With the rapidly increasing consumer appetite for online shopping, the number of sellers on marketplace platforms (Lazada, Shopee, and Tokopedia) has multiplied over the years.
Everyone’s selling online and eating into your slice of the E-Commerce pie.
In this article, we will share with you:
- The limitations of the existing in-marketplace traffic solution (sponsored search and in-marketplace ads). Read more about this here.
- 4 Ways the Marketplace Affiliate Program (MAP) can help to boost traffic to your store.
Let’s begin:
Current Restrictions For the In-Marketplace Solution
Restriction 1: Marketplace Internal Traffic Limitation
Ultimately, your marketplace store sales are at the mercy of the platform’s internal traffic. Something that you have no control over:
1. Online shoppers browse on the marketplace platform (Shopee, Lazada, or Tokopedia).
2. Online shoppers see available products and marketplace stores.
3. Online shoppers might discover your product or enter your marketplace store
4. If online shoppers find your product unique or competitively priced, they might buy from you.
Restriction 2: Sponsored Search & Recommendation Limitations
The 2nd problem with the sponsored search and in-marketplace ads is that you are bidding for leads that you have limited control over.
Ideally, you would want to define who your customers are—for example, their age, sex, and interest, to name a few.
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Involve introduces the Marketplace Affiliate Program (MAP) to address these issues faced by advertisers on marketplace stores.
What is the Marketplace Affiliate Program (MAP)?
The Marketplace Affiliate Program (MAP) is an innovative technology that connects your marketplace store (store within Shopee and Lazada) to defined external traffic.
Here’s how it work: Publishers promote your brand and drive their specific audience directly to your marketplace store, thus increasing the number of prospects going down your sales funnel.
You’ll only pay a commission to Publishers that are able to convert a sale. A total win-win situation.
Unlimited external traffic is the only way to truly scale your marketplace store to unimaginable heights compared to relying on internal traffic alone.
Now that you know what the MAP is and how it works, let’s now see its 4 benefits for your marketplace store:
4 Benefits of MAP to Help Scale Your Marketplace Store Exponentially
1. Brings external traffic to scale
2. Centralize management of Publishers & campaigns
3. Freedom to fine-tune your campaigns & Publishers
4. Low-risk & only Pay Per Sale (PPS)
Now you have the overview, lets dive into a little deeper for each of the four benefits:
MAP Benefit 1: Brings External Traffic to Scale
This could be your marketplace store’s sales funnel with MAP
The formula to success for selling on any marketplace store is knowing that It’s a numbers game. For you to sell more, you need more prospects going down your sales funnel. It’s that simple.
That being said, nobody buys from a brand they don’t know, like, and trust.
Involve’s network of 50,000+ Publishers (as of 2020), create content and channel their audience directly to your marketplace store.
Over time, with your brand’s constant exposure, this will move more prospects down your sales funnel.
Examples of Involve’s high-converting Publisher network:
1. Coupon websites
2. Comparison websites
3. Loyalty websites
4. Content websites (articles, videos)
5. Influencers
MAP Benefit 2: Centralize Management of All Publishers & Campaigns
Let’s use an example where you are selling on more than one platform in multiple regions:
1. On your website
2. On Lazada and Shopee Malaysia
3. On Lazada and Shopee Singapore
4. On Lazada and Shopee Indonesia
In the above example, you will have separate dashboard logins for each platform. Imagine how tedious that could get to do simple tasks like:
1. Monitor and manage campaigns
2. See which Publisher does well in which platform.
Only deal with one dashboard: MAP can centralize the management of your Publishers & campaigns across different platforms & regions in one convenient dashboard:
MAP Benefit 3: Freedom to Fine-tune Your Campaigns & Publishers
Currently, when bidding for internal traffic via sponsored searches and recommendations, you have no control over the audience’s age, gender, interest, and browsing interest.
Analogy: Imagine you’re a physical computer store at the mall. You want more visitors to come to your store. You have some budget to pay for potential customers to go to your store (leads). Which would make more sense?:
1. Hand out flyers to all random customers entering the main entrance of the mall.
2. Work out a commissions deal with a local university lecturer. Ask him to bring his 1st-year computer science students that just received their scholarship money to make a field visit to your store.
MAP allows you to access prospects out of the marketplace. You can further narrow down to specific publishers that own audiences in your exact niche. Thus, increasing the chances of conversion.
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MAP provides external reach and relevance. So you’re not wasting time and money paying for unqualified prospects that don’t convert.
MAP Benefit 4: Low-Risk & Only Pay Per Sale (PPS)
Pay Per Sale
With a Pay Per Sale (PPS) model, Publishers only earn a commission when you made a sale from their audience.
The PPS business model is great to quickly scale your business to enormous heights without the need for massive amounts of an upfront marketing budget.
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Publisher Approval
You would want to define your target audience as much as possible. This means you would only want relevant Publishers to promote your business to their audience.
With the MAP dashboard, you can see all the Publishers that are applying to promote your brand. With this valuable insight, you can decide if they are relevant to your business and approve their application.
Wrapping Up
In-marketplace traffic boosters like Sponsored Searches and paid ads can definitely help get more prospects to your marketplace store. But there is a ceiling on how high it can bring your business.
Leveraging on MAP and the external traffic that it brings can scale your marketplace store business to unimaginable heights compared to relying on internal marketplace traffic alone.
To know more about the MAP and to enroll your marketplace store in this program, click here.
