I have a unique design premium product that has been patented and have been suspended from selling on Amazon. Are there any alternate marketplaces with customers similar to Amazon where I could sell my product?
“Electronic commerce, commonly written as E-Commerce, is the trading in products or services using computer networks, such as the Internet. Electronic commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web for at least one part of the transaction’s life cycle, although it may also use other technologies such as E-Mail.
E-Commerce businesses may employ some or all the following:
1. Online shopping websites for retail sales direct to consumers,
2. Providing or participating in online marketplaces, which process third-party business-to-consumer or consumer-to-consumer sales,
3. Business-to-business buying and selling,
4. Gathering and using demographic data through Web contacts and social media,
5. Business-to-business electronic data interchange,
6. Marketing to prospective and established customers by E-Mail or fax (for example, with newsletters),
7. Engaging in pretail for launching new products and services.
Pretail (also referred to as pre-retail, or pre-commerce) is a sub-category of E-Commerce and online retail for introducing new products, services, and brands to market by pre-launching online, sometimes as reservations in limited quantity before release, realization, or commercial availability. Pretail includes pre-sale commerce, pre-order retailers, incubation marketplaces, and crowdfunding communities.” (Wikipedia 2015)
Selling products on e-commerce platform is common practice these days and there are many platforms globally that sell and buy products. To understand the selling process, we must investigate 5-C-model (Zwass 2014) of e-commerce. It defines E-Commerce by five activity domains whose denominations start with the letter “C”:
1. Commerce:
1. In the electronic marketplaces there is a matching of customers and suppliers, an establishing of the transaction terms, and the facilitation of exchange transactions.
2. With the broad move to the Web-enabled enterprise systems with relatively uniform capabilities as compared to the legacy systems, a universal supply-chain linkage has been created.
2. Collaboration:
1. The Web is a vast nexus, or network, of relationships among firms and individuals.
2. More or fewer formal collaborations are created or emerge on the Web to bring together individuals engaged in knowledge work in a manner that limits the constraints of space, time, national boundaries, and organizational affiliation.
3. Communication:
1. As an interactive medium, the Web has given rise to a multiplicity of media products.
2. This universal medium has become a forum for self-expression (as in blogs) and self-presentation (as, for an example, in Polyvore.
3. The rapidly growing M-Commerce enables connectivity in context, with location-sensitive products and advertising.
4. In the communications domain, the Web also serves as a distribution channel for digital products.
4. Connection:
1. Common software development platforms, many of them in the open-source domain, enable a wide spectrum of firms to avail themselves of the benefits of the already developed software, which is, moreover, compatible with that of their trading and collaborating partners.
2. The Internet, as a network of networks that is easy to join and out of which it is relatively easy to carve out virtual private networks, is the universal telecommunications network, now widely expanding in the mobile domain.
5. Computation:
1. Internet infrastructure enables large-scale sharing of computational and storage resources, thus leading to the implementation of the decades-old idea of utility computing.
Alternatives to Amazon are as follows:
1. Google Shopping: Google Shopping is a subset of the Google Search Network that is reserved exclusively for products. Every month, roughly 100 million US consumers use it. Although Amazon is more popular among consumers for making an initial product search, the average Google Shopping conversion window is almost a full week shorter than the average Amazon conversion window. There are two ways to get your products in front of the millions of consumers who turn to Google Shopping every day: by adding structured data mark-up to your ecommerce website or by uploading a product data feed to Google Merchant Centre (GMC).
2. Walmart Marketplace: Walmart, the world’s largest retailer and the largest employer in the US, is most commonly known for its immense brick-and-mortar presence—bolstered by more than 5,000 physical store locations in the US alone. Recently, though, they have been seriously stepping up their digital game. 100 million organic visitors land on Walmart’s website every month. Plus, thanks to a 43% increase in online sales in 2018, Walmart commands just under 5% of the American ecommerce market—making it the third-largest online retailer in the US behind Amazon and eBay.
3. Bonanza: Bonanza, boasting over 300,000 organic monthly visitors, is built around the idea that marketplaces should help sellers build relationships with loyal customers—rather than render sellers virtually anonymous while simply helping customers find the lowest prices possible. With a customer marketing tool that allows you to store and filter data regarding past buyers—thus enabling you to segment them into groups and remarket to them—and a seller stats dashboard that gives you a high-level perspective of product performance, Bonanza empowers you with the insights and resources you need to succeed over time.
4. Newegg (electronics): Founded in 2000 as a first-party seller website and re-launched in 2010 as a third-party marketplace, Newegg is a one-stop shop for consumer electronics and computer hardware. It connects you to over 10 million organic monthly visitors across dozens of countries, and although it now sells stuff like fitness gear and car seats, Newegg remains a go-to marketplace for tech-related products. If that is your speciality, Newegg is an ideal alternative to Amazon. One of their unique value propositions is that they facilitate both B2C and B2B. With Newegg Business, you can sell products in bulk to tens of thousands of businesses the world over. Plus, in step with Amazon, they offer an order fulfilment service called Shipped by Newegg (SBN). If you lack the time, resources, or physical space to ship orders to customers yourself, you can send products to a Newegg fulfilment centre and let their team take care of the picking, packing, and shipping processes for you.
5. Zibbet (art): If you create original pieces art (or sell online on behalf of artists), Zibbet—with an admittedly small organic monthly audience of about 13,000—is a great option. The awesome thing about Zibbet is that it doubles as both a third-party marketplace and a centralized platform that enables you to sell on your own website as well as Etsy. Every time you make a sale on Zibbet Marketplace, your inventory is automatically updated in real time across your website and Etsy. Plus, you can manage and fulfil orders from all channels within the centralized Zibbet platform.
6. Reverb (music equipment): You can list as many products as you want for Reverb’s 3 million organic monthly visitors to peruse—you will not be charged for any of those listings. In fact, the only fees Reverb sellers ever need to cough up are the 3.5% sales commission fee and the 2.7% transaction fee. Plus, that commission fee caps at $350. So, even if you sell something for over $10,000, you will only owe $350 in commission. Nonetheless, Reverb is committed to helping sellers get what they are owed. Although Reverb does not run on an auction system—whenever you list a product for sale, you ask for a set price—prospective buyers have the option to name their own price. You, of course, can make as many counter offers as you would like.
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