How to sell on Ozon: stories of entrepreneurs who succeed

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

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Both experienced entrepreneurs and those who are just starting their own business can create a business on the marketplace. With a marketplace, you do not need to spend money on the development of your own online store and set up delivery, and it is also a real chance to find customers all over the country and even abroad.

Valenki, products from Khakassia, fruit snacks: how to build a successful small business by displaying these products on a large marketplace? The story is told by three entrepreneurs from different parts of Russia who have opened shop windows at.

Story 1: Kiez felt boots

How did the idea of your business come about?

Before starting the business, I worked as a sales representative, and when I accumulated a client base, I decided to start my own business. My first business is the production of soft drinks, but it is very difficult to enter large supermarkets and retailers with them. We have tried, but it is very difficult to compete with big brands. We can sell only in our region, and in order to develop further, we need a lot of costs, efforts and resources.

Since 2016, I have formed a second production - this is the sewing of shoes and accessories under the Kiez brand. We are developing very successfully: we have an online store, our own equipment and our own production facilities.

How does a business enter the big market

I studied English in America for two years and closely watched how foreign marketplaces are developing rapidly: how delivery works, how customers react to such purchases. And every year this sphere took off higher and higher like a rocket. After that, I started to study Russian marketplaces. It turned out that in literally two days you can conclude an agreement and enter a large-scale market - not only Russia, but also the neighboring countries. This surprised me a lot.

The marketplace makes it possible to work, stand on the same shelf with major brands. And here we do not pay for marketing and promotion, we do not pay for customer traffic - all this is done by the site.

The geography of the marketplace is a huge market in Russia and neighboring countries where you can sell your products. All that remains is to produce a quality product and pack it beautifully so that the consumer wants to buy it.

Everything is clear: the personal account is accessible, anyone can figure it out - there is nothing complicated about it. Last year we launched our goods in November, the first batch was small - about 100 pairs of shoes. And with these 100 pairs we just learned last season, not counting on colossal sales. We looked at how a personal account is arranged, how to deliver goods, how to manage everything, still tried to promote goods, launched advertising campaigns, and worked with reviews. This year, from the very first days of September, from the beginning of the season, Ozon has started to move a lot. Now we are increasing sales there - we sell about 100-150 pairs of shoes a month.

How to make money on the marketplace

I want to allay the fears of new sellers: they think they will need to spend huge amounts on storage, plus shipping and commissions. To estimate how much everything will cost and how to work, you can use Ozon.

Just imagine: the marketplace has an average daily number of unique visitors to the site - 4-5 million. An entrepreneur will never receive such a flow of customers on his website.

I know this from my own experience. We had a website, but in order to attract customers there, we paid a lot for advertising. And it was not always possible to set up advertising campaigns correctly - we were stupidly pouring money out. And here everything is set up: advertising campaigns, marketing, logistics. You just need to correctly analyze the data and calculate the number of deliveries to the warehouse so that the goods do not stall there.

From the very first sales, you should have good ratings and reviews. If you send an ugly and poorly packaged item, your feedback will be negative. This has a bad effect on sales, and it is very difficult to raise the rating of a thing. Describe your products correctly: take high-quality photographs, tell us what material it is made of.

Buyers are not stupid either: they search, watch, and leave reviews. Now is the time for reviews, so you need to keep an eye on this. Ozon has a Review for Points tool. If you list your products on this list, then the customer who left a review on your product will receive points at your expense. This is how you can collect reviews and raise the rating of a product.

If you sell on Ozon, it doesn't matter where your production is located. The logistics infrastructure of the marketplace allows you to deliver products throughout the country. And even if you have not the most common products, including felt boots, they will find their buyer. The daily audience is more than 4 million people, and delivery is possible in more than 13 thousand settlements throughout the country. Already every second order from this site contains goods from marketplace sellers.

Story 2: Siberian exotic UMAY

Elena Lebedeva Founder of a grocery store from Khakassia.

How did the idea of your business come about?

In 2016, I was involved in the development of a large referral Internet portal in St. Petersburg. Then the vector of development of the service changed, I left and thought about what to do. After the freedom and abundance of impressions provided by the Internet portal, it was difficult for me to imagine myself in some other company.

Around the same time, Russian manufacturers replaced European goods in stores. Crimean products appeared, Altai, Karelian, Bashkir, but among them there was nothing from Khakassia, my small homeland. And there are, after all, unique products - only bird cherry sweets and lingonberry marmalade are worth something! In addition, I was personally acquainted with several manufacturers. So I decided to open my own shop with products from Khakassia in St. Petersburg.

The starting amount was the money received from the sale of a summer cottage in Khakassia. They were enough for a designer's fee, rent of premises, minor repairs, furniture and the first batch of goods. At first, I worked in the shop myself, and after a year and a half I launched the website and began to receive the bulk of orders via the Internet. At the same time, I met an old friend of mine who invited me to help with an architecture conference. I responded, did one thing, then another, third, and so I returned to PR and organizing events.

But I didn't want to leave the mission of getting to know Khakassia through food. My scheme of working with the store changed: a warehouse appeared, and on the site people could choose delivery or pickup from the warehouse. So the possibility of personal communication was preserved. It turned out that for many it is very important to have direct contact, receive an order from me and communicate. And I am always pleased to present the product myself and tell about it.

How does a business enter the big market

In the spring of 2019, I got a call from Ozon. They were looking for unique products, found my site and offered cooperation. I gladly responded, filled out the contract and got access to my personal account. Then circumstances and lack of time pushed back the practical implementation of this intention, and only at the beginning of 2020 I decided that it was time to start. The assortment includes long-term storage products: herbal teas and jams made from pine cones, honeysuckle and bird cherry.

I updated the catalog on the website, found a company that delivers to the Ozon warehouse, and sent the first shipment in March 2020, shortly before the general quarantine. How did it turn out in time! For the first 2 weeks, bird cherry jam even became a bestseller, the batch quickly sold out. In conditions when I could not conduct offline activities, I was very supportive. First of all morally.

I realized that even if I stopped renting a warehouse in St. Petersburg, my business would continue. Moreover, the geography of sales has become wider!

How to make money on the marketplace

After six months of working at Ozon, I can say that if you study the conditions well, choose a work scheme that is profitable for yourself and follow the advice and recommendations of the service, there is every chance to develop successfully there. I comply with the basic requirements: prices are on a par with similar products, discounts on items that have not been sold for a long time, participation in promotions. And even with such low activity, I see the result - my products are on sale!

However, I am not a manufacturer. I have the costs of logistics and delivery support, taxes, the volumes are still small, and the profit is not as high as it could be if the goods were produced by me.

If you compare the effort expended with the amount of work that had to be done before itself, I think this is a good deal. Especially during a pandemic.

I really like the analytical tools of the marketplace: thanks to charts and tables, I see what is in great demand and where I need to change something. For example, herbal tea is also bought, but not as quickly as jam. I believe that this is a unique proposal. Bird cherry and honeysuckle ground with sugar are exotic even for such a giant as Ozon.

You can sell anything (within the law), even exotic things like pine cone jam. It is quite possible to build a business here selling products, the main thing is that they are not perishable.

The site provides several free tools for promotion, and sellers only need to learn how to use them in order to expand their assortment, manage sales and build loyalty. Ozon is trusted by millions of buyers, which means sellers don't have to invest a lot of money in advertising.

Story 3: Zelenika fruit and vegetable snacks

Alexandra Shatilova Head of Marketing Department.

How did the idea of your business come about?

The founder of Zelenika is Oksana Moskvitina. Prior to launching the project, she worked as CFO at the largest flower company in Russia. The entrepreneurial spirit brought Oksana to the Skolkovo startup school, where the idea of Zelenika was born.

We saw the growing trend towards a healthy lifestyle and wanted to launch a product that would make people's lives better. I had to spend a lot of time researching the global healthy snack market - including physically looking through supermarket shelves. This is how we got acquainted with freeze-dried fruit and dried vegetable snacks. In our climate it is very difficult to eat your favorite fruits, berries and vegetables all year round, and Zelenika allows you to get up to 90% of vitamins from fresh fruits and vegetables in any season.

How does a business enter the big market

Our first sales started three years ago. We quickly found a common language with target partners who began to help with delivery to and to other online sites. The growth rate was below our expectations, so we decided to build up our expertise on our own and switched to direct shipments to marketplaces. This gave a fairly quick and good result. During the year, we were able to increase the share of Zelenika's online sales from 1-2% to a stable 10-12%.

Online platforms are a window of opportunity for a startup like ours. This is a chance to present the maximum product line to the consumer, use various promotion mechanics and sell across the country.

It is not difficult to understand the intricacies of the marketplace. Ozon has created a tutorial built into the platform. In the help you will find all the stages of interaction with the platform and a description of the difficulties that arise during the first shipments. If you do everything slowly, you can avoid mistakes.

Tariffs are clear, and with careful study, it is easy to calculate and plan financial flows. The platform provides all the necessary reporting in the required form.

How to make money on the marketplace

If this is your first delivery to Ozon, then with careful preparation, you need to reserve 2-3 weeks before the first sale. Further, if you did everything right, sales start immediately.

Sales on Ozon account for a significant share of the company's total profit, but we plan to constantly increase their volume. We still have a lot of work to do to ensure that our clients receive orders as soon as possible and profitable for themselves.

If you are just starting your journey in the online space, it is very important to get the eye of the buyer. It is likely that your product will end up in a category that needs to be targeted on purpose. This means that you will automatically lose some of your customers along the way.

For us, the most effective mechanic was the placement of product cards on the Brand Shelf. In this case, the product appears in a special section immediately on the main page or in the desired category. With this placement, the conversion will more than double.

Also, pay attention to the promotions that Ozon organizes. If your product fits the category conditions, then you can get profitable additional "chips" for the provided discount - for example, to appear among other products on a banner on the main page.

For sellers, Ozon provides not only a platform for sales and marketing tools, but also loans to scale the business. So, with financing through the platform, sellers increase their turnover by an average of 30%. Thanks to these loans, you can avoid cash gaps and expand your assortment. All commissions and tariffs of the site are freely available, and you can calculate the cost of Ozon services using a special one. If you have any questions, please contact the site: they will explain how the marketplace works and help start sales throughout Russia.