3 ways consumer electronics brands & manufacturers can reach online shoppers now

Consumer electronics in ecommerce is absolutely booming. But that doesn’t mean every brand or manufacturer in the sector has it easy. Some 40% of the revenue is generated by Chinese companies alone, and giants like Amazon are always at the forefront of consumer’s minds when it comes to making a purchase. However, multichannel advertising and new, easy-to-use technology are changing this up. They’re opening new pathways for businesses in ecommerce who are willing to look.
While traditional marketing and partnerships still play an important role for electronics, brands can now achieve so much more than ever before. They are able to go directly to consumers - including brands that haven’t traditionally considered themselves D2C.
And equally important, businesses can take control without putting any pressure on their existing partnerships.
Here are three of the absolutely key ways that consumer electronics businesses can sell more just by leveraging their product catalogs and channel strategy.

You don’t have to compete with Amazon - instead, be visible everywhere you can

Sales channels today are incredibly high-tech. They’re practically made for large scale automation, if you have the right tools. This is partially because shoppers hang out on so many channels, ranging everywhere from marketplaces and comparison sites to brand sites and social platforms. That’s why it’s important to list your products everywhere that might be relevant. In many cases, this means list your products just about everywhere.
When strategizing, the key will be a focus on visibility. Cover your bases and reach all the channels that are relevant - not just the obvious ones. By doing so, both consumer electronics brands and retailers alike will be more than able to reach new audiences and sell more. Plus, in many ways, this task is simply one more product feed. 
And once the data preparation and syndication step is mastered, there’s nothing stopping you from scaling… and scaling and scaling. (More on feed management later!)

However there’s also one key type of channel missing here…

Consumer electronics meets recommerce

Used products have always had an audience. Their lower price tag makes them instantly more buyable for some consumers. Plus, consumer sentiment about recommere is changing today. Consumers no longer buy used products just because they’re affordable. They love used products because they're environmentally friendly. The increasingly large Gen Y and Z audiences are exactly the folks who are happy to buy used.
Whether it’s old products you want to get rid of or opened, returned, and seasonal products, there are plenty of sites out there that cater to the specific use case. Reaching these channels will require the same skills as the option above. That means, if you’re able to start the digital transformation process and take control of your feeds, all of these new channels are easily available to you.

Now let’s jump over to the marketing and awareness side. There’s something about social you should know.

Share the workload and costs with collaborative advertising

It’s not exactly a secret that the consumer electronics ecommerce landscape is making the relationship between brands and retailers a little complicated. Manufacturers want to get in the marketing game and boost revenue, and retailers need to maintain control of the selling sphere. In many ways, this is a new age in marketing, and sites like Facebook and Google are getting on board.
Collaborative ads are a Facebook ad type that allows brands and their retailers to share the weight - and also the success - of ad campaigns. (Keep an eye out for this ad type to pop up on other channels!). To use them, retailers organize their product catalogs for use by the relevant brand, and that brand can then easily serve and fund ads (even using the retailer’s data to make them better targeted). For example, Samsung used Facebook Collaborative ads to drive shoppers to purchase Samsung products on eBay-owned site, GittiGidiyor.
Similarly, Google has Shopping campaigns with partners, which allows brands to support their partner’s marketing budgets and promote certain products even more.
For brands, this is a really simple solution that can take them from planning to live rather quickly. And for brands who aren’t content to sit on the sidelines, this is a great chance to simply do more for your products and be more proactive throughout the funnel.

Last of all: Google Manufacturer Center - could you be doing more?

No one understands the benefits and specs of a product quite like its manufacturer. That’s why Google Manufacturer Center lets manufacturers add their product data, ensuring that their products always have key, relevant data, no matter who is advertising them.
Bosch Power Tools is a great example. By adding their own product data, advertisers and retailers immediately had access to better, more targeted information. Bosch products could surface more accurately and often. Consumers had more accurate information. And, of course, they boosted conversion by 4%.
The question is: how much attention are you giving Google Manufacturer Center?
The manufacturer center is not like other touchpoints, and the fact that Google can be quite strict also makes it more difficult. However, adding data here can help relevant partners of all kinds sell more of your products. Be sure to follow these best practices:

• Publish product feeds to Google Manufacturer Center often
• Include all optional attributes
  • You can even include video links!
• Review performance at the GTIN level
  • Use this data to inform what you further optimize or push on other channels
  • Google also includes category benchmarks and pricing insights

How consumer electronics in ecommerce can manage all those product feeds at scale

If you aren’t quite ready to go conquer all those new channels, it’s probably because it seems daunting. Getting on new channels, mastering collaborative advertising, and ensuring your data is always synchronized is only possible with strong product feed management processes in place. However, this doesn’t have to be hard. Productsup not only simplifies feed management but it also allows you to tackle new opportunities that would otherwise seem unthinkable.
For consumer electronics brands who want to take control of their presence online, Productsup can help.

• Choose from 1500+ built-in channel templates or use a custom template to quickly tailor data to any channel’s requirements
• Ensure feeds are always reliably prepared and distributed - everytime
• Get products on new channels in hours, not days or weeks
• Automate order synchronization and never worry about advertising out of stock products again