Go Beyond Amazon: Small Businesses Today Must Take a Multi-Site Approach to E-Commerce

By Steven Rozenfeld

When brands start selling products online, there is often a single word they think of: Amazon.

And to those brands, I’d like to say another single word: Stop.

I don’t mean stop selling on Amazon—you’d be foolish to do that. What I mean is stop selling on a single e-commerce site. If you only have your product on one site, you’re doing e-commerce wrong.

You like the ocean, right? Let’s do an ocean metaphor. If you are only using one e-commerce site, you’re like an eel. Just one, long appendage swimming around (maybe electrocuting stuff if you’re into that). But, you don’t want to be an eel when it comes to e-commerce, you want to be an octopus with several appendages.

Let’s take a look at why you need to be doing this and how to do it. (Also, anyone else hungry for seafood?)

Why you need to use more than one site

At the risk of sounding obvious, the more places you sell your stuff, the more people see it and the more people buy it.

This is the same principle with brick and mortar stores. Sony doesn’t just have its electronics in one store. It ships its products to multiple stores because the people who shop at Walmart might not shop at Best Buy and the people who prefer to support little local stores don’t shop at either of those places. But, by making its products available at multiple stores (and multiple kinds of stores), Sony is ensuring the greatest number of potential customers see its products.

As a small brand that is just starting out, getting in front of as many eyeballs as possible is crucial. When you get as big as Apple, you can do the single store approach. Until then, you absolutely should be on multiple sites.

Where you should be selling

You need presence on the big sites and the up-and-comers. Here are my personal top six:

Amazon—Of course you need to be on the site that is synonymous with online retail. If you’re not on Amazon, you’re basically invisible. With $107 billion in net revenue in 2015, Amazon is a juggernaut in e-commerce. Sure, there are going to be dozens of brands competing for the same customers on there, but you can’t compete if you don’t show up.

eBay—A lot of people tend to forget that eBay isn’t just an auction site. You can open a store on eBay and sell new products too. eBay is much smaller than Amazon in terms of net revenue, but it still does strong sales and is an oft-forgotten e-commerce site that you can use to your advantage.

Newegg—Although it’s a lesser known e-commerce site, Newegg offers the same services (if not the same reach) as its larger counterparts like Amazon. It’s based in City of Industry, California, and in 2015 saw $2.6 billion in sales revenue.

Rakuten—Maybe not a name that rings many bells outside of Japan where it was founded, Rakuten has nevertheless been around since the late ‘90s and offers all kinds of internet services in addition to its e-commerce site. It’s a great way to tap into the Asian market.

Walmart—Many of you have just executed a double take at the mention of Walmart. What does the brick and mortar behemoth have to do with online sales? Well, quite a lot if the company gets its way. With online shopping being all the rage these days, Walmart has felt the pinch, having to close almost 270 stores in 2016. Walmart wants to make a statement that it is a part of the online sales marketplace, too.

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How you should sell

Now, the number one concern with trying to sell on so many e-commerce sites is that it takes up so much time to post products and optimize everything on multiple sites. And that’s why many brands selling online absolutely must be using the right software.

Known as marketplace optimization software, platforms like Sellbrite (just as an example, I’m not associated with this company) work much like software that allow you to post to multiple social media sites at once. You can set your prices and optimize your listings for all the e-commerce sites you use in one convenient location; you sign into one account, do all your tweaking in there and every site you’re on gets optimized at once.

From my experience working with dozens of brands across multiple e-commerce sites, I estimate you’re looking at as much as a 25 percent increase in sales when you opt to sell across multiple sites as opposed to a single site.

With so many great places to sell (and shop) online, why would you want to limit your brand to just one place? Use the right software and take the right approach to optimization and you’ll see your sales jump.