Selling on e-commerce platforms is just like selling offline in multiple ways. One of the most important similarities is building trust. To gain the attention of the prospects and grow your business on the internet, you need to build trust and reliability in your audience. You need to establish the name of your business as one of the most reliable names to create a sustainable online business.
E-commerce is one of the fastest growing modes of businesses. It requires small capital investment and can reap huge returns in no time. Stats show that 2.3 trillion US dollars’ worth of goods were sold online in 2017. This number will increase exponentially to 4.48 trillion US dollars by 2021. (Source)
Establishing reliability is tough on the internet especially when you are not selling an original product. Most e-commerce sellers do not sell their own products. In fact, they collect products from various brands and sellers to sell it via their channel.
Risks on e-commerce platforms
Once you have established your business on an e-commerce platform, you need to take certain steps to protect its identity and reputation. If you don’t take the right measures at the right time, your business will fail in the long run.
Here are some of the most common risks that you will face on the e-commerce platform once you have created a great brand image for your business.
1. Content theft
The quality of content that you have on your e-commerce marketplace drives your overall value and brand name in a major way. The content that you use to describe your brand, as well as your products, help you in creating a new identity on the e-commerce platform. It also decides the number of times your products pop-up on the search results of the marketplace.
As the name suggests, content theft is basically a condition wherein the content of your product/seller information is at a major risk. Someone can easily scrape your content from the internet and replicate the content on their store using online web scraping tools.
2. Competitive pricing
Competitive pricing is one of the worst types of risks associated with a brand name on the internet. Except when you are selling an original product, someone always has the potential to see the same product at a lower price tag. This increases the competition for your brand and makes it difficult for you to sell the product at the same price. Under such scenarios, you must either reduce your profit margins while selling the product or find a supplier who can supply the products at a lower cost.
3. Fake product and seller reviews
This is often known as ‘Dirty Play’ on the e-commerce marketplace. Your competitors might try to harm your store’s reputation severely by writing fake negative reviews about your products and store. The negative reviews and rating can hurt your brand name in a disastrous fashion.
Some e-commerce marketplaces have come up with tags that suggest an ‘Authorised Purchase’ to ensure that people who have actually purchased your product can only post the review. However, most marketplaces allow random people to post reviews on the product/seller to increase the overall number of reviews on the store.
4. Lack of control
As the manufacturer and supplier of original products, you need to control the pricing at the base level to make sure that no one misuses it to destroy your brand. It is like having a minimum selling price for your product on the e-commerce platform. You don’t want to supply the product to a third-party seller in hopes of increasing sales and lose out on a considerable business opportunity and profit margin, right?
Without the right amount of control from your end, the third-party seller might reduce his/her profit margin to sell the product at a cheaper cost thereby harming your overall brand reputation. This will create a competitive environment for your product, making it hard for you to sell your own product on the e-commerce marketplace.
5. Stocking problems
Stocking is another issue with e-commerce shopping. You need to maintain a minimum amount of stock at the warehouse of the e-commerce seller to ensure a quick delivery from its end. Novice e-commerce sellers often anticipate the demand for their products wrongly. They often damage the brand reputation and their profit margins by overstocking or understocking the products at the e-commerce warehouse.
How to protect your brand?
Now that we know the most common risks associated with a brand image on the e-commerce platform, let us discover a few ways in which you can protect it.
1. Get a trademark
Your business rights are protected under the strict governmental jurisdiction of your country. If you leverage your rights in the right manner, you can easily establish a good amount of control on the sales of the product in the early stages. You can exercise your rights about selling the product easily if you get a trademark for your business in the e-commerce marketplace.
The trademark allows you to control the pricing of the product as well as minimise the scope of grey-market selling for your products by a significant amount.
2. Understand operations on the e-commerce platform
Understanding the fine print of the e-commerce platform governance will help you make sound decisions for brand identity protection. The rules and regulations for each e-commerce platform vary a little. If you are selling your product on multiple platforms, make sure that you understand the regulations for each one of them clearly.
Most e-commerce platforms have a dedicated seller portal that can help the sellers understand all the different norms for operation.
3. Organise distribution of your product
The best part about selling your product through e-commerce is that the platform takes care of the transportation and logistics at its end. However, you need to calculate and manage the supply chain from your end. When you organise the distribution of your product, make sure that you do it with the most reliable partners in the industry.
4. Choose authorized sellers
If you are planning on selling your products through third-party sellers, make sure that you control the price of the product completely. The authorised sellers will never want to harm their reputation. You might have to offer them the products at low prices, thereby cutting on your profit margins. However, this trade-off is worth it for the safety and control that you have on the pricing of your product.
5. Register your brand
You can register your brand on the e-commerce platform very easily if you are selling your own product. However, if you are a third-party seller, the process of registering is slightly difficult. The seller helpline portal of the particular e-commerce store can help you register your brand within minutes.
6. Use e-commerce tools and data
Several major e-commerce players have dedicated data analysis tools that help you control the price as well as assess the competition in the right way. You can leverage these tools to ensure that no one misuses your products on the marketplace. Someone might easily sell your product at a lower price tag, and you need to counter that with a great brand image.
You must understand that reliability trumps a better price for most people. Therefore, if you have created a reliable brand image on the e-commerce marketplace, you can manage to sell the product at a slightly higher price. People will still buy products from you rather than a shady seller that has no reviews, ratings or even a description.
7. Keep a transparent pricing model
If you are selling a product through third-party sellers, make sure that you have kept a transparent pricing model. You can assess the minimum price at which the product is sold the end-customers. After this, you can give the third-party sellers the freedom to set their own prices and leverage their brand identities to charge higher.
8. Distribute marketing resources evenly
You must distribute your marketing resources on the platform evenly to maintain a good and sustainable relationship. Spending money on SEO-friendly content to generate organic traffic should be a big part of your budget.
9. Set micro and macro goals for brand creation
The goal-setting process for your brand can help you prioritise on the creation of the brand image. In the initial stages of the selling experience, you will see people making a huge profit through reseller model. The goals will help you stop that urge and provide great value to the customers so that you can build a good reputation and drive profits from the high quantity of sales.
10. Be patient with brand establishment
Seasoned e-commerce sellers will tell you that the marketplace is getting tougher every day. You cannot see or predict the movements of your competition anymore. This makes it tougher for you to have a solid sales plan for your product. They will also tell you that patience is the key to making it big on the e-commerce platform.
Back your marketing efforts on the platform with a strong sales cycle and reliable contacts. Optimize your branding campaigns regularly to make sure that you can protect your brand identity for a longer period in the marketplace.
