In Adam Grant’s book – “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World“, he talks about research which provides information that contrary to popular belief, most successful entrepreneurs actually hate risk and do everything in their power to constantly reduce the risk in their businesses.
This was the case with Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay. Pierre only left his day job as a programmer when eBay was generating more income than his nine-to-five job.
Even when Max and I were generating over $100k /month on eBay, we strongly focused on reducing the risk of our business, relying on one platform, and were constantly looking to discover eBay alternatives and expand our business to more platforms with the goal of reducing the risk.
According to Marc Lore, who runs the eCommerce marketplace for the largest company in the world, Walmart (and has previously founded Jet.com), eCommerce is going to be dominated by multiple marketplaces.
In China – 90% of eCommerce is already generated through marketplaces.
Here at CrazyLister, we constantly receive feature requests from users to expand the solution to more marketplaces.
All of the above comes to say, if you have a sustainable eBay business, that’s awesome! You manage to generate sales on one of the world’s most established, mature and competitive markets.
But it also means that it is very likely that there is a very high demand for your products at your prices (or even higher) on many more marketplaces.
By the way, taking advantage of the demand to your products elsewhere is just one motivation to expand beyond eBay. I explained in one of my previous posts that relying on eBay alone as you only source of income is too big of a risk for any seller, this is one eBay selling advice I wish I got when I just started.
While we work on the technological solution to auto-magically expand your products to be available on more marketplaces, you’d better listen to what the CEO’s and leaders of these platforms share; their stats and insights, for the near future.
5 eBay Alternative Marketplaces Every Seller Should Expand to Right Now
1) Alibaba: Lee McCabe, VP at Alibaba
For western online businesses, eBay and Amazon are the go-to platforms. We assume that selling on these two marketplaces covers most of the demand sources for our products.
But then came China and Alibaba and in one day (November 11th 2017) they generated a revenue equal to what eBay generates in 4 months – $25 billion.
By 2020, Chinese eCommerce is expected to grow to 891 million shoppers, to give you a perspective of just how big is this number, the US market is expected to grow to 270 million shoppers.
This means that the Chinese eCommerce market is growing to be 3.3x bigger than the US within the next 3 years.
This talk by Lee McCabe of Alibaba has changed the way I think of the future of eCommerce.
If you don’t have plans to sell in China soon, you’d better start planning…
2) OfferUp: Nick Huzar, CEO of OfferUp
OfferUp is the leading mobile marketplace in the US.
With $14 billion in transactions last year, this is a platform you should seriously consider to expand your business to.
In their own words – “Nick and Arean founded OfferUp, a marketplace on a mission to become the simplest, most trustworthy place for people to buy and sell locally.”
In his talk, Nick showcases examples of both occasional and professional businesses generating revenues on OfferUp.
Whether you’re a part time seller getting rid of stuff around the house, or a professional business, you should check out OfferUp.
3) Amazon: Peter Faricy, VP at Amazon
55% of customers in the US start their shopping journey on Amazon, compared to 26% on who uses search engines.
300 consumers shop on Amazon.
100k businesses generated more than $100k in sales on Amazon in 2016.
50% of items sold on Amazon are from 3rd party sellers; small and medium businesses who generate revenue on the marketplace.
With the above stats, if you can, sell on Amazon. If you can’t … find a way!
4) Wish: Peter Szulczewski, CEO of Wish
Wish.com is probably the biggest marketplace you’ve never heard of.
In their own words: ” Wish is the leading mobile marketplace in the US and Europe. We sell
more than 1 million products every day”
Wish has 200 million registered shoppers, growing 250,000 new shoppers / day.
But what’s more interesting is that Wish developed the next generation of eCommerce; shoppers don’t need to search the platform, rather Wish uses predictive analytics technology to surface the most relevant items for the shopper based on his social behavior, usage history, demographics and more.
Only 9% of transactions on Wish start with a search query, the rest is Wish basically telling the shoppers what they need – think about it…
5) Walmart: Marc Lore, CEO of Walmart eCommerce
According to Marc, who previously founded Jet.com (Sold to Walmart) , there are 100’s of millions of SKU’s on marketplaces, but he sees the most potential in the long tail categories: jewelry, fashion accessories, shoes and clothing etc.
These are the categories where the marketplaces and sellers can create much differentiation, as opposed to commodity categories such as electronics, toys, sporting goods etc.
The long tail categories are also the ones who generate the biggest margins for sellers (30-40%).
Walmart eCommerce marketplace is now aggressively pushing towards becoming the go-to marketplace for these long tail categories.
Conclusion
I highly recommend that you carefully listen to each of the above talks. These are the leaders of the largest eCommerce platforms on the planet. What their teams will do in the near future is highly likely to have direct effect on your business.
These folks are working on generating high quality demand for products, your task as an online retailer is to provide great products, at great prices, with great logistics and customer support.
Our task at CrazyLister is to seamlessly connect your products with the right marketplaces, liberating you from the need to master the different platforms.
Coming soon…
