Direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce goes from strength to strength
What if you could simultaneously publish and manage fashion products across multiple online fashion marketplaces? E-commerce automation lets you take full control of your distribution strategy and campaigns to improve brand awareness and maximize profitability

Direct-to-consumer, DTC e-commerce goes from strength to strength

Online marketplaces occupy a central place in today’s e-commerce landscape. These multi-vendor platforms offer third-party companies a lucrative revenue stream that can boost sales, expand business offerings and enhance the customer experience.

For direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands and retailers, online marketplaces connect fashion products with consumers at minimal cost, without running an e-commerce website.

Major consumer brands are also using DTC channels to reach new markets. The DTC business model offers numerous advantages, like collecting customer data, personalizing the consumer experience, testing new products, and expanding business.

Today, maintaining market share is less a question of choosing between DTC channels and retail outlets. Fashion companies must above all ensure that their DTC activities contribute to overall business growth at risk of losing out to competitors with a more balanced omnichannel brand strategy.

To take full control of multichannel marketing efforts, e-commerce automation delivers price and assortment intelligence to reliably and seamlessly manage processes across all platforms and campaigns.

How e-commerce automation drives business growth

Automation can play an important role in driving business growth. In fashion e-commerce, automation optimizes operational efficiency and improves the customer experience while generating value-added performance. Measurable savings and efficiencies delivered by automated processes can be realized as of implementation, while over the long term, fashion companies can use it to gain strategic and competitive advantages.

The power of intelligent automation can be harnessed to transform repetitive processes into value-added operations such as customer notification of order status, inventory level monitoring, low product level replenishment, performance reporting, internal alerts, ad space bidding and competitor price monitoring.  

Connect fashion products with consumers

An all-in-one e-commerce automation solution provides all the tools you need to attract consumer interest, market your product offering and personalize customer interactions.

When you launch campaigns at scale using automation technology, you can integrate seamlessly and securely with a virtually unlimited number of channels and marketplaces.

This reliability enables you to quickly take your direct-to-consumer (DTC) offering straight to the consumer. Online fashion marketplaces allow customers to follow real-time fashion trends at attractive prices, while fashion companies can focus on remaining relevant and keeping costs down to stay competitive.

Boost online sales and move inventory

Using the built-in analytics of an automated e-commerce platform, vendors can monitor product rankings and track competitor performance. Data-backed decision support makes it simple to carry out price adjustment and product catalog optimization, improving performance and increasing sales on marketplace channels.

E-commerce automation can also help brands lower inventory costs by reducing overstock.

An assessment of data for a set period of sales can help vendors better understand buying patterns and plan inventory, anticipate peaks in demand, and reduce losses.

Limited-time discounts and significant markdowns pushed via social media channels are just two ways vendors can eliminate excess inventory. Data analytics offer reliable consumer purchasing insight to optimize pricing and determine the ideal length of promotional offers.

Reliable data that are updated automatically across digital marketplaces provide the visibility for vendors to assess and adjust their stock levels—a key performance indicator impacting vendor ranking on the marketplaces.

Promote and increase brand awareness

Online fashion marketplaces invest considerable resources to acquire traffic from various sources.

Key to their strategy is the continual renewal of the marketplace’s overall product offering. When individual sellers provide items in high demand, they are rewarded with greater visibility.

Marketplaces feature popular products and ranges on the home page, push items via e-mail and cross-sell and up-sell through related product suggestions. This degree of exposure can significantly increase brand awareness.

Products and ranges become more familiar to consumers while also garnering attention on social media.

Fashion marketplaces’ tremendous potential to expand reach and attract a larger audience make it paramount to satisfy their product quality and publication guidelines.

By maximizing the impact of individual product listings, vendors can also maximize brand reach, sales and profitability.

E-commerce automation delivers capabilities to publish relevant, complete product listings and descriptions that conform to marketplace guidelines, as well as powerful analytics to track and improve performance by incrementally adjusting offerings.

Gain valuable insight from data analytics

E-commerce automation lets you harness the power of performance data to increase the efficiency of your marketing campaigns and boost online sales.

Purpose-built software solutions automate integration across all e-commerce platforms, enabling concurrent analysis of all data sources at the speed and scale of your fashion business. Data analytics can reveal insight to:

• improve product assortment and availability,
• update product attributes,
• optimize product description copy and visuals,
• continually improve product quality,
• adjust pricing and promotions,
• and take into account valuable customer feedback.

Larger data sets acquired over multiple seasons can furthermore enable vendors to respond to influxes in demand, new trends, and changing customer preferences.

Drive engagement to grow revenue

The key benefit of a marketplace presence is personalized interaction with customers.

By using e-commerce automation to drill down into deeper customer insights, fashion vendors can deliver a product offering more in line with consumer expectations, winning loyalty at the same time.

To maintain brand loyalty, e-commerce automation offers the data and insight to inform the customer experience and foster engagement.

By harnessing e-commerce automation data, vendors can simplify product searches and recommendations for customers, making it easier to locate items they like.

Data analytics can also deliver the decision support to tailor product offerings and promotions to customer preferences. These positive customer experiences reinforce brand loyalty, leading to repeat sales, increased business and boosted revenue.

What are the benefits of a multichannel sales strategy?

• Lower the cost of acquiring new customers by selling on established platforms.
• Generate online sales without building or running a proprietary website.
• Increase brand reach by leveraging digital marketplaces’ larger target audience.
• Improve product offerings by gaining insight from customer reviews.
• Raise your profile by benefiting from marketplaces’ PR budget and strategy.
• Gain a social media presence through marketplace posting and publishing campaigns.

Making the most of marketplace opportunities

Accessible and scalable, digital marketplaces allow fashion companies to quickly expand their product catalog, grow their business diversify revenue streams, and reduce supply chain risk.

For consumers, marketplaces offer an endless array of choices and personalized experiences with the ability to quickly comparison-shop.

To make the most of all that online marketplaces have to offer, e-commerce automation solutions place a full suite of digital capabilities at fashion vendors’ fingertips to boost sales and support long-term customer loyalty and branding strategies.