Online Channels to Market

In the third in a series of e-commerce articles, John Debrincat talks about the different online sites you need to consider to maximise your sales

We are increasingly seeing the development of portals—online comparison shopping and online marketplaces in the Australian and New Zealand markets. This is not a new trend but one that started some time ago in Europe and North America.

Portals like Amazon and eBay have become huge multi-billion dollar businesses that attract all types of merchants with nearly anything for sale. Curiously Australia lags behind Europe and the US in the development and availability of these types of marketplaces so the trend is relatively new here.

So what place do portals have in an e-commerce strategy? According to IBM’s latest e-business study, 85 percent of businesses that adopt an e-commerce strategy do so to take up new market trends.

So going out and creating a website to represent and sell your products is a starting point. To be successful you need to define the channels that will work for you and implement those channels. Some channels to market include:

• your own physical shop that sells your products;

• an online shop that you run to sell your products;

• online markets like Amazon or Ferrit (www.ferrit.co.nz);

• eBay and other auction sites like Grays Online (www.graysonline.com.au);

• comparison shopping engines like Shopferret (www.shopferret.com.au), Getprice (www.getprice.com.au) or shopping.com (http://au.shopping.com): or

• a combination of all of these