Marketplace sales can represent a huge and growing portion of a website's total sales.

According to FEVAD, marketplace sales represent 34% of the overall sales of sites that have them.

On Amazon, Marketplace sales in France represents 70% of overall sales , a figure higher than the site's average, which is around 60%. Some countries have been opened exclusively in “marketplace” mode, such as India, where 100% of Amazon sales are made by marketplace sellers.

On the seller side, the share that marketplaces represent in their activity can be very variable. Some companies sell exclusively on marketplaces and therefore achieve 100% of their turnover there (this is the case of Momox, for example, a German company with more than € 100M in turnover on marketplaces). For other businesses with a website,  marketplaces make up 10 to 30% of their business volume.

This is certainly not a rule, as it will depend on the investment and strategy of each seller.

If you're a brand new seller, we advise you not to sign up for MerchantSpring just yet.

Your first step should be to list a few products on one sales channel (like Amazon, Wallmart,  eBay) manually, and work on getting a few orders per month. Only then will you see why sellers need MerchantSpring.

Once you've listed products on more than one marketplace or country and are getting orders, MerchantSpring can help you simplify and scale your  business  effectively from powerful analytics tool. 

This obviously depends on the complexity of what you want to do.

If you start directly on marketplaces, there is no time limit . From the moment your account is opened, and you have passed the "Verification / KYC" step, you can start selling on most marketplaces like Amazon, Cdiscount, Fnac, Rakuten, eBay ... For some marketplaces, you will need an interface via an integrator: La Redoute, Rueducommerce, Spartoo ...

If you want to interface your website and manage via flows, the easiest way is to go through an integrator. It will take an integration time, aiming to adapt your flow to what is necessary to sell on the marketplaces. The deadlines for this stage range from 1 day to several weeks, sometimes several months depending on the complexity of what you want to do, the quality of your catalog, your ability to export the mandatory attributes required by marketplaces.

The time to set up the sale on marketplaces depends on several factors:

Depending on the marketplace chosen, the reactivity time can vary greatly. The complexity of your situation can be a source of time to anticipate.

If you have a website with a product feed to distribute on marketplaces, you must already know whether the item sheets are already created on the marketplaces, or whether they will have to be created.

To check if your products are already referenced, just look for the EAN code of your products on the marketplaces. If you find them, it means that the article file is already referenced. Otherwise, it will have to be created.

If your products are already listed, it's easier, and in a few days your feed can be configured to be sent to marketplaces. The sale of your products on marketplaces can then go very quickly.

The sales costs on marketplaces obviously vary according to the players who offer its sales functions.

Overall, most offer fixed fees that correspond to a monthly subscription and variable fees proportional to the number of products - the insertion fees - and the volume of sales.

Marketplaces subscription fees vary between $ 30 and $500 depending on the services included. It is therefore advisable to do your calculations correctly in order to optimize the selling costs .

Depending on the sector, marketplace commissions also vary significantly.