Congratulations! We’re finally past the official holiday season and into the New Year, so it’d be perfectly natural to just breathe a bit easier and take a look at what went right and what could have been better during an unprecedented 2020. However, now’s also the time to prep yourself for 2021 and think about that classic of New Year’s traditions: making some resolutions.
For your business, this could mean a lot of things: from shoring up your fulfillment logistics to building inventory or fine-tuning your pricing. Maybe it just means setting lofty goals for your growing business or deciding to employ some third-party expertise to really get your sales off the ground.
Need a little help to get going? Unlike personal resolutions like losing weight or writing the next great American novel, in this Sell Better Blog we’ll let you in on some great ideas you can resolve to do for your business in 2021. Are you ready? Read on!
Resolve to Improve Your Catalog for Maximum Effectiveness
In 2020 we released several tools to help sellers improve the quality of their catalog on a whole as well as their individual listings. The main hub for this is the Listing Quality Dashboard in Seller Center. It lets you take your optimization strategy to the next level, providing a comprehensive overview of your entire catalog and how customers view your items. You’ll get to see what your trending items are, view a breakdown of the holistic score assigned to your catalog on a whole (and each of your listed items), examine your post-purchase quality issues, and finally let you act on recommendations for each individual item in your catalog.
Sellers that have used the Listing Quality Dashboard to improve their catalog have shown marked improvement in not just their item visibility but conversion and sales volume. It’s an area you can’t afford to not look at in 2021 because you can bet your competitors will be optimizing their catalogs.
Listing Quality shouldn’t just be the end of your catalog-oriented resolution, though. The Unpublished Items dashboard tells you how many items in your catalog are unpublished (i.e. unlisted) and insights to get them back in front of customers.
We also introduced quite a few new ways of getting your items noticed when we recently revised the Item Spec to 4.0. Basically, this new specification adds a lot more attributes to many categories of listings, allowing you really get specific about how they are defined and how they can be found in searches and navigation. You might not have had time to take advantage of the new Item Spec before the holidays, but this is the perfect time to do so now.
Resolve to Get Your Mark of Seller Excellence: the Pro Seller Badge
There are a few things a seller wants more than to stand out in a crowd. It’s one thing to optimize your listings, but it’s another to give the discerning customer a quick way of showing that you are a top seller and take customer care seriously.
Do yourself a favor then and make sure you qualify to get a Pro Seller Badge this year. It’s a visual mark of excellence that a seller instantly displays on all of their listings that really shows you’re going to provide a great shopping experience. Not everyone qualifies though, so take note of these requirements as objectives to meet this year for your very own badge:
- Your Listing Quality Score must be between 50-60% or higher for trending items.
- Delivery defect rate of 5% or less.
- Cancellation rate of 1% or less.
- 100% of your items offer free online and in-store returns.
You can use the Listing Quality Dashboard to monitor your criteria. What better way to reward your own business this year than with a Pro Seller Badge?
Resolve to Make the Most Out of Our Shipping Options
One of the things 2020 has shown that if your shipping infrastructure is a little too narrow and limited, you may be missing out on a sale you would normally have had. With the explosion of eCommerce offerings across the United States and around the world, shipping companies and fulfillment services struggled to meet demand. Don’t let yourself get caught in that trap in 2021 and resolve to diversify not only who you ship with but how.
Take a look at our Expedited Shipping Ecosystem page. Here you’ll see all of the ways you can leverage our expedited shipping ecosystem to utilize fast delivery capabilities, valuable discounts with known carriers, cost-effective fulfillment options and even machine learning tools to get your business a competitive edge and sales growth for the New Year.
Plus, you can streamline your shipping logistics even more this year by migrating your settings to our new Shipping Templates. This new tool lets you optimize your current shipping settings using flexible templates featuring multiple custom configurations, variable transit times, granular delivery regions, and in-depth reporting. What does it mean for you? Well, now you can offer TwoDay and ThreeDay delivery regionally for any portion of your catalog and get a significant lift in conversion. You have a little bit of time to revisit your settings —sellers will need to migrate by April 30—so please read up this process more on our Shipping Templates page and start your migration today.
Resolve to Improve Your Business Operations
Finally, let’s face it, everyone could probably use a little bit more help this year. 2020 changed a lot for our industry, and now’s the time to examine how best to make use of all the resources out there. Our growing number of excellent Solution Providers can help you do just that, from helping you improve your listings to managing your inventory, encouraging and aggregating important ratings and reviews, improving your pricing optimization, and even managing some if not all of your fulfillment.
Maybe you know exactly what you want to do—but just need an extra bit of funding to push you over the top. Marcus by Goldman Sachs is there to help you do just that, by providing a business line of credit for sellers with an extremely competitive interest rate on what you borrow, with (for a limited time) no maintenance or prepayment fees. You’ll be able to see if your eligible by just going to Seller Center and visiting the Lending Offers section of the Financial Settings area.
So, whether it is catalog effectiveness, shipping configurations or ways to stand out on Walmart.com, as a Marketplace seller you surely have a lot to take care of to start another e-Commerce year successfully. Get organized and stay tuned for more exciting programs launching for Marketplace sellers this year!
