Our marketplace service offerings provide the strategic and tactical building blocks to deliver significant market advantage to our clients. Small and mid-size third party sellers account for half of Amazon's $400 billion in annual sales and all of these sellers are potential customers for this line. We have seen five key problem areas and has developed software and processes to increase sales and convert one time buyers to repeat customers. These five key areas are: customer service, cross channel selling, automated cross channel fulfillment, KPI monitoring and product improvements.
Typical marketplace sellers are not in the business of customer retention because they fail to connect and maintain connective tissue with their customers. They answer their messages once a day, only accept messages through the channel messaging system and only provide service on a transactional basis. Our offering will provide premium customer service through a variety of engagement channels including marketplace messaging, e-mail, live chat, phone, text message, Facebook, and Twitter. We will offer a one-hour response time during the hours of 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. EST at launch with plans to expand the hours as we grow. Our platform will integrate all of these messages into one place and merge customer requests into a single screen so that any customer service agent can instantly see the totality of relationship. This will not only greatly increase our ability to serve the customer but will also drastically reduce our labor per request.
There are a lot of eBay sellers, a lot of Amazon sellers, a lot of Jet sellers, etc. What we have found is that they aren't all the same people. Many businesses selling on eBay do not sell on Amazon and Jet and vise versa. Our platform brings all of a sellers listings in and re-distributes them to their sellers accounts on all the relevant channels. More importantly, sellers who are accustomed to managing listings on a single channel will see this as an impossible task. By partnering with us, we can deliver this to them for zero upfront cost. They will immediately realize increased sales velocity, generating additional profits to accommodate our revenue payment model.
Fulfillment is often a challenge among small sellers, as they are constantly packaging products and driving to the post office or UPS hub. Amazon introduced a very successful fulfillment network called Fulfillment by Amazon, or FBA, many years ago. If you sell on Amazon, it is simple, but what if you sell on eBay, Jet, Wish, Rakuten, etc.? Our system will sweep all orders into one place and send any orders that are in stock within Amazon's fulfillment network to be shipped from there the same day, often at a cheaper price than the seller would pay for shipping themselves. Whether they are on holiday, sick in bed or enjoying a day on the golf course their orders will be shipped on time and customers will automatically receive tracking information within the marketplaces required timeframe. We aren't just selling scalability, we are selling increased work life balance for the small to mid-size online seller.
Every marketplace seller knows that heart-wrenching feeling when you they see a negative feedback and react quickly. What happens when a customer files a case, or they see their shipping rating drop from 5.0 to 4.5? What about when an item is out of stock and the tracking number doesn't get submitted within the required time frame? Each marketplace, in each country, has a different set of performance metrics that dictate everything from the commission cost to search result ranking. Our team knows the requirements in and out, what needs to be addressed immediately and what does not. For instance, if a customer files a case the impact to you is different based on the customers message timing through the channel messaging service. In many cases, if the customer doesn't contact you and the case is filed too quickly, there is no negative impact and corrective action on the sellers part is less critical. Our team can monitor returns, cases and seller performance metrics daily to insure proper compliance to maintain or achieve the highest marketplace rating.
After seller performance, the most important presales aspect of marketplace selling is the product listing. Everyone knows to have a good title, good pictures, and a good description, however, market advantage is gained in exploiting the gaps in your competitions lack of technical knowledge of the online marketplace. Simple examples of this gap in knowledge are seen in the significant numbers of sellers who have no understanding that there are certain words that customers search for more than others, there are certain phrases that make customers click on listings more, there are descriptive elements that lead to higher conversion rates, there are ways to bundle products which lead to more profit, etc. Every seller can benefit from our data driven expertise in this arena and the additional sales and profit will quickly prove the success of their investment. While large businesses have teams of both internal and external people who understand some of these elements, even they struggle due to a lack of nimbleness and lack of budgetary restraint. Our methodology forces the creative technical practices needed to dominate the online market.
Each customer will be presented a pricing plan that is unique based on their sales and size. Since each service has the goal of increasing sales, everything will be based on percentage of sales. Our default pricing is as follows:
Customer Service: Greater of 5% of revenue or $0.50 per message (minimum $100/month)
Cross Channel Selling: 10% of sales
Automated Cross Channel Fulfillment: 10% of sales alone (or +2% if combined with cross channel selling)
KPI Monitoring: $100/month for Weekly Reporting, $300/month for Daily Reporting
Product Improvements: 10% of revenue on increased sales if signed up for CCS or ACCF, $50/product otherwise
Our proprietary Omicron platform will take in inventory, art, and content data is every form possible including flat files, XML, EDI and REST/SOAP APIs. We can work with any format that our supply chain partners require.
Our system will dissect the data and determine whether this is a new item for us or simply another distribution point and update according while filling in gaps of missing data by merging art and content data for multiple sources.
This aggregated master list of items is then pushed into the industry leading Channel Advisor platform for distribution to Marketplace channels throughout the globe.
Omicron will calculate breakeven point across every channel and locale and throttle pricing automatically according the required margins or, in some cases, the selling climate.
By extracting data from the platforms directly we will analyze click data across all platforms to determine which items are being seen but out pricing is off, which items are not being seen but the marketplace itself is selling them, and which items are not getting in front of customers. Our system will create actionable reports on what needs to be done: whether it be to send items to FBA, to bring items in house in bulk for a lower cost, to consider PPC ads to promote the listings, or something else.
At the time of intake our system will build item bundles based on lost cost complimentary value-add items that will give us higher search exposure on items that aren’t front and center. We will use “old style” UPCs that are inexpensive and create new products on the different marketplaces to achieve this.
Post-sale, our system will extract the orders from Channel Advisor and analyze the available fulfilment paths (in house, 3rd party logistics centers, dropshippers) and calculate the shipping cost from each and choose the best option to ship from. Typically, this is the lowest COGS and shipping but not always. Our system can factor in real time:
Shipping Cut Off Times (if a source can’t ship same day but another source is $0.07 more and can ship today that would be worth it)
Credit Line Consideration (higher and longer credit capacity is worth using if the cost isn’t significantly more)
Cash Flow (shipped owned inventory first)
Reliability Grade (inventory sources aren’t made equal, for an extra twenty cents it is worth sending the order to a supplier that always ships on time
Relationships (increase the preference weight of a supplier while you are negotiating better credit terms, etc)
Our system will process outbound shipping in any way required, whether that is sending electronic labels or processing a supplier tracking number.
Omicron knows when items are supposed to ship and when they are supposed to be delivered. It keeps track of issues to make customer service and the customer are aware ahead of time which decreases CSR calls and negative ratings.
Our system stores all of the order information in one place for quick scheduled and ad-hoc cross channel data analysis (if an item is selling well on Amazon and Walmart, why isn’t it selling on eBay).
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