As the need for convenience becomes more prominent for consumers, it makes sense that over 75% of people are shopping online at least once a month. For Gen Z (1996-2010) the percentage is even higher, with 85 percent of consumers making regular purchases through their phone, with fashion & beauty being the #1 purchase category.

The reason for the rise in online purchases is a result of many factors, such as:

• The increased use of smartphones and mobile shopping,
• Social media and social commerce,
• Transformative technology,
• You can opt for next-day delivery,
• You have access to more product information
• You may have a more personalised shopping experience.
• The way shopping behaviours have changed from generation to generation — Baby Boomers to Millennials to Gen Z.

• Take the initiative: A successful marketplace strategy requires sellers to be proactive at every stage. By selling on marketplaces, companies can tap into a larger customer base and benefit from the platform’s more significant marketing efforts and brand reputation.

• Go live on multiple marketplaces: MPs drive a huge traffic volume as they help you reach new audiences and bring in customers that may not be normally shopping your brand and they can surface your product there. Adding your product onto a marketplace will likely do is introduce a whole load of customers that maybe aren’t you core customers or bring customers that maybe have forgotten about your brand back to your brand and suddenly they have become one of your core customers again .A multi-marketplace strategy allows for wider exposure and can be leveraged to increase geographic reach.

• Align with marketplaces that invest in the seller experience: Not all marketplaces operate the same way. When choosing a marketplace partner, sellers should carefully evaluate what it brings to the table and whether their products are a good fit for the marketplace’s audience. In addition to campaigns and creatives, the seller should look for how the marketplace treats the seller’s brand? For example, do they offer highly customizable brand pages, or are all brands presented in a uniform way? Is there opportunity to differentiate from competitors on more than price and how seller-friendly is the marketplace when it comes to managing the brand’s store.

• Take advantage of a marketplace integration platform: While it makes sense to sell on multiple marketplaces, integrating to each sales channel is a very time-consuming process which requires a very high IT cost.  However, integration platform like Hemi Connect make it easier to streamline multi-channel management by automating the connections between a seller’s system and those of multiple marketplaces. Seller integrators can also provide help with account management and inventory management, thus significantly reducing the seller’s time to market and tech resource needed.

Conclusion: It is important for sellers to take an omnichannel approach by evaluating different ways to go direct to the consumer in order to maximise the value of their D2C investment. Arcade acts as a merchant of record in order to facilitate your brand’s cross-border trade strategy in the UK and beyond, enabling you to sell successfully across both global and local marketplace channels.

Ready to accelerate your cross-border trade? Get in touch with us today. At Arcade, we can:

• Facilitate your brand’s cross-border trade strategy in Europe and beyond
• Leverage our relationship with European marketplaces to secure you the best commercial terms
• Use our customer service network to respond to queries in the local language and time zone, taking the stress out of translation
• Design appropriate, localised product listings for your business
• Run local marketing campaigns during peak seasons and shopping events throughout the year so that you can be sure your products are reaching customers at the right time
• Handle local fulfilment and local returns of your products, so we can do the majority of the heavy lifting for you in terms of logistics
• Take care of compliance for you, using our existing partnerships and knowledge to ensure that you avoid any unnecessary problems with taxes, tariffs or documentation

If you’d like to find out more, feel free to get in touch at: https://www.arcade.global/contact-us/