You can either fall, or grow during the crisis. The pandemic made lots of brands vanish from the online retail environment, but the number of those who joined digital entrepreneurs had grown also. We decided to figure out what were their keys to success to survive and expand during COVID-19. In this post, we share the insights from marketplace owners who took the measures and got an amazing result in growing sales and a vendor base in 2020-2021.
400 orders submitted after loan integration app for Numart
Numart is an online marketplace from Nigeria. It offers home appliances, fashion items, electronics, products for children, and other everyday goods. The company IT department developed a loan application portal for customers to provide them with a pay-later opportunity. When Olayinka, the Digital Marketing & IT Personnel manager, came to us he clearly set up the goal: to integrate the loan platform with the shopping cart and redirect to the platform where the loan application process takes place. His concern was about a challenging process to redirect customers from one platform to another. So, our task was to make integration and redirecting smooth and easy. We rolled up our sleeves and succeeded. The manager’s review left on Clutch proves that this work was beneficial.
Now the integration is working fine as our customers have been placing their order and filling the loan application successfully without any issue.
Like I mentioned above, they gave us 100 days to test and revert if there are any challenges during the transaction. But from the first day that the project was deployed we’ve never had any challenge as the platform works smoothly. Now, we have recorded almost 400 orders with loan application details fully submitted.
They did an excellent job and this has made us choose and trust them with any other task that may be required to be done on our platform.
Olayinka Adebiyl, Digital Marketing & IT Personnel, in the interview with Clutch
150 % increase in sales after connecting a payment processor to Faly Music
Faly Music is a marketplace from Mexico selling branded music instruments. The founders were electronic engineers who started their business back in 1981. It was a service center to repair TV, video players, and audio devices. In 1989, they opened a professional audio and musical instruments business. They started the online sales in 2010. The company reps addressed us first in 2016 to seek for our Cloud Hosting service. Since then, we fruitfully cooperate with the Faly Music team providing hosting and customizations on request. According to Yamir, the CEO of Faly Music, their biggest challenge “was to find a good and secure payment processor with enough knowledge to avoid fraudulent transactions”. After years of searching, they selected 2 payment processors and hired two development companies to integrate both.
The only integration that 100% worked and reached our expectations of security was Simtech Development’s one. This development was one of the best decisions that we made, the sales increased by 150% in one month alone! In the next 3 months, we sold almost 80% of what we sold for the last year!
Yamir Palma, CEO of Faly Music, in the interview for Simtech Development
That was a high estimate of our services. This month, we came back to the company reps to get to know more about their strategies to succeed during the pandemic. Here is the answer we got:
At the Pandemic beginning, we:
– Started strategic alliances with the principal suppliers sharing more information between us. We worked on improving the delivery time, shipping directly from some suppliers warehouses.
– Concentrate all customer communication channels in a new communication, and the number of customers asking questions has grown 3 times than before. It helps to increase the sales.
– Increased our catalog from 5,000 to 18,000 products.
– Opened a new department called “Dealer sales”. Now we sell products to other musical stores and their websites.
Manager at Faly Music
Increased mobile visits to Kayamo after the website optimization
Kayamo is a marketplace of custom jewelry from Germany. Its founders are Günter Windler and his wife. They run their online business together to help crafters and designers to easily reach their audience. The marketplace has grown since its inception in 2016 and is still gaining popularity. The platform is high-performing from the point of searchability. We assisted the founders in improving SEO for the better website ranking.
After the development our website loads faster and customers can find us better. We have more people who come via mobile. And our ranking is getting better.
Günter Windler, Head of Kayamo in his interview with Clutch
Learn more about the other ways to improve mobile traffic>>>
In addition to SEO, we provided technology help. We moved the platform to our Cloud Hosting, improved the look-n-feel of the marketplace, and did some design optimizations.
We are currently not worried about the 1000 sales people – the system can do that. Our platform is not a self-made brand, but has been used by dealers worldwide for many years. The largest marketplace that runs with CS-Cart currently has 500,000 sellers! We therefore assume that we can manage 1000 shops well. Today we did another test to check the stability. We are currently able to cope with 1500 hits per hour and 40 simultaneous hits. However, we all experienced last week that even Amazon’s server can go to its knees on PrimeDay. So I’m cautious about statements like “always available” … after all, we use Amazon’s servers … but I don’t think there is anything more stable at the moment.
Günter Windler, Head of Kayamo in his interview with IT-Recht Kanzlei
Double increase of vendors at Urbankissed
Urbankissed is a slow & ethical fashion marketplace from Switzerland. It was founded by Sophie Brunner in 2017 as an online destination to buy and sell unique, sustainable but affordable labels. This platform has quickly become a reference in the online eco community thanks to the zeal of its founder. The platform checks sellers for sustainability index, offers planting a tree for visitors, delights with its beautiful design and abundance of visually appealing images. We are proud to be of assistance for Sophie when it comes to technical issues.
So first of all, I really just feel safe as I know I can always lean back on Simtech and my own relationship manager here at Simtech when I have issues with my website or server. For someone like me who has no clue about coding nor hosting, this is brilliant. Moreover, this allows me to really focus on my main business.
Sophie, Owner of Urbankissed in the interview for Simtech Development
We connected +15 add-ons for Urbankissed to help the founder to implement her concept into life. And that worked! For the last year, the number of vendors doubled, from 50 to 100 brands.
Yep, we do have so many new, affordable & great sustainable brands joining Urbankissed. Reaching a highly curated list of 100 sustainable and ethical brands very soon
Sophie
Closing words
Up and downs happen. But with the right technological partner multiplied with your business acumen will help you to face challenges and overcome them.