Selling online isn't easy.

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Your store is open 24/7 meaning anything can and will change overnight: SKUs go out of stock, advertising budgets run out, deliveries are missed, three simultaneous campaigns need KVs, PVs are down and shoppers have a lot of questions they want answers to. As the business owner, you're in charge of putting out the fires.

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There's also pressure to keep growing GMV 30x year over year, quarter over quarter, while lowering prices campaign over campaign because consumers are shifting online and promotional periods never end, so there's always someone to sell to.

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But as ecommerce becomes a strategic advantage for businesses of all sizes, the big online marketplaces saturate with hungry sellers like you selling similar items with strong value propositions, nicer product thumbnails and better prices.

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How are you going to compete for a shopper's attention?

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You can increase your advertising budget but there's internal conflict within the organisation - how much should be allocated to online channels and how much to the traditional offline business that still drives >60-80% of total sales?

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You need data to justify spending more online, especially on retail media such as in-platform ads but the raw data sits on four different Marketing Solutions Portals and you can only extract historical performance data up to 90 days ago...also, why is the conversion data different on the portal and Facebook?

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The marketplaces are also asking for more ad dollars to drive out-platform traffic from Google and Facebook, but the ROAS isn't ideal and the costs are high. How do you stretch your brand's audience between the three simultaneous campaigns on different marketplaces while meeting traffic commitments?

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Think about it tomorrow because you still need to stay up until 3AM to turn on and review the 4.4 ads, pause individual keyword bids for the 20 Hero SKUs that usually sell out within the first hour and ensure your Midnight Big Bang achieves 50% of your GMV target.

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Oh, the marketplace also called to see if you can top up the vouchers and offer an exclusive GWP that will surely eat into your margins but you can’t risk losing the barter package. Before you agree, you need to check if (1) your warehouse has the capacity to package and store the bundle, (2) it's compliant with regulatory affairs and (3) cost to ship isn't going to drive you into negative net revenues.

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All things to do before the next campaign scheduled in two days but you survived the night. Now you can sleep and tackle it tomorrow.

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Sound familiar?

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We know selling online isn't easy - this is why Epsilo was created. We built technology to enable online marketplace sellers to save time, to connect their products to the people looking for them, to use data to operate efficiently and to achieve scale in a complex online landscape without having to hire a large team. We help businesses close the gap when it comes to ecommerce execution.

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Contact us to learn more about how SaaS can solve your problems.

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Image credit: Fab Lentz