Want to Participate in an Online Market?
February 6, 2023For the UK based small business owners out there. I am looking into the possibility of adding an Online Market to this website, with the idea of driving online sales.
I need some small business owners to participate as part of the working party where we would run the first market as an excercise for four weeks to see how popular it would be and what sort of sales we get as a result. It may be that we decide to run it for longer.
It will be completely free to particiapate in testing of the market.
How would it work?
There will be a Virtual Market page, and within this will be stall holder pitches. Each seller will have products listed, so customers will be able to browse by seller. To make a sale, the customer will simply follow the link in the market and checkout on your sales page as normal.
This is where we would have it. There is a small business in there already, with one of their products listed. Find it here: VIRTUAL MARKET
Why is this different to Virtual Markets on Facebook?
These are usually run in groups on Facebook. Even for the groups that are not ‘closed’ or ‘secret’, any post at any given time will only reach betwee 2-7% of the audience. Audience reach also depends upon engagement, so unless your potential customers have been engaging in the group already, then it is unlikely that they will even see your posts. Even with five or six posts as part of your ‘stall fee’, you could well be reaching the same pool of people and not other people in the group. Also, unless you are an admin or moderator of the group, you won’t get to see how many people have seen your post. As a trader myself, I’ve been part of a Virtual Market where all I have got for my pitch fee is the ability to post a product in a private group.
Unlike a Facebook market, our online market comes with paid-for advertising to draw in people to look at your products. Traffic to your site from ours should be measurable when you look at your own analytics.
All we would need from you to do this is:
1) A square image or your business branding/logo, along with your business name.
2) Up to five products, with 1 or 2 good pictures of each product.
3) The url where these products are already for sale (this could be Etsy, your website, or Amazon)
4) The name of each product.
5) A short description (255 characters or less) of each product.
6) Your price for each product.
7) Contact information for customers, and a sentence about your business.
8) Evidence of public liability insurance.
Our initial commitments are:
1) We won’t take a cut of any sales. Sales will be made on your own site in the normal way, with you still in control of your own sales. We will not have access to this. This will not change after the trial.
2) We are not responsible, nor do we have any liabilities for products or stallholders in the market. This is taken as your agreement upon agreeing to take part.
3) We reserve the right to remove products or sellers from the market. For example, in cases of copyright infringement, or other dispute.
4) There will be no ‘pitch fee’ for stallholders during the test period.
5) Once the test period is concluded, we will remove stallholders and links to their products from our site and notify everyone that it is completed.
6) No age restricted products, or products that require a licence to sell.
7) Stallholders will need to advertise the market on all their social media platforms at least once a week during the course of the market. This will need to be the market url; so advertising the market as a whole and not just sharing the url to your own stall in the market. We will produce a poster like a regular market so that stallholders will have something to share with their customers.
8) There won’t be any repeating products, or sellers selling the same things.
After the market trial
After the trial market ends, as part of the working party you would need to put forward your ideas on:
1) How much you would pay for this if this was a regular thing. Someone at our end will need to administer the market, and we would be paying for digital advertising. These costs would need to be covered within any future pitch fee. TikTok, Facebook and Instagram advertising isn’t that expensive.
2) How long the market should run for? Because of the nature of SEO and ppc advertising, it may be that future markets would need to run for up to 12 weeks at a time.
3) Do we need to change to format of the market? E.g. Have a Market page and then all of the items in one place, rather than separate pitches for businesses? Would this make a better customer shopping experience? Is this something we should change before we start?
4) This trial would need to be measurable, and the best way for us to to this would be to use Google Analytics. Among other things, we will work on measuring the number of clicks going through to your stall from our site, and with that data you should be able to work out your conversion rate – e.g. out of the number of views how many of those lead to a sale. The number of views and your conversion rate will say if it is value for money. It may be this is something we do for every market after.
If you are interested, please apply here:
coven@somethingwiccan.co.uk
Blessed Be
Saranne