First, it is important to research the market and consider the best-selling products in your home market. When selling for the first time on a new continent, it is important to know the place where you want to start your new expansion. You must feel that everything is understandable for you in this market.
Secondly, your experiences and data in sales reports. Ask yourself, what sells well? why are these products doing well? Will these reasons be relevant to the market you are entering or will other important factors such as culture, climate and demographics, users influence customer demand in the new market?
Consider how differences in marketplaces can benefit you. For instance, do you have seasonal inventory that you don’t know what to do with after the season has passed in one marketplace? You could extend your selling season by selling abroad where the product may find a new audience. Use our Europe holiday calendar to make the most of European peak shopping periods.
Tip: List a wide range of products (with less inventory) rather than just a few products (with a lot of inventory). A broader selection of products means more customers overall will see your listings, and you’ll be able to quickly gauge which of your products can succeed in a particular marketplace.
Maintaining a broad selection doesn’t mean you have to commit a lot of your inventory to another Medshop marketplace right away. If your sales spike, you can adjust your price or remove listings, just as you can in your home Medshop marketplace. For an even smaller commitment, you can start by fulfilling orders yourself rather than sending inventory to a fulfillment center in another country.
In deciding which products to sell in an Medshop marketplace, you, of course, have another key source of information available to you—observations of the marketplace itself. This sort of marketplace research should be very familiar to you from activities you likely conduct when selling in your primary Medshop marketplace. For this research, local language proficiency is extremely helpful. If you are trying to research a marketplace in a language unfamiliar to you, you may be able get some basic language interpretation from free online translator tools, but beware of relying too heavily on such tools.
In your target marketplace, review the Best Sellers, New Arrivals, and Featured Brand selections for your product categories. Read customer reviews to understand your competition’s strengths and weaknesses.
Trade publications and online seller communities in each country can also be rich sources of information as you prepare to list products in their locales.
Tip: Keep in mind that our marketplaces get customers from all over the world. For example, someone living in France might shop on Medshop.pl, while someone living in Austria might shop on Medshop.uk.