If you have been lucky enough to reach a certain level of success in your business, you may be looking to expand your activity beyond borders. More specifically, you may have already considered selling your products to the French market. But you may be also wondering if you’ll eventually need to learn French (good luck with that), if you’ll need to open a subsidiary in France? Or maybe even pay taxes over there? Relax, the answer is ‘no’. But here are a few hints for you about marketplaces selling in France.

How’s e-commerce doing in France?

France is Europe’s 3rd market in value with around 45 billion € in cumulated online revenue in 2012, just behind Germany (50 billion €) and UK estimated to be a 90 billion € market the same year.

Specialists estimate that France counts 110.000 to 130.000 online shops (source) but professionals and service providers consider that the amount of e-shops that are ‘active’ (meaning ‘the ones who actually make money online‘ basically) is much smaller.

France has a slowly decreasing average basket value of 85€ per transaction (-1% versus year before). But this particular KPI being decreasing year on year is not necessarily a wrong sign. As shoppers integrate more and more online purchase in their consumption patterns, they tend to shop more often for smaller amounts and for a wider range of articles. This is compatible with the increase of number of transactions that went up by 25% in 2012.

Should you sell your products in France ?

Well, depending on the type of products you’re specialized in, the answer can be somehow different. However, French shoppers are sensitive to a wide range of offers including fashion, travel, home furnitures, high-tech and electronics, so there’s a lot of product categories that can appeal to French people.

10 reasons why you should bet on marketplace selling :

1°) Marketplaces are among the fastest growing e-commerce websites worldwide. French versions of Amazon, eBay, Pixmania or Rakuten’s PriceMinister receive millions of visitors each month. So, it’s highly unlikely that you will not reach your target, even abroad.

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Lengow’s Feed-Management Tool allows e-merchants to quickly and easily index their products catalogue on any e-commerce channels in the world : shopbots, marketplaces… As a matter of fact, once our clients’ product feeds are sent through these channels, they just have to optimize the feed daily in order to keep it up to date and improve their products’ SEO.

Marketplaces and Shopbot are the most commonly used e-commerce channels but have a completely different business model.

Some useful reminders:

The source feed is the file which links the merchant’s catalogue to the channels’ database. The feed includes all the required information related to the product sold : name, description, size, color, price, delivery, shipping costs, etc.

Shopbots provide customers with a list of classified offers sorted by ascending prices.  If a visitor clicks on one of the offers on the list he will be redirected to the merchant’s website. With shopbots, the transaction is processed on the merchant’s website. E-retailers pay shopbots on a CPC-basis which means that every time someone clicks on its offer the merchant will pay the shopbot a small commission for bringing in a visitor on its website. The commission depends on the product category and can vary from 0.10 up to 0.50 cts per click.

Note: although some shopbot will take a percentage on the final amount of the sale there are very few shopbots that still work that way.

Marketplaces provide visitors with a list of offers from multiple sellers. As opposed to shopbots, marketplaces take care of the entire buying experience. Thus, visitors are never redirected to the merchant’s website. As a result, marketplaces make money based on their third-party sellers’ performance (CPA) by charging a percentage (usually from 8 to 15%) of the final amount of the sale.

As a matter of fact, marketplaces’ commission rates can be more expensive than shopbots’s CPC ; however marketplaces offers a no-sale no-fee basis where sales are guaranteed. Whereas with shopbots, you will pay a few cents/click to attract new visitors on your website that you will still have to convert into clients. This traffic acquisition technique is much more random and can be even more expensive in the long run if your conversion rate is too low. Remember: take a moment to think about it before!

e.g. If your conversion rate reaches 2% (that means for 100 visitors on your website only 2 of them will actually buy something) your customer acquisition cost (called CAC) will be 50 times your cost per click (CPC) because on average,  you need to acquire 50 visitors to sell once.

Carefully optimizing your product feed is highly recommended for any e-commerce channels you choose.

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When considering marketplace selling, there are a few things that you might want to think about in order to be sure you’re on the path to success and not making a strategic mistake. You got to know what are the caracteristics of the battlefield and Lengow is here to help you with this.

On your way to success, selling on marketplaces is a mandatory step to drive your business forward. Here are some pros and cons about selling through marketplaces.

Pros :

Audience is Massive : Marketplaces are among the fastest growing ecommerce websites in the world. Amazon, eBay, Pixmania or Rakuten’s PriceMinister receive tens of millions of visitors each month. And this is targeted audience that you can’t ignore.

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As you may already know, marketplaces are shopping websites where online buyers choose among thousands of third-party e-tailers in a secure and optimized interface for business. eBay and Amazon are the most famous marketplaces of them all.

Here are the 5 pillars of marketplaces that you should understand and remember at all time when selling through online marketplaces.

As part of its participation at the Retail Business Technology Expo show in London, Lengow is pleased to announce that all new clients will enjoy a special offer to discover our data feed management solution and its features.

Every new client will benefit from a special pricing to list their products on marketplaces:

One marketplace feed (with a limit of 10,000 products) within the marketplaces integrated in the Lengow solution for only £25 per month!

Thanks to this welcome offer, new clients will quickly and easily index their products catalogue on marketplaces and discover how Lengow can help them to optimise the management of their online marketing campaigns.

To take advantage of this offer, contact Lengow UK team by phone, +44 203 318 26 31, or by email at .

lengow.co.uk

Terms and conditions: this offer is not available to existing customers of Lengow.  This offer cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer. If the merchant wants more feeds, he automatically changes for the regular Lengow pricing rates.

 

 

 

Selling better and selling more is what every merchant is looking for. That’s why they are always searching for efficient distribution channels to increase their sales and means of reaching new audiences.

A marketplace is an important marketing tool on which sales can be easily boosted. In the United-Kingdom, the two biggest marketplaces are Amazon – 19 million unique visitors per month* – and eBay – 17 million unique visitors per month. Ebay, Amazon and Pixmania account for 27 % of total online retail sales and all marketplaces put together allow you to reach a massive slice of the total UK population. UK audiences are focused on 5 major marketplaces – Amazon, eBay, Pixmania, Play and HMV.  In 2011, UK shoppers made 84.6 million visits to online retail sites on Cyber Monday – which was the 3^rd of December this year – , with Amazon and eBay representing 28 % of all retail visits on that day**.

Marketplaces are therefore a key distribution channel massively used by internet users. They buy on marketplaces because of the extensive supplier base, the quality of product descriptions, security, products availability and promptness in delivery. When an online merchant integrates a marketplace, he has the guarantee:

• to boost his turnover
• to control the acquisition costs (pay per sale, not per click)
• to benefit from the quality of traffic and notoriety
• to take advantage of the reputation and indexing of these well-known marketplaces
• to diversify the distribution network and increase visibility.

More than 60 % of our clients have already integrated a marketplace and for most of them, marketplaces represent more than 40 % of their turnover. Hence, building a strong marketplaces strategy is very important as part of an e-tailer’s on-line marketing strategy. Change, adjust, adapt, add information as soon as you can in order to increase your visibility on each marketplace. It is necessary to optimise your data and to give internet users as much  information as possible about your products and delivery service. As a leading partner with marketplaces, Lengow supports you in the optimisation of your marketplaces shops. To be more visible on eBay for example, you can personalise your shops thanks to our eBay templates and you can optimise your data thanks to Lengow tools.

Boosting sales is essential but targeting new audiences is crucial as well. When you sell on marketplaces, one of the great business opportunities is to sell all over the world. Cross-border trade is a strong means of keeping the growth up and expanding the targeted audience. More and more European shoppers don’t hesitate to buy abroad. But to obtain consumers’ confidence, e-shops must be perfect and especially perfectly well translated, particularly on marketplaces. So drawing attention to translation is necessary but it is often tedious and costly work. Lengow helps you to sell abroad and offers automatic translation of your product catalogues in order to provide marketplaces with your products translated in the language you want.

Lengow offers more than 50 languages within its solution with an accurate translation that you could change as you want. Furthermore, with this features you can also centralise the management of your international e-shops and benefit from detailed statistics for each country.

With Lengow, think global!

 

*Source: http://www.alexa.com

**Source: http://www.bizreport.com

 

When you sell on marketplaces, one of the great business opportunities is to sell all over the world…

Your company is well established in your country and, therefore, you decide to sell in other ones such as Deutschland, France, Russia, and so on (if you deliver and ensure an after sales service in those countries, of course).

To sell all over the world, you must provide the marketplaces (which allow you to sell in the targeted countries) with translated product file cards in all languages you want.

It often curbs the commercial growth and remains tedious and costly. From now on, Lengow allows to automatically translate your product catalogues in order to provide marketplaces with your products translated in the language you want.

Lengow proposes more than 50 languages within its solution and allows a reliable translation which you could change as you want.

Thanks to this new feature, you will be able to develop your company and sell your products worldwide!

One of the problems often encountered by retailers selling products with variations on eBay (shoes, clothing, furniture, etc.) was the fact that they had to create an individual listing for each variant.

In order to centralize all variants within one single listing, eBay has recently introduced a function allowing merchants to indicate the variations of products (multi versions), for example different sizes for a pair of trainers.

How does the multi-version format work?

Multi-version listings allow you to list multiple variations of the same product with one fixed price (different sizes, colours, etc). In certain categories, it is possible to list multiple fixed prices within one single listing – therefore paying just one listing fee.

For example, you can create one listing combining all colours and sizes in your catalogue for a particular shoe and charge £29.95 for children sizes and £39.95 for adult sizes.

What are the categories affected by the multi-version format?

- Clothes, shoes and accessories
- Baby
- Sporting goods
- Health & Beauty
- Jewellery & Watches
- Pottery, Porcelain & Glass
- Crafts
- Coins
- Stamps

Lengow integrates these multi-version listings

Lengow has just integrated eBay’s multi-version listing function within its solution, allowing retailers to centralize the management of products and their variations in just one listing!

As a reminder, Lengow offers an exclusive eBay module for just £39 per month!

 

The British marketplace Play.com is now available within the Lengow interface!

Specialized in cultural products such as video games, DVDs and CDs, as well as all other high-tech products, Play.com will allow you to sell your merchandise in all main European countries.

Lengow now allows you to easily index and sell all your products on this online marketplace. You can also import your Play.com orders in the Lengow Dashboard or via your e-commerce store thanks to our XML API!

 

For several months, Lengow has allowed you to centralize all your marketplace orders within one single interface – your Marketplace Dashboard.

From this centralized location, you can view your orders, accept or refuse them and also confirm shipping.

In addition to this, it is now possible to also view your PayPal transactions directly within this interface.

You now have the ability to view your eBay orders and also all of your PayPal transactions together, providing you not only with full details of your total balance and each transaction – but also enabling you to take action on these transactions (refunds, cancellations, etc).

Lengow offers a unique interface for online retailers, enabling them to manage all orders completed on different distribution channels, and on marketplaces in particular!