Why Trade Me?
When you’re selling online, it makes sense to be able to put your products in front of as many eyeballs as possible. The greater the exposure your products get, the more you are likely to sell.
That’s why Datum Connect is launching a new Trade Me integration for our online inventory system, CIN7. Trade Me is the biggest platform where kiwis do business online, with over a million members. “Once upon a time, Trade Me was just for private members to sell second-hand goods,” says Datum Connect CEO Danny Ing. “In the past couple of years they have become far more open to businesses listing with them. There are a lot of retailers and wholesalers who are doing a significant proportion of their business on Trade Me.”
While many people have criticised Trade Me as taking away from traditional ecommerce, we disagree. “It’s clear to us that Trade Me has become central to ecommerce strategy,” says Danny. “I don’t see it as competition – I see it as an essential complement to any ecommerce system. Trade Me has become as important as your ecommerce website for sales.”
Integration difficulties
Up until now, loading your products on Trade Me as well as your ecommerce site has been both difficult and time-consuming. “Trade Me integration is not something that is offered standard in ecommerce or inventory systems – people are using other applications to integrate into Trade Me,” Danny says. “But if you have to upload all your products again, you may as well just upload them straight to Trade Me. These applications don’t save that much time.”
Making selling on Trade Me easy and seamless
If a customer builds an ecommerce website with Datum Connect, their inventory sits in CIN7, our inventory management system. “We want our customers to be able to exploit CIN7 to its fullest potential by selling their product just about anywhere – not just on their shopping cart, but on Trade Me too,” says Danny.
How does it work? CIN7 talks to Trade Me, places products on the Trade Me system, takes products off, take orders on Trade Me, and then imports those orders back into the CIN7 system. “This is all done seamlessly – you don’t need to leave your CIN7 interface,” he says. “If you put a product on our system and flag that you want it to appear on Trade Me, it will do so automatically. When you get an order from Trade Me, it will appear in the list of orders in our inventory system. Nice and easy.”
Keeping stock levels accurate and your customers happy
Danny notes that one of the Trade Me integration’s most important features is its ability to seamlessly manage stock availability across all channels. “Let’s say you have 1000 products listed as available on your shopping cart and 500 in Trade Me. You forget what you’ve sold in your shopping cart, and forget to take it off Trade Me when you’ve run out of stock. Someone buys the product off Trade Me but you can’t send it to them, and now you’re in a predicament.”
It’s all about customer service, Danny adds. “If you’re inconsistent and can’t deliver on your promises, Trade Me users are likely to give you a bad rating, which will lower the level of trust buyers have in you, and therefore the likelihood they will buy something from you. Our Trade Me integration fixes this by creating consistency in stock and availability across all channels. “
Free to all Datum Connect CIN7 Customers
“Cost is the number one issue here,” Danny notes. “Our customers are already paying for hosting fees through us and commission to Trade Me. This integration is something we can offer our customers easily and so we wanted to give it away to provide a helping hand.”
The Free Trade Me integration module is set to be available in Mid-October 2011. Visit www.cin7.com to view features of the Cin7 online inventory system.
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