WHY LISTABL?
The Listabl idea arose from many years working with sellers and managing their marketplace campaigns.
A quick story.
There are many solutions out there promising the world. The usual pitch – there are hundreds of channels and, by using such-and-such a platform or service, you can sell your products on marketplaces around the globe. Easy. I knew the opportunity is real, but few sellers ever went live on more channels beyond the digit count of their fingers – the most we managed for a single seller was 22 marketplaces.
That may not seem too shabby for one seller and they achieved decent numbers, however, when you consider there are over 450 channels worldwide, it’s less than 5%. The horse they have in the race only has one leg.
No two set-ups are the same. There are several things which need doing before trading, particularly in other countries. France or India or Australia or anywhere with a respectable market– take your pick. If your platform supports trading on 100+ channels, why would you not grab the advantage?
THE INCREDIBLE IMPORTANCE OF PRODUCT DATA
The answer to optimising sales, in most cases, is product data. If you send your product data to eBay, you must map it to the correct category. You then must provide the correct attribute values, your titles must not exceed the 80 character limit and your parent/child relationships must be correct. And so on with each channel. This is an enormous challenge.
The key, as with most successful e-commerce, is clever automation. Take the data you have and automatically transform it. This way, you don’t have teams of people hunched over spreadsheets. Products go live like lightning and you get less money-gobbling errors and delays from the marketplace – because the data is more consistent. It’s optimised for the target sales point.
The main issue is the work needed to set up transformation rules is long. We had some fairly good functionality, but it took weeks to set up for each marketplace as the requirements are different for each one. It’s fine if you’re setting up for Amazon where the return makes the effort worthwhile but, what if you want to sell on Coolshop or Eprice where the return doesn’t justify the time investment? Most sellers I worked with judged the level of effort prohibitive and simply did not bother.
There’s a further issue. Most of the time, the source data was so poor (I once had a title presented to me that was just a dot) or simply missing. On your own website, you can just get away without a separate colour value (although I wouldn’t recommend it) but on several external sales channels, they require this value. It won’t work, won’t sell without it being 100% right.
the listabl solution
These are the two problems that Listabl sets out to solve. How to use technology to create original product content when a seller doesn’t have it. Second, can we automate the structuring of listings so managing hundreds of channels is finally realistic?
There are many other benefits to using a system like this. First, most listing tools accept a product feed. If we sit between the merchant’s system and their listing tool of choice, we should be the essential bolt-on to add data optimisation automation. Second, if we create original content and format it differently for each channel, we should use that same process to enhance the seller’s own website. For better conversion, for improved SEO. A perfect end-to-end product sales optimisation.
So, we needed a team. I’d consider myself an expert in marketplaces and product data. I needed an expert in website optimisation and I needed a developer to build the platform.
Fortunately, I knew an expert in SEO/CRO for many years and, when I pitched the idea to him, it turns out he knew a CTO who he had worked with many times building Magento sites from the ground up.
Listabl was born.
We believe the machine we have made will help you grow sales. It has no single competitor. You’ll need several tools to replace Listabl. If you’ve read this far, I’ll assume you’re either a seller considering how to boost your sales, a potential partner sizing us up, or a green-eyed competitor trying to understand what we’re about.
Regardless, thank you for visiting our site and please get in touch if you want to discuss boosting your product sales.
Dan Burnham
CEO & Founder