Since the advent of e-commerce, there has been a rapid increase in the number of vendors catering to every imaginable niche. Today, the competition is so fierce that you have to fight tooth-and-nail, figuratively speaking, for every customer. The situation is such that gaining a foothold in an existing e-commerce sector is nigh impossible unless you have an extraordinary product and marketing genii at hand.
And it is going to keep getting worse.
According to the National Retail Federation, online sales are projected to triple in 2017, with new retail e-stores cropping up left, right, and center. As a result, there is a growing need to be heard above and beyond the conventional marketing and publicity efforts. Vendors are tapping into newer and more innovative means of product marketing, so as to increase their reach.
The rapid influx of retail vendors and the need for every seller to stand out from the crowd creates a highly fertile field of opportunity for vendor marketplace owners.
How so?
Well, as the owner of a vendor marketplace, you have multiple vendor products and financial stability at your disposal, leaving you free to try out various sales strategies to increase profits.
You can always opt for time-tested strategies like bundling products, offering discounts and coupons, and setting up personalized pricing for frequent customers. In addition, you can also tap into the field of paid marketing, by setting up featured listings on your e-commerce marketplace.
The Advantages of Featured Listings
A featured product listing is when you promote a prime product at a popular listing spot on your vendor marketplace for a definite time period, either for free or for a fixed price. There are several advantages of doing this. By setting up featured listings, you can:
- Highlight Categories of Products on the Marketplace
Selective display of listings allows you to feature products by category on your e-commerce marketplace. This allows you to promote specific products as per your marketing timeline. For instance, say you have a category of Christmas-related products. You can easily highlight this category prior to and during the holiday season, driving traffic and sales to your vendors.
- Feature Products based on Quality
Setting up featured listings gives you an opportunity to set a threshold defining the quality standard of your marketplace and thus build a reputation. Your vendors become aware of the fact that products can be featured only after they measure up to the bar you have set and hence work harder to fulfill the requirements. In fact, this can become your USP, provided you begin with the idea from the outset.
- Set up Fixed Duration for Equal Product Exposure
Another advantage of featured listings is that you can set up numerous products for a fixed time limit on the marketplace. This gives you an opportunity to showcase a variety of products on the platform, giving due time and consideration to every category the better to highlight their advantages.
- Enable Site Monetization
Apart from the altruistic advantages of featured listings, they have a very significant monetary advantage as well, namely that of being chargeable. Website monetization by advertising featured listings is one of the foremost ways most blogging websites make money. If you feature a blog on your marketplace, this is definitely a solution you should consider.
Setting Up Featured Listings on a Vendor Marketplace
WisdmLabs offers a comprehensive service for setting up featured listings on your vendor marketplace. The way it works, we help you create dedicated slots of product listings, which can each be priced differently.
For instance, say you have three slots, depending on three locations in decreasing order of prominence on your website. Each slot has 10 spaces and is priced independently, as follows:
| Position | Position Price |
| 1 – 10 | $50 |
| 10 – 20 | $35 |
| 20 – 40 | $15 |
Now, these slots will be viewable and available for purchase for your vendors, on a first-come-first-served basis. Vendors can select their desired slot, choose the product they want to promote and finalize the purchase. As the slots are filled, the counter counts down automatically, displaying the number of open places left.
Some features of the service include:
- The Administrator can limit featured listings to a particular category of products or keep them open to all
- All slots can be set up for a limited duration, after which the process repeats again
- Every product is displayed as per the position selected at the backend
- As the duration of the featured listing comes to an end, a notification is sent to the Vendor, informing him that the listing will have to be renewed to continue in the said spot
- All positions can be reset after the listing duration is over
Endnote
Paid product listings are one of the best ways to increase your market reach and build a brand. Today’s audience has a multitude of options to choose from; in order to stand out from the rest, you need to ensure that people have a constant visual reminder of your marketplace and your products.
A word of caution though. Maintaining marketplace integrity is important as you monetize your website. As the bigger marketplaces get saturated day by day, you have the opportunity feature selective products in your marketplace, thereby increasing your market reach.
What is your take on using featured product listings? Pen your thoughts to let us know. 🙂
Want to set up featured listings for your marketplace? Talk to us today!
