Multichannel Ecommerce: How to Run It Well

Multichannel ecommerce is selling through several channels at once: marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, retailer marketplaces, and your own website. It widens your reach, and it multiplies the number of places where numbers can go wrong.

What gets harder as you add channels

• Stock: one unit can be sold twice if channels do not share levels
• Listings: updating price or content in five places by hand
• Profit: each channel has its own fees, so one sales total hides different margins
• Customer service: messages arrive in several inboxes
• Reporting: five dashboards, none of them comparable

What to put in place

• One source of truth for stock and orders, often an aggregator or inventory system
• One place to publish listings, so a price or content change goes everywhere at once
• One profit view, so every channel is compared on net margin
• One inbox for customer messages

Start with profit

Before adding another channel, check whether the ones you have earn their place. Many sellers find a channel with high sales and a thin margin, and another with modest sales and a healthy one. That changes where to put effort.

Add channels deliberately

Pick the next channel by margin potential and fit with your products, not just audience size. Test with a small range, measure true profit, and only then scale.

A simple operating rhythm

• Daily: orders, stock alerts and customer messages
• Weekly: profit by channel and product, ad performance, refund rate
• Monthly: which channels and products to grow, cut or reprice

What is multichannel ecommerce?

Selling the same products through more than one channel, for example Amazon, eBay and your own website.

Is multichannel the same as omnichannel?

Not quite. Omnichannel usually refers to joining up the customer experience across online and physical touchpoints. Multichannel is about the number of selling channels.

How many channels should I sell on?

As many as stay profitable and manageable. Add one at a time and measure its true profit before adding another.

WhatSales brings profit, performance, inventory, customer messages and listings together across more than 30 channels. See the full list at /integrations and how the pieces fit at /profitability.