I've just explained.
There are professional marketplace sellers who will apply for these channels as soon as they possibly can. And it's often too much work for the marketplace before the team behind this new marketplace to get on top of. And so you'll often have, you know, maybe a team of five to 50 people at this company. Responsible for onboarding new sellers. And for them it's a new process. So there's often a lot of legwork involved trying to figure out how to do it.
And so quite often, new sellers will get dumped into a, into a pool. And I mean, there are marketplaces where I've seen people sitting there waiting to open an account for two years sometimes. Uh, so honestly, I mean, it, it sounds, uh, I don't want to. Plug ourselves too much. This is an area where we then help people.
Um, it doesn't necessarily mean that somebody has to take out our services, but we can at least kind of make the introduction and often going via virus service provider that already has an existing relationship with the marketplace. If that service provider introduces you as a seller, it's a good way to kind of get a foot in the door and kind of differentiate yourself from other sellers. Fair enough. That's fair enough.
So there's, if I want to, I obviously there's going to be marketplaces that I know about those things and just be searching around that industry that needs trying to find who else is doing what, looking on people's websites. So with us, look for that phrase or similar, um, sell through as sell on is, uh, you know, those kinds of things.
And then reaching out to them or using service platforms like yourself, uh, which can also help with that introduction just out of curiosity, your platform, that technical connection. Um, well, let me, let me take a step back for, I I've gone too far down my rabbit trail in my thought. Um, let me just take a step back. Sorry. I've got. Let's say a list of 10, 15 marketplaces that I think I can work with.
Um, I get what you're saying in that I have now very quickly come up with a huge nightmare, uh, possible Jeremy sort of possible nightmare scenario, which says for every channel I want to promote my products on. I have to think about my products in the format that that channel wants those. Put in. And so you mentioned it earlier in our pre-call you were talking about, you take the color blue.
For example, I sell a t-shirt in blue while on my platform, it might be called blue, but on Amazon, I might have to call it Royal blue and on Etsy, I might have to call it Navy blue. And I mean there's how, how do you even go about sort of. Working your way through that kind of thing. So what I mean, it it's like, it sounds good, but I, now I've got a big admin men nightmare on my hands and I know your software can help, but we'll come to your software in a sec.
But what are some of the things I guess I need to think about? Um, I think another factor just to throw into the mix is also the, the language factor, because obviously whether it's dark blue, Royal blue, Navy, blue Marine, You've also got the German, the French Italian, the Spanish versions of those words. Um, and you know, it's going to be different between each marketplace in each, each category in each sub category.
Uh, for example, on eBay in France, I think it's with men's shoes, you can use gray and with women's shoes, you have, you can call themselves. Um, and so it, it's very hard to stay on top of, and really the simplest way is to have some kind of product inventory management system, where per product you can have. Um, you can have that kind of overview of how we advertising this product. You know, how do we change it? What, what can we call it?
Unfortunately, with most Penn systems, what happens is you do end up with per skew. If you imagine, for example, on Amazon, you know, in some categories you can provide up to 300 fields and a product of information. Uh, if you know, selling on multiple Amazons in multiple countries and multiple other marketplaces, it's very quick, it's very easy to quickly end up with hundreds, if not thousands or tens of thousands of columns in your pencils.
How your product inventory management system, where you do then just have massive data. And it does become quite hard then to keep that overview. That's, that's something that we then try and solve, but really, uh, you can be quite clever with it where things like Excel sheets and look up lists, you know, you can say right, I'm going to call it blue, but I know that Amazon wants Royal blue. Um, you can do that with a lookup list.
The problem then, then comes in that these values that are different per channel, they also change. We download nine gigabytes on average, about nine gigabytes of changes every week from Amazon alone. And it's, you know, it's often the smallest thing it takes. Sometimes it's just them correcting a typo, but sometimes it's something like changing, uh, the value from a capital R to a lowercase R or the other way around.
And if you've got an old, old, uh, value that says, you know, this t-shirt's retro, uh, and it's written with a lowercase R and they now say it has to be retro with an application. That value won't be accepted anymore. So you do have to then stay on top of these changes as they happen. Well, uh, nine gigabytes have changed as well. I'm not surprised now, but I liked what you said. I guess if you're just starting out, if you're wanting to Dublin, the sheet can.
Use something as simple as, um, Excel or Google sheets with the lookup function. Yes. And I, and I would really recommend to do it outside of the marketplace, no matter what system you use, um, you know, you don't have to pay for it if you're not at the point in the business where you can afford an expensive any, any kind of system, you know, even like a Penta, some don't have to be expensive.
But you can use something free, like Excel or Google sheets, but just have your product data outside of the marketplace because, or outside of everything, even outside of Shopify, just have your own data center. Because at some point you will need it. And it amazes me that I still regularly talk to sellers who have no access to their own titles, bullet points, description, skews, EAMS prizes. Um, they just don't have a central place for that. And so that would be my big tip.
Yeah. That's a good tip. Actually keeping your product data outside. And so something like a Google sheet, and then just pulling that data in from Google, through to your website or wherever, and there is a command, isn't it. And as you're talking, I'm going back in my head, over my Excel programming days, there is a command called V lookup or H lookup, which helps you figure these things out.
Um, and so you can go to YouTube and just Google Excel lookup, and I think it works the same in Google sheets. Um, yeah. To sort of start to build your own mini PIM system. I like that pimp. So what does PM stand for again? PIM stands for product inventory management.
Um, there's a lot of acronyms in e-commerce and especially when it comes to technology, because you also, you also can have, um, ERP enterprise resource planning and you can have, um, peds product inventory, data, uh, data servers, and, and, and, um, Tom and, um, oh, there's hundreds. There's there's so many of them are ETL is another good one extract transform load. Um, it just randomly making it words now. I think people, I think that's what I think that's what happens.
Uh, I know we went through that phase with, as a, when we started out as a company, we're like, what, what are we, are we a pin are, or an ETL? Are we it's like, no, we're just going to say where he chameleon it's much, much more understandable. Uh I've I've heard. Like Q I've heard people use so many different acronyms.
Um, we've gone into clients' places and we've chatted, you know, whenever we've done the coaching or consultant and they'll throw things out like PIM ERP, CRM, and all that sort of stuff. And I just, every time I have to stop and go, can you please describe. What you mean by that phrase? Because I know what I think it is, but I need to know what you think it is because I'm not convinced we will necessarily see eye to eye on everything.
So, um, and it's funny, the amount of times people are going to, well, I don't actually know what it means. It's just the name. We call this bit of software over here and you're like, okay. Right. That's helpful. Thank you. So. Yeah. If there's anything else that we do on the e-commerce podcast is we do like to define acronyms, uh, because I think it's super helpful. So we've got our PEM.
You can create one in Google sheets, you can go out and you can get, um, some system, uh, out there on the market. What I guess, how do I know? Right. That, um, that going into a different channel or marketplace is right for me as a, as a business. That's a, that's a big question.
Um, realistically, if you want to succeed on marketplaces in general, there's a few ducks that you need to have in a row before you can do so once those ducks are in a row, you can sell on any marketplace and that's, that is that's. I think the more important question is how is, can I get those ducks in a row? Realistically, what you should be looking to do with a marketplace business is to build processes that allow you to put your, to test the waters in these new channels.
Because one of the benefits, one of the great things about marketplaces is they're quick and easy to get, to start selling them. You know, if you, if you're thinking about expanding internationally, before you go and set up a local business entity and local fulfillment of your own and, you know, deal with everything that's involved with setting up a new country.
You can instead just look for a marketplace that's in that country and already has a captive audience and just see how your products perform there and, um, by doing so you can, you can very quickly it's, it's like, it's almost like a form of AB testing. Um, you know, you can see if, if your products perform well in that chat, in that locale.
And if they do, then you can take the step of potentially expanding their international needs properly, um, to figure out if a marketplace is going to be right for you realistically. I would say that most marketplaces are right for most businesses, as long as there's not a really obvious contrast, you know, you don't try and sell my product. I don't try and sell hardware products on that.
How am I store or the one catered for, for babies and, and, um, you know, family, you're not going to, they're probably not interested in buying a box of screws. Um, but very true. Yeah. The, at the same time, your processes should allow you to very quickly. At new channels. What I mean by that is for a business that's already selling on Amazon. And there are businesses that are very successful on Amazon and sell exclusively on Amazon.
They often discount other marketplaces because they're looking at it through the lens of Amazon. How ISO a hundred grand a month on Amazon. I know that on eBay, I'm only going to send, sell five grand. Yeah. Well 10 grand a month. That doesn't mean that eBay's not worth it. It doesn't mean that eBay's not worth only worth 10% of your time.
What it means is that you should be looking for 10 other channels where you can also generate 10 grand a month and, and manage those with the same amount of effort and distribute your effort evenly across all of your channels. And then Amazon suddenly only 50% of your business and not a hundred percent of your business. Yeah, that's very wise, very, very wise. So what are these ducks? What are the ducks that I need to have in a row?
Um, they are mainly surrounded by, uh, I would say logistics is a big one, making sure that, uh, that there's different options for logistics. You can look at Amazon's FBA. I don't personally write it, but highly it's good.
If you're just on Amazon, as soon as you want to sell another channels, it causes issues because most other marketplaces don't want their buyers receiving boxes with Amazon branding on Amazon in America, they do offer plain box fulfillment, but even then Amazon is more channel fulfillment solution. Super cheap. You know, there's children, there's better options for three pills.
Um, for third party logistics solutions, if you don't want to do it yourself, or if you're not capable of doing it yourself, I think there's both ends of the spectrum. Smaller sellers often don't have the capital or the, or the know how or the resources in general, to be able to have a good logistics solution and very large sellers, especially people are companies which have traditionally focused on B2B. They often can't handle B2C.
You know, they're used to selling maybe 50,000 pounds worth of stock in one, go to one buyer and they'll send 10 pallets to that retail store. Um, so there's that, that problem exists on both ends of the scale, but if you can find a good three PL solution, uh, and you can just define three PO at the third party logistics. So for example, in the UK, um, GFS is a very good one. Um, very well, very experienced in dealing with marketplace.
And the idea there is that you just say, Hey, let's throw a bunch of we'll throw X pallets, we'll store them. There we'll pay a small fee for storing the products. We'll pay them a small fee per product that they send to the buyer. But then you know, that that buyer will reliably get the product say next day or within a set time period that you can tell the marketplace.
And this is the, this is where it becomes really important for marketplaces is you have to say to the marketplace, I need, when an order comes in, I need this much time to process the order. And this many days. To get the order from my warehouse to the end customer. And as long as you stick to that, you'll be fine. Obviously with, you know, this day and age, people will like to have next day delivery. They kind of expect it.
Um, but as long as you're able to say, yeah, it's going to take two to three days, as long as it arrives within three days, you'll find if it arrives on the fourth day, either you will receive negative feedback or the marketplace will just suspend you or, you know, if it happens two to three, Okay. So deck number one is logistics, um, and having a good solution for that.
Uh, what, what else would I need to think about, um, technology, having, having a, having a process in place, whether it's a Google sheet or something more, we talked a little bit about having that in place and having a way to efficiently create listings on all marketplaces and also including your own Shopify or Magento or whatever in that process. Um, and. Whether or not you include it. Um, for my perspective, product content is one of the most important things.
Okay. What what'd you mean by that? Um, it can mean anything. So whether it's, whether it's debate, whether it's the argument of blue or Royal blue or Navy blue or dark blue, or whether it's a title, how you structure a title is very, is very different on different marketplaces. So again, you can do this in Excel with a concatenate cells, but you would want to.
Really, what you should aim to do is to have your product in this PIM system that you build yourself or, or use an existing one, you should try and keep your data as granular as. So that you can reuse it in different ways because every marketplace has very different rules about how, how a listing should look auto in Germany.
For example, you don't create a title, you send them different attribute, values, like material, color size, um, item, weight brand, and they will, depending on the category, the product is listed and they will create a title with a different structure. Okay. And some marketplaces, they don't allow you to include the brand name in the title because they will have the brand listed directly above the title. So they don't want it to say Nike, Nike men's shoes.
Um, and so by having the product by getting the product content, right, you not only make sure that the marketplace algorithm will work for you, but you also ensure that you've very quickly add as many attribute values or items specifically. To your listings. And what that means is that when buyers start applying filters, your product stays in the ranking.
Uh, so, you know, for example, if, if you've got a buyer that's looking for a pair of waterproof trousers and you don't have the item specific filled in that these trousers are waterproof, you will fall out of that search. So there's a lot of, and this is a guess where doc, number two, about technology is going to be really helpful because technology is going to help me get this content. Right.
But just understanding that actually one of the, you've got to have the ability to create the right content for the marketplace at your own. Um, and that's. That can be made easy by technology, but fundamentally it still needs to be done. Right. Um, is there anything else that I need to think about? There's, there's a few, I can, I can, I can list them off very quickly and then we can go into some details on them. Um, I would also say that advertising is important as is customer service.
Scalability and, uh, and having access to expertise. So advertising, um, I, I, I get, but in effect, this is setting aside budget to advertise on that market space right up marketplace. Is that what you're meaning there? Yes and no. So to an extent, absolutely. So every, every marketplace or most marketplaces have some form of PPC, um, where you can. Pay for certain keywords and get ranked based on that. But there's also a lot of organic work that needs to happen there.
Um, there's organic, uh, sorry. There was a real benefit as well to what I just dropped. This is where it kind of overlapped a little bit with the content. Um, but specifically with marketplaces, every marketplace has, or many market places have their own. Advertising options. Now with Amazon, we have things like a plus content, which is generally restricted to brands. Um, but other channels will also allow you to do things like flashlights.
Where they will, as I said before, you know, they'll partner with you and those will be figuring out, okay, how are we going to sell more of your products on this marketplace? You know, you're selling products where, you know, your peak season is isn't Christmas. Like everyone else, or like Mo like a lot of sellers, but it's in February. So how about we do a, we do a flash sale in September to help you try and get a second peak.
Um, and you can drastically reduce your products or pricing then, uh, and they will help advertise it. And depending on size of the marketplace, it might be that, you know, they throw it in with national TV campaigns and stuff. So it can often be really good opportunities to take care of them or to take advantage.
Beyond sort of the standard and that's where it really helps to kind of communicate with the marketplace selling on, to figure out what advertising options exist on this channel specifically. Yeah. Yeah. And I can take advantage of those and okay. That makes a lot of sense. Um, access to expertise. What do you mean by that? Regardless of how good your.
Systems and processes are, I think it's still important to have at least one person within a company who understands the general concept of how marketplaces work. Um, the, the problem at the moment for a lot of businesses is now that marketplaces are booming. It's pretty much impossible to hire anyone who understands Amazon or marketplaces in general. Um, sorry. It's specifically Amazon Amazon account managers are usually getting snapped up by big brands or by agencies.
And for that, you know, I talk with a lot of retailers who have lost good employees and often the only employee and new home was on worked. Um, but the thing with marketplaces is if you know how Amazon works, that doesn't help you at all for selling on eBay because they completely different marketplaces. However, the expertise that you have from selling on one marketplace does let you understand in general how marketplaces work.
And there's a lot of nuances to selling on marketplaces that have to come into the equation. And it doesn't whether, whether you have that in-house or whether you have a service provider at your side that can kind of consult with you and not necessarily do the work, but at least just kind of bounce ideas around and say, okay, in general, we're going in this direction, how to market, how does it. How can we factor marketplaces into this idea?
It's just an important thing to have them on the side of your business as well. Very, very wise words, very wise words. And, and Jessie, I'm sorry, but I'm aware of time. And I, I feel like it's every week I talked to fabulous people and I just go, oh, I wish I had a little bit more time. Um, Uh, speaking of expertise and how people can get hold of, uh, experts. How do people connect with you? How do they, how do they reach out to you?
Um, the best way to get hold of me is generally either via LinkedIn or directly through our website. Um, so on, on LinkedIn, it's, uh, I hope that you'll put the spelling of that in the show notes, but put the whole link in the show notes to be fair, Jesse or, or eat chameleon.com. Um, so that's e-comm as in e-commerce and chameleon, uh, because we adapt so you don't have to, oh, I like it. I think we did that very clever play on words. How long did it take to come up with the name you can meet?
Uh, the better question is how many days did it take? Yeah. Uh, how many beers that say? Absolutely. Um, and actually I would have been able to help with that cause my German extends to being able to order beer. So I'd have been there with you. Listen, Jessie, thank you so much for sharing your valuable time and expertise.
And like Jesse said, we will put a note to him on LinkedIn, his LinkedIn, and to eat chameleon in the show notes, which you can download on the site, uh, on e-commerce podcast on net. I do reach out to Jesse, uh, especially if you're interested in this whole marketplace thing, checkout your chameleon. Um, it's fair to say. It's a, um, you're in a space which.
I, I may be talking slightly out of my, my area of expertise here, Jessie, but I've come across platforms or the platform, which Springs out to mind the channel advisor of this world. Um, for those people that have used channel advisor in the past, um, they should definitely definitely check out you guys. Right? I would hope so. Yeah. I mean, when you chameleon started out at an agency where we, where we would help channel, I mean, not only channel advisor, but we used to have.
Um, users of similar products to sell on marketplaces. And the chameleon was really born out of the fact that as I said, it doesn't matter how good the technical connection is. Cause he's a great product and ChannelAdvisor's been on the market for 20 years. Um, there's a lot of expertise in that product. However, the technology is only one part of it. You also have to have specifically the product content has to, you have to have an easy way of managing product content. You can't always rely on.
Having somebody who understands Amazon working inside your business. And part of the idea behind the chameleon is that you can put the expertise into the processes so that you can build these systems. And so that your team can actually use it, regardless of if it's just a joke, a guy that you have in your company that speaks German, he should be able to create listings for German marketplaces without having to understand how each one of them works. Yeah. Um, no, very good. Very good.
So do check out E chameleon.com if you are, uh, either shipping to, uh, various marketplaces or whether you are thinking about doing so check that service out. Um, Jesse, thank you so much for your time. Uh, it's been a real pleasure. Anytime. Thank you. So there you have it. What a great conversation. That was huge. Thanks to Jesse for joining me today. A brilliant, brilliant, brilliant conversation. Genuinely. Really appreciate it.
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