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I'm in this space. There are just so many ways to reach potential customers nowadays each with their own audiences. Although marketplaces still rule, I’m beginn
by Axsuul 7y ago
I'm in this space. There are just so many ways to reach potential customers nowadays each with their own audiences. Although marketplaces still rule, I’m beginning to see the trend that savvy long-term businesses who want to protect their upside and own their customers are beginning to focus more of their efforts on their own properties (à la Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Squarespace, etc) while treating the marketplaces they sell on as marketing channels. It’s already becoming commonplace now for a retailer to be on a wholesale platform, a few marketplaces, have their own website, and also sell in a brick & mortar location.
Shameless plug: I work on Trunk [0] which helps businesses sync their inventory in real-time across everywhere they sell. The long-term vision is to make selling on multiple places just as easy as selling on one!
[0] https://www.trunkinventory.com https://www.trunkinventory.com
- noir_lord 7y agotrunk seems like a good pickaxe to be selling in a goldrush, nice idea.
- Axsuul 7y agoThanks a lot :)
- madaxe_again 7y agoHow do you deal with simultaneous purchases of the final unit(s) of stock across channels that don’t support real-time stock checks?
- Axsuul 7y agoHey thanks for the question! Thankfully that hasn't been an issue so far (although my largest customer only does 500 orders per day at peak). The current strategy is to just make inventory syncing as fast as possible (making use of webhooks or polling very often). There is something on the roadmap though that will introduce minimum stock levels such that even though you have 10 in stock within Trunk's centralized inventory, Trunk can add a buffer for high-volume products such that it will sync a stock level of 7 to sales channels instead of 10 in case this situation might occur.
- robryan 7y agoI deal with this by calculating the average sales per day and std deviation of each product and using that to pull products that might go out of stock in the next day. The hard case is a slow moving product with 1 unit, you want to list it because it might be weeks before it sells, but you can’t predict when/where it will sell.
- codeisawesome 7y agoThat’s a really cool idea! I’ve been wondering how to participate on Amazon ecosystem without having to engage in Adversarial Interoperability - and this is one neat way. Congrats on figuring it out!
- Axsuul 7y agoThanks so much! I wouldn't say I've figured it out just yet :)