Why Your Ecommerce Brand Needs an Accelerator to Grow on Global Marketplaces
If you’re in ecommerce, you’ve most likely heard of a rising category of brand partners: accelerators. Since the term is still fairly new across marketplaces, CEOs may question the true benefits of partnering with an ecommerce accelerator to their brand.
It’s notable that brands like Spectra Baby are experiencing significant success with ecommerce accelerators. Alone, Spectra lacked the right resources to gain control and execute a narrow distribution strategy. But once they partnered with Pattern, an ecommerce accelerator, Spectra has access to all of the marketplace tools and expertise they need to drive results—a consistent, 60% year over year increase in their revenue.
Ecommerce Accelerator Amplify Brands on Marketplaces
Many brands simply don’t have the bandwidth to do ecommerce the right way—it takes a multiple teams of experts. An ecommerce accelerator layers on top of and amplifies a brand’s current efforts in whatever marketplaces and channels are part of its ecommerce strategy.
As the world’s leading ecommerce accelerator, Pattern understands the issues facing your brand, so you get the benefit of extensive experience across multiple marketplaces, regions, and industries with one partner.
How an Accelerator Makes a Big Difference for Brands
1. Provides an Outside Solution to Execute an Ecommerce Strategy
Time and time again, we see brands don’t have the resources they need to succeed on ecommerce marketplaces. And it’s no surprise—the ecommerce space is crowded, competitive, and vastly different from a traditional, brick-and-mortar sales model.
To execute your strategy correctly, you need to have SEO experts, creative resources, data analysts, brand control experts, fulfillment specialists, legal help to maintain MAP… the list goes on.
So, brands have the choice to either ignore issues they’re experiencing or find outside help. We don’t recommend the first option—issues that seem small now will get out of hand fast, and the further problems develop, the more difficult it is to contain them. It’s definitely doable to reverse damage due to loss of brand control, losing the buy box, issues with brick-and-mortar distributors, MAP compliance problems, and the dreaded profitability death spiral. But it’s all the better to avoid them as much as possible in the first place.
2. More Cost Effective and Maintain Brand Control than Agencies or Aggregators
As you move forward in taking advantage of the ecommerce opportunity and gaining control of your strategy now, you’ll likely still not be able to justify building out large teams to do that. So, brands are opting to partner with an agency, aggregator, and/or an accelerator. Here’s where the first two options are falling short:
Ecommerce agencies aren’t the best option for a few reasons. For one thing, the price you pay to hire one doesn’t reflect the value you get out of the agreement. Agencies aren’t paid based on your success, they’re paid from you, a fixed rate (plus overage), regardless of how your products perform. So, they’re not invested in making a large impact for your brand. Agencies also often specialize in one aspect of ecommerce, such as SEO, making it necessary to hire multiple agencies to execute all aspects of your ecommerce strategy. Once again, this inflates your costs and causes vast alignment issues within your ecommerce plan.
Aggregators aren’t a great solution either. They’re interested in purchasing and growing brands, which sounds like a compelling idea, but, since all brands are unique, what works for one may not work for another. Therefore, the aggregator's universal brand playbook often leads to poor product performance for brands. Brands acquired by aggregators often lose all control and ownership to the buyer as well.
3. Amplifies Brands to Grow Revenue
That leaves brands with the option to partner with an ecommerce accelerator. In our opinion, this is the best way to gain control of your strategy and experience the healthiest and most profitable growth for your products.
Accelerators work because they layer on the top of systems, processes, and teams you’re already using. If you’re experiencing success in your D2C efforts and in specific marketplaces, an accelerator won’t “rip and replace” what’s already working. Instead, they’ll add the resources you’re missing in your strategy to fix issues and expand your presence across global marketplaces.
An accelerator is also paid differently—they agree to a profit margin with your brand, then take ownership of your products and strategy by buying your inventory. As your profitability grows, theirs does, too. By structuring their success this way, they’re truly invested in fixing ecommerce issues at their core and ensuring your long-term gains.
Accelerate your Ecommerce Strategy with Pattern
As a pioneer in the ecommerce accelerator space, Pattern knows the ins and outs of great ecommerce strategy for global marketplaces. We’re fanatical about great data and obsessed with growing our partners’ ecommerce profitability. With pioneering technology, vast expertise, and highly capable internal teams, we have the resources you need to establish and grow your ecommerce presence, brand control, and profitability.
Ready to explore an accelerator partnership? Set up a meeting here.
More Resources
8 Signs Your Brand is Out of Control on Amazon—CEO Cheat Sheet
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Aug 9, 2022
The Ecommerce Equation: 4 Levers CEOs Use to Drive Marketplace Revenue
Developing your ecommerce strategy for digital marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, Tmall, and Alibaba gets complicated fast—there’s a lot to think about, including marketplace SEO, product photography, advertising tactics, disjointed sellers, distribution logistics, managing ratings and reviews, and more. It can be overwhelming for brands, especially those with small teams, to know which behaviors to optimize for for the highest gains in profitability.
The good news? Revenue performance all comes down to data. Pattern was built on a data science approach to ecommerce success. We find the patterns that drive profitability, then apply them to boost our brand partners’ revenue on ecommerce channels.
And a key pattern we follow for all brands on digital marketplaces is the ecommerce equation: revenue = traffic x conversions x price x availability. As brands zero in on these four pieces of the equation, they can simplify and focus their efforts to reach truly profitable ecommerce growth.
1. Drive Traffic to Products
The first part of the equation is traffic—you need to get people to see your listings if you want to generate sales. There are two ways to drive traffic to your products: through organic search and paid search. Striking the right balance between both for your brands is crucial to driving enough of the right traffic to your products, ultimately increasing your ecommerce revenue.
Knowing this, Pattern provides the resources and technology needed to drive traffic to your product listings. Our brand management team, advertising specialists, and SEO technicians work in harmony to create a unified strategy to boost your brand’s organic profile and balance that with a paid advertising approach that works for your brand and listings.
Using this method, we took Feetures socks from ranking on longer-tail terms like “no show athletic socks black” to driving traffic on parent keywords like “no show socks.”
2. Create Content that Converts
Getting customers to your product listing is only half the battle. Once on your listing, you need customers to convert. Conversion is key to the ecommerce equation because it leads to real product purchases and revenue. Traffic without conversion leads to more time and ad spend without the ROI.
Optimizing your images, product description, bulleted details, customer reviews, and buy box performance is key to successful conversion. If you’re going to spend time and effort driving traffic, you should make sure customers can easily and clearly find what they’re looking for when they arrive at your listing.
While your imagery and descriptions are important, you also need to build customer trust to drive conversions. Studies show that your customer service efforts matter too—84% of people trust online reviews as much as friends, making strong reviews an important factor of conversion on marketplaces.
The good news is as you provide a quality product and a great marketplace experience, you’ll build brand equity, increasing your customer loyalty. Then, as your reputation, reviews, and traffic grow positively, marketplace algorithms will recognize your popularity and improve your rank accordingly. Rank drives both traffic and conversions, helping you to optimize your performance further. As your brand equity grows, your conversions will continue to grow with it.
3. Control Your Price
While setting a strategic price is an important step in your ecommerce strategy, it takes more than that to truly control your price on marketplaces.
Without proper control and with wide distribution, your product could end up in the hands of disjointed sellers who lower your marketplace price to sell their inventory and make quick profits. With one seller lowering price online, other authorized sellers and retail partners are forced to lower their price to compete, creating price erosion and sending your brand down the profitability death spiral.
This Death Spiral damages brand equity, hurts conversions, and can lead to Buy Box Suppression on Amazon, hindering traffic as well. And as prices get lower and lower, your profit margin withers away, decreasing your overall revenue.
Using our data-driven insights and Pattern’s eControl partner Vorys, we help brands implement narrow distribution, identify and take-down unauthorized sellers, eliminate price erosion, and control their price online. Focusing on price control, Pattern helped LifeSeasons, a premium supplement company, take back 91% control of the Buy Box on Amazon.
Download the LifeSeasons 1-Page Case Study Here
4. Optimize Your Product Availability
The last piece of the ecommerce equation is availability. It makes sense to think of availability as a contributing factor in conversion, but we felt that it’s important enough to call out on its own—you can fully optimize your traffic, conversion, and price, but without availability, you can’t grow revenue for your brand.
A lack of availability leads to stock outs, losing conversions to competitors, losing possession of the buy box, poor customer reviews, a decrease in traffic…the list goes on. The best-performing brands on ecommerce digital marketplaces optimize their availability with high-end technology, optimize their cash on hand, and inventory time on hand to keep the ecommerce equation powered and optimized in their favor.
How Pattern Drives Revenue Using the Ecommerce Equation
Pattern is committed to solving the ecommerce equation. We partner with brands to provide the expertise, resources, and technology needed to drive traffic, create content that converts, protect price, maintain availability, and ultimately accelerate ecommerce revenue and profitable growth.
Interested in improving the results of your ecommerce equation? Schedule a call.
