Marketplace Order Management: What Is It and How Can It Help Grow Your eCommerce Business?

Key takeaways

• Marketplaces are essential sales channels, and it takes solid order management to scale.
• When you centralize all marketplace orders in one backend, you keep control and cut admin.
• Automation tools make it easy to sync orders, returns and stock across multiple marketplaces and channels.
• Up to date stock and shipping updates help you avoid overselling and keep product info accurate.
• With the basics running smoothly, it’s easier to scale up and expand to new marketplaces.

Automated marketplace order management is the future of eCommerce

Did you know that marketplace sales are expected to reach $5 trillion by 2027? That makes marketplaces a key component of any online business strategy.

For consumers, marketplaces offer a fast, seamless shopping experience. For online merchants like you, marketplaces can be a goldmine, as long as you have a solid multichannel strategy. Above all, that means using a marketplace integrator to automate your marketplace order management, so you can scale your business without the hassle of maintaining multiple backends and admin systems.

Why automate marketplace order management?

When you sell on multiple marketplaces, it’s easy to lose track of your marketplace order management. Your inventory management can turn messy, and then you risk running into common challenges like overselling or delayed stock updates.

It’s time-consuming and inefficient to maintain a separate order management system for each marketplace and channel you sell through. To grow your business more effectively, it helps to centralize all incoming orders into one multichannel eCommerce platform, like Channable.

As we’ll explain further below, tools like Channable seamlessly connect all the incoming order and inventory data from all your different sales channels. That keeps all your sales and inventory activities automatically in sync, so you don’t have to input the same data in multiple systems, or check different backends to get the latest information.

How does marketplace order management automation work?

To get the most out of selling on multiple marketplaces, it helps to have an integrated solution that handles your orders and saves you from having to do more manual work.

Automated marketplace order management tools send the orders from all your marketplaces directly to your online shop, so you can handle everything from one place.

These tools work differently depending on which eCommerce platform and marketplaces you use. However, any effective marketplace order management system should include these core features:

• They send all data on orders and returns from the marketplace to your online shop, and send status feedback (such as shipping information or track & trace codes) back to the marketplace.
• They automatically sync inventory data between all your channels, so you avoid selling out-of-stock items without having to manually update inventory data for each marketplace separately. This also makes it easier to conduct PPC optimization (for example, by promoting high-margin items that are heavily stocked at the moment).

How Channable helps you optimize your marketplace order management

Channable’s marketplace integrator retrieves and fully synchronizes marketplace orders online. In addition, we offer lots of helpful features that give you more seamless control of your multi-marketplace sales and inventory activities.

We offer API connections to leading marketplaces worldwide. These include major integrations like our Amazon Marketplace integration, Walmart Marketplace integration, Kaufland and eBay integration, as well as regional and niche marketplaces.

These integrations keep your shop backend in sync with the marketplace, so order management takes place automatically, without having to enter data by hand.

Channable also simplifies product feed management to optimize your listings on marketplaces. Each marketplace requires different product data formats and attributes. Channable automatically converts and optimizes your shop’s product data, so you meet each marketplace's requirements without the manual overhead.

We also offer rule-based optimization, so you can set if/then rules to better control which products you list when and where. For example, you can set rules for Amazon, so that products only show when a minimum margin or stock level criteria is met. Learn more about how to sell on Amazon.

Advanced features like our automatic Amazon Repricer let your set minimum and maximum price limits and automatically win the buy box.

• Read this blog for more information on ‘eCommerce marketplace management: Manual vs Automation ROI.’

3 benefits of automated marketplace order management

To sum up, here are 3 key advantages to using marketplace order management technology like Channable:

1. Save time while handling more orders

You can handle more marketplaces and orders in less time and shift your efforts to a smarter marketplace order management. You speed up the whole order process from the moment the customer clicks the ‘buy’ button to the products leaving your warehouse.

2. Easily expand your multichannel strategy

By centralizing your marketplace order management in one backend, you free up resources to discover new sales channels and integrate them into your order handling automation.

3. Fewer marketplace order errors = more happy customers plus avoid penalties for sellers

You avoid advertising or selling out-of-stock items, and minimize the risk of human errors. Your marketplace orders and shop information stay in sync, so your customers enjoy accurate product listings and a trustworthy shopping experience.

What do all these benefits have in common? They put your business on the road to more sales and growth in the eCommerce marketplace world.

Wrapping up

If marketplaces are part of your sales mix, having the right setup behind you makes it easier to scale and succeed. Channable supports over 12,000 leading eCommerce retailers worldwide with integrations that keep channels connected and workflows simpler.

Want to see what’s possible for your setup? Explore Channable’s our marketplace integrations now.