Why You Should Sell On Multiple Marketplaces | #235 Tahir Khan

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Claus Lauter: Hello and welcome to another episode of the e commerce coffee break podcast. Today, we want to talk about on how to sell on multiple marketplaces. Now, the reason is why would you do that? Obviously you want to reach as many customers as possible, and there are certain ways to facilitate that and to make it easier for you from a technical side to really get your product on multiple marketplaces instead of doing it manually.

So to dive deeper into that, Tahir Khan, founder and CEO of rocketseller. com is with me on the show today. Thank you. Tahir has a master, in computer science and business administration. He co founded ParkingSoft, crafting the world's first cloud based parking solution in 2009. In 2017, he founded Kanputas, a tech consulting firm.

Recognizing a gap in e commerce tools, Tahir burst finally RocketSeller in 2019. With the final release in February 2023, RocketSeller empowers e commerce sellers to expand across. Multiple platforms effortlessly, and he's driving for enhanced the software while we're speaking. So let's welcome Tahir to the show.

Hi, how are you today? 

Tahir Khan: Hey Klaus. Thank you. Thank you for having me on your show. 

Claus Lauter: Let's dive into multiple marketplaces. A lot of people try that. But a lot of merchants are always focusing more on one platform than on others. Give me a bit of a background, why it is important to sell on multiple marketplaces.

Tahir Khan: e commerce world, very risky proposition to put all your eggs in basket. Granted, you may be very successful selling on Amazon, You're doing good. You're happy expanding to multiple marketplaces is a chore. And first of all, it needs a ton of resource investment, training and hiring people, getting all your ducks in a row, making sure that you're set up for success.

A lot of entrepreneurs, I wouldn't say most of them, big chunk of that majority, they're apprehensive, saying, Oh, that's a commitment. I don't have the resources. I'm doing great on Amazon. So while we're at, several times from a risk mitigation perspective, diversification is the key.

To be successful, , and spread your wrist across, the e commerce spectrum, for example, Walmart, eBay, Shopify, Etsy. Why would you not as an entrepreneur take advantage of it? I also sell actively on Amazon.

I have two accounts grew, from a need. I was like, okay, I'm doing good on Amazon. I had a couple of people helping me, but I want to be able to expand my horizons. Why don't I sell on Walmart? Why don't I sell on Why don't I sell on Shopify, Etsy? looked at the tools.

There were tools that let you do some listings that charge you per listing, not a comprehensive solution. I wanted to automate everything from the point that I just wanted to be able to connect a marketplace and completely automate the process from that point on. That includes sinking my inventory, sinking my price, creating a new listing when an order comes in.

I wanted to leverage, Amazon's FBA as my own 3PO and fulfill my orders without me being involved in the process at all. Well, that's a goal for RocketSeller to be 100 percent hands on. But I do realize that there are some gotchas use cases that we may not have anticipated.

But our goal is to make the entire process of being able to sell on multiple marketplaces absolutely with no human intervention. It should just work out of the box. It's supposed to be a turnkey solution. So that's a long winded answer for your short question, 

Claus Lauter: Klaus. Yeah, but I think it gives a very good overview where a lot of people struggle with.

And then you mentioned a few of them. So one of them is obviously learning a new platform because every platform works different. Every platform has different policies and so on and so forth. So there's a very steep learning curve to get into that. And then also the technical implementation is very, very different.

Now, workflow looks like from your solution from RocketSeller? Into another platform, maybe start with, I don't know, one platform. How does the integration work? How does that flow work? So that our listeners get a better understanding. 

Tahir Khan: So let's start with a very promising, marketplace. Walmart, we are an approved solution provider, for Walmart.

And all you do is create your seller account on Walmart. We also have a special link that you can go to our website and grab that link and click on that link and, go create seller account on Walmart if you don't have one, obviously, Walmart is still trying to work their internal processes, creating a seller account is not always straightforward, so if you do use our link, We can get in between you and Walmart and see if we can expedite the process.

that's from the perspective of someone brand new coming into the Walmart marketplace. One of the ways to create a seller account. Is use our special link that Walmart recognizes. once you have a seller account with Walmart, all you do is sign up to Rocket Seller. You connect your Amazon account.

Amazon is the gateway account to our solution. Once we have downloaded your inventory. You can go back in. We can connect your Walmart account. And that's an entire video on our website on how to do that. Once you connect your Walmart account, we have built a very comprehensive data normalization engine, Klaus.

Where our product speaks the language that Walmart understands as far as listings go. So we carry forward all the listing optimizations from your source platform, Amazon, and take them all the way over to Walmart. Once we create your listings, then you can automate the process of syncing your inventory and pricing, Walmart.

We have different pricing engines built in. One is the automated truck pricer, which currently works on, off of Amazon and Walmart, but I'm not talking about that. You can use smart pricing. So take, for example, if you're selling a widget for a dollar on Amazon, And you want to sell it for 5 percent less than Amazon's price in one month or 10 percent more, you can use our smart pricing feature stay below or above the current Amazon price by X percent and when we sync, your price and inventory next, which happens every 30 minutes to an hour in our system, we take that dollar, add your, markup or markdown percent, if your markup is 15 percent of widgets that's selling on dollar will sell a dollar 15 on Walmart.

So it's completely automated. Now, once you get to Walmart, and if an order comes in, you can choose to let our system know that, hey, when an order comes in from Walmart, go ahead and automatically fulfill it. Using my FB inventory. So the entire process at that point is completely automated. We sync your inventory, pricing, listings, keep track of your orders, communicate with the Walmart API to send them the tracking information, what have you.

Claus Lauter: Now that sounds very convenient. Now, question that comes up for me is obviously, in the background, fulfillment runs automatically. If somebody orders on Walmart or any other platform, how does it look with the data that gets transferred to customer data? So at shipping address and all of that, how is that set up?

Where do I go to find out if. I don't know tracking information if it has been delivered or where do I find the customer data to how to contact them because they would obviously expect me to contact them through Walmart if they have bought their. So how does that look the back end? 

Tahir Khan: You can go to Rocket Seller our app, and there's a special page within our solution. You click that link and select the marketplace that you came in from, so the source marketplace. Okay, for example, your source marketplace is Shopify, for instance. You would sign in.

Go to the marketplace orders page, select your source marketplace, and we will display a list of all the orders that our system has automatically created for you. You can select a date range, you can click the link, and it will take you to your Seller Central account on Amazon.

You can grab the tracking information and carrier code and everything from there. In addition, when an order is shipped out from Amazon, and if it is automatically fulfilled by our system, we take the tracking information. And, the carrier information or the entire shipping information and send it to the, source or the platform.

So if this case, Shopify happens to be the source or the platform, we take that information and tell Shopify, hey, This order has been fulfilled, here's the tracking information and the order has been completed so that our user can get paid for that order. 

Claus Lauter: Okay, that makes sense.

Now, a lot of versions have different ways on where they basically warehouse. Some use FBA. Some only use FBA for part of their products. How does that work? How can I choose where the shipping... Comes from. 

Tahir Khan: our system automatically creates fulfillment orders only if the item, is a f b item. If it is not f b item.

So you have a mix of, , F B A merchant fulfill listings on Amazon. We sync them over to shopper or Etsy for that matter, and order comes in from Etsy. When we look at. Okay. What is the fulfillment channel for this product? And if it is a BA, we check whether there's sufficient inventory to cover the fulfillment.

If it's not, then we send an email to the customer saying, hey, we could not create a fulfillment order. Here's the problem. You don't have enough inventory. if the order comes in for a merchant fulfilled item, our system again communicates with the seller saying, Hey, this is a merchant fulfilled item.

You received an order. So go ahead and fulfill it. 

Claus Lauter: Now, as a merchant, you're obviously interested in, reporting what to know, where are you selling the most, where you focus on which platform is focused on the most, what kind of reporting tools do you have in rocket seller. com that helps with that?

Tahir Khan: Our system. Is you can look at each marketplace. Let's call each marketplace a platform. You can look at each platform individually, or you can go to our comprehensive dashboard. It will look at it will show all the marketplaces that you have connected the sales, the profitability information, of course, provided that you have, assigned cogs, cost of goods sold for your products and uploaded them to rocket seller.

it's not a typical report that you would see, but it'll give you a complete overview of any data range for which we have the data. Your profitability, it'll tell you, okay, you made a hundred dollars on Amazon, you made $30 on Walmart, $20 on Etsy, $10 on shelf file for this date range.

Claus Lauter: When I have my products connected to these, different platforms, Can I decide to push only certain products to a platform and not to another platform? What kind of flexibility does the system have? 

Tahir Khan: right now it's all or nothing. We have a request from our sellers. we have over 200 customers.

 There are use cases where one or two of the sellers, so a very small percentage , of sellers. have requested this feature. Now, if that request goes to 10 or 15 or 20 percent of the sellers requesting, hey, I want to select which listings I want to push to this platform or that platform, we will build that.

But as of now, based on our experience, And our customer base. No one has asked for this specific feature, except one or two people, but we are aware of this limitation. It's not actually a limitation, it's based on our experience that our sellers, they want us to be able to push.

All the listing server, why wouldn't they make more money by listing more products? That's what, their mindset is. So as of now, it's all or nothing. 

Claus Lauter: Okay. Now, most of our listeners running Shopify stores, how does the integration look like? What's the technical steps to get started? 

Tahir Khan: We are an approved Shopify app.

What you can do is go to Rocket Seller and it's a simple two step process. You let us know your shop name, and Shopify, and then when you click a button, we take you to Shopify, to our dedicated app page. You allow rocket seller access to your Shopify account and you direct it back to , rocket Seller.

So a simple. Two step click process, we integrate your Shopify store. One thing to remember is we do differential listings synchronization. So take for example, you already have 10 listings on Shopify. And you have 30 listings on Amazon. When we download the Amazon inventory and then when you connect your Shopify store towards our system, we would sync only the 20 listings that do not exist on Shopify.

so you don't end up with double listed products on 

Claus Lauter: Shopify. Yeah, I think that that's very, important info there that it really, um, , synchronize only the things that you don't have in your store yet. Now, with the syncing it obviously does create a new product detail page on Shopify.

Can I edit this page from my side or how does the data flow, the API work with Shopify? 

Tahir Khan: When you create a new product detail page on Shopify, we will download your updated product. Details into our system. Our system currently uses. Like I said, Amazon is a source platform. So if you have did anything on Amazon, it will be sent across the entire enterprise of all the connected marketplaces.

If you do update a single product on a single platform, our system will be able to grab that updated information, but it's not going anywhere. It's not a two way sync, if that's what your question 

Claus Lauter: You said you're working with hundreds of sellers using rocketseller. com. What kind of results do you see from people or businesses coming onto your platform and then one of a sudden selling on multiple platforms?

Tahir Khan: We have sellers who have paid us for a year. One of our oldest sellers, He joined Rocket Cellar when we were in beta. beta in the sense, it fully baked product. He was one of the first few sellers and the idea of Rocket Cellar really excited him. And he had an existing...

Walmart and ebay account. he connected his business to rocket seller in the first year alone. They did over 27, 000 in additional sales just on Walmart. So that's something that did and the subscription that they paid, it paid them back multiple times over. We have sellers that Have come back after using, , a different product.

I'm not aware of any other product offering these capabilities at this time. Certainly not the number of marketplaces that we integrate with. So they have come back and their business is completely on autopilot and they are very happy. We have sellers who have come in just to use our automated

repricing tool. So our, the entire toolkit class is built around our core competency of you being able to list and sell on multiple marketplaces. To that end, we have a very capable automated repricer. That you can create strategies for, it's a based pricing engine. , you can completely automate your entire e commerce business.

Right from managing pricing on Amazon. using the different strategies that we have, built in. Your pricing is automated, your inventory sync is set up and then you can use the smart pricer to sync different prices to different platforms.

And when the order comes in, it's automatically fulfilled. So rocket seller. It's a complete e commerce business management platform and all the features and toolkits that are built around. All the features in the entire product are built around our core competency, 

Claus Lauter: it sounds absolutely like a no brainer, because it takes so much work away from a merchant and being automated. And then obviously with the price adjustments, I think that's a perfect solution for a lot of merchants out there. Now tell me a little bit about how does your pricing structure work?

How do you charge? 

Tahir Khan: So we currently charge, , on your annual revenue on Amazon because the assumption is you join Rocket Seller because we offer the tools to let you grow and expand into different marketplaces. So it's based on your annual revenue on Amazon. And our pricing is very, competitive, based on just the sheer amount of work that our system does.

and what it offers. if you're making, ideal customer, for rocket seller, someone who's pretty successful on Amazon, say, making more 250 K in revenue per year, and they want to expand their horizons and be able to sell in different marketplaces. So that's our ideal customer and it's again all the pricing is based on what's your yearly revenue because That is a good gauge on how much data we're gonna house for you 

Claus Lauter: Okay before we come to the end of our coffee break today Is there anything that you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet?

Tahir Khan: anyone that is watching or listening this video know that this has been built by a seller for the other sellers. And it grew from a need that I , personally experienced, the product has been completely engineered by me, built by me through my hands. I have a team of developers here, of course, but, each and every nook and cranny of the software has been built by me If you give us a try, based on our prior experience with Jones Rocket Seller, once they start using our platform, they actually stay with us. That's a big validation So if you really want to grow, we are here to help. You can look at our pricing. , we're not making too much money. It's very competitive.

The price is very reasonable. Our entire goal is to be able to help sellers. that we find in our shoes and really, really help them automate their entire, business. So they can go back to enjoying their life. Interclass e commerce is not easy. It's a full time job And our goal is to help you claim the most precious commodity that you have in your life, which is time, so you can enjoy your life and go home every evening and do the girlfriend and wife thing.

Claus Lauter: Yeah, that's very true words spoken there and it shows you that you have been in the trenches of e commerce for quite some time. I can totally relate to that. And every tool that helps you to free up your time to not work more, but to enjoy your life is a good tool. Where can people find out more about your solution?

Tahir Khan: you can go to rocketseller. com if you would like to watch the entire product demo, it's 18 minutes long and it is long for a reason because I wanted us to be able to explain everything that our software currently does. So take some time and watch the demo, see if it's a good fit for you.

And then you can just go to rocketzilla. com and sign up for a free seven day trial. If you like what you see you can upgrade and stay with us and we will do everything that we can. to help you succeed. Moreover, we offer free technical support, email support to everyone that joins, our platform.

Our support hours are between 9 a. m. and 5 p. m. Eastern Standard Time. So you are not alone in this journey. We will help you succeed, and walk you through each and every step if needed. 

Claus Lauter: Excellent. It's always good to have a partner on your side that helps you to grow your business. Yeah. We'll put the links in the show notes.

Then you just want to click away and I would recommend our listeners to check it out themselves. I think there's a lot of value in there. Thanks so much for your time today. 

Tahir Khan: Thank you. Thank you for having me.