Owning an online portal and still struggling to get your business the required pace and manner! One may contend with an online presence but is your business that visible and how best is your online presence bringing the desired results.
Very often merchants fail to realize that being part of an online marketplace is quite different from a mere online presence in terms of increasing business visibility, developing leads, and largely, gaining customers.
An online business relies more on individual business promotion and direct network building through, direct means of promotion and audience reach and may not necessarily be a well-networked or network connected means of business conduct. A direct to shop or online business access is in other words a means of an additional channel that addresses the need for online access or online presence alone.
On the other hand, the presence on an online marketplace broadens up the scope of network-connected business activity in the sense of business visibility, as multiple vendor platforms or marketplaces feature vendors listed on that particular portal selling the same type of products or services.
The customer may not specifically browse for your shop but may browse for a product and concurrently your shop gets featured for selling the same type of product and this is so because you are part of the market place and your presence and visibility here is not confined to your shop alone but assigned to the market that you are part of.
To achieve this on an individual basis one needs to own, operate, promote and constantly maintain at expenses that could be unreasonable at the return on investment or the ROI level. The costs include setting up the online facility or the capital expenses, operating the facility or OPEX, and promotional expenses that have to be incurred on a recurring basis and manner.
As vendors and merchants have started to realize the drawbacks of a mere online existence, the demand for online marketplaces has begun to rise steadily with the proliferation of these marketplaces catering to different sectors, at different levels. What more, local businesses serving local customers are increasingly joining e market places at the hyper-local level and function.
And the market however big or small, popular or unpopular definitely has a network of its own, and whatever, building a network through a well-networked platform is always better than the concept of building it on your own.
Here you are part of a network and an increase in your business’s visibility is in multi-folds. The reason – huge customers and large customer bases being able to view, reach and access your business in view of your business being part of their network and more.
Being part of a broader online network helps your businesses to be visible to larger customers and customer bases and to sum it up e market places have broader customer networks that enable business visibility to be greater and effective in driving sales and revenue.