Online Selling: A Journey for SMBs
When it comes to online selling for Small and Medium-sized businesses, understanding the struggles and challenges is critical to making things easier.
With more and more SMBs being founded every year and with the added pressure of the post-pandemic crisis, being able to reach out to them and maintain commercial relationships is paramount to growing your business. Especially in the age of social media and the internet, where capturing someone’s attention for five seconds is the new battle.
Understanding the pain points, struggles, and benefits that SMB online sellers have from using different platforms is critical in understanding where opportunities are and how to better use the internet to the business advantage.
I have found some powerful insights into the way that SMB sellers behave online. Some of the biggest takeaways are:
Different platforms are used for different goals
When it comes to selling, SMB sellers prefer to use Amazon, as it is one point of contact to millions of possible buyers. However, its onboarding process is not necessarily the simplest. Especially when it comes to using Amazon-Handmade, many mention that it was not very intuitive.
In addition, other platforms that could be used for selling are not being used because they require a lot of information to create an account, and most sellers don’t like having to give their address, phone number, and bank account unless there is a sale.
For advertising purposes, most prefer to use Facebook Ads. It is convenient to use because many people are on Facebook and related social media, but they also have good integration with other platforms like Shopify and Instagram. Although not everyone thinks that Facebook ads are very intuitive to use, and they can be very insistent, prompting very often to use their advertising services.
When it comes to marketing, people liked to use various Social Media platforms, especially Facebook and Instagram. This is because they seem to be easy to use and can reach a lot of people. However, one problem that SMB sellers point out was the need to be very active in these platforms to grow their following and increase people’s engagement with their posts and stories.
Most SMB sellers are willing to experiment
With the great number of available platforms and the different ways to work on each of them, SMB online sellers are more than ready to try new platforms and test them for a few weeks and even months.
They usually like to spend enough time getting used to the platform and gauge how much of a benefit it is for them. What’s tricky about it is finding where their customers actually are because not all platforms are for all clients, products, or services.
Creating listings can be a bit complicated
Each platform used to sell will require different ways to create a listing. Some will provide templates; some won’t. Some will ask for a lot of specific information; some will auto-fill the post using AI; some will allow you to post for free, others will charge an upfront fee, and others will ask for a percentage on your sale.
Navigating each option is not always easy, especially when you want to have your offer on many different sites. What’s important is to try and narrow the ones that actually work for your product and audience and optimize the process to avoid spending too much time on them.
I think the most annoying part of having to list on all these different platforms is they all require different information.
- An online vintage clothing store owner
It is sometimes difficult to analyze the ROI of advertising
Although sellers might see the analytics and data of their ads on Facebook, Amazon, Instagram, and other platforms, they don’t necessarily have all the data to know how good the return on investment is.
Gathering the appropriate information, allowing enough time for ad campaigns to work, and really analyzing advertising ROI is crucial for SMB online sellers, especially when they have to inform management.
Inventory management across platforms is more complicated than expected
Keeping inventory up to date is paramount for sellers, but it can also become a nightmare when listings are distributed across multiple platforms. Additionally, setting appropriate notifications on the media to know when an item has been sold is essential; however, not all platforms offer this feature, which can sometimes slow down the process.
Customer support across channels
Selling is not about giving the product to the person and then proceeding to disappear. It actually entails taking care of pre-sale and post-sale customer support. Some platforms can encourage this by making it easy to communicate with the buyer by facilitating communication channels, providing notifications, and even templates, but they aren’t all made like that.
Additionally, some platforms are more friendly towards the buyers than to the customers. For example, eBay and Amazon have rigorous return policies and response-time standards that favor the buyers and not so much the sellers.
We’re doing site work, we are out in the field, we’re working with clients, and we’re maintaining projects for producing stuff. I don’t have a lot of time to sit and figure out all the nuances of how we are supposed to ship it. And some of the processes got overly complex.
- A small publisher
Social media and multi-channel advertisement are needed nowadays for any business that wants to survive in this online world we live in. Research shows that these are territories that are still hard to navigate. However, they can increase your reach and sales if done correctly, purposefully, and with the proper understanding of where your audience is and what you are trying to achieve. Not all platforms will benefit all businesses, but there is a platform that will work wonders for each company.
There are many platforms out there with wildly different audiences and different requirements for onboarding and managing. That is why it is hard to know where sellers must focus their attention, time, and money to get the most out of these platforms.
The key takeaway
The major finding from the research is that, sadly, most sellers aren’t ready for advertising because they find it confusing, so they choose to grow organically first and then make the investment once they know better how to generate the appropriate traffic. Therefore, platforms need to focus more on what the seller needs. They can do this by providing templates, easy-to-manage websites, intuitive user interface, timely notifications, in-depth analytics, etc., everything to reduce time spent on menial tasks. Thus, allowing more energy and money to go on customer support and excellent service and products.
To find out more about potential solutions, I recommend following this link.
