Why Selling on Multiple Marketplaces is Your Secret to Growth - Chris Timmer | Why selling on multiple marketplaces drives growth, How a unified platform solves inventory issues, What hurdles sellers face when expanding channels? (#358)

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In this episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break Podcast, host Claus Lauter sits down with Chris Timmer, CEO of Linnworks, to unravel the complexities of multi-channel selling. 

Discover how modern e-commerce businesses can overcome operational challenges by leveraging unified platforms that streamline inventory management, marketplace listings, and order processing. 

Chris shares insights into how technology can help sellers expand across multiple channels, reduce errors, and create seamless customer experiences in today's competitive online marketplace.

Topics discussed in this episode:  

• Why selling on multiple marketplaces is crucial for e-commerce growth 
• How a unified e-commerce platform solves inventory management challenges 
• What operational hurdles do online sellers face when expanding channels 
• Why AI and forecasting can transform inventory strategies 
• What surprising strategy are online brands using to boost digital sales 
• Why successful merchants sell on more than five channels 
• How marketplace pricing and integration impact business performance 
• What makes a smooth e-commerce platform implementation 
• Why customer-centric technology solutions matter in competitive markets 
  
  

Links & Resources 

Website: https://www.linnworks.com/
Shopify App Store: https://apps.shopify.com/linnworks
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-timmer-019996/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/linnworksglobal
X/Twitter: https://x.com/Linnworksglobal 

Get access to more free resources by visiting the show notes at
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Transcript

Welcome to the e commerce coffee break podcast. In today's episode, we discussed the benefits of selling on multiple marketplaces and how a unified e commerce platform can be your secret weapon. Joining me on the show is Chris Timmer, CEO at linnworks.Com. So let's dive right into it.

This is the e commerce coffee break. A top rated podcast that helps you become a smarter online seller. Each week, your host Claus Lauter and his guests share what's working right now to grow your store, boost your sale. and stand out in a crowded market. Stay ahead in this fast changing world of e commerce and get expert advice you won't find on Google.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break Podcast. Today, we want to dive into the world of listings, inventory, orders, and shipments, basically everything that every merchant has to deal with every day. And we want to find out how a unified commerce platform can be your secret weapon with dealing with Joining me on the show today is Chris Timmer.

He's the CEO of linnworks.com. com. He has more than 30 years of experience in sales, marketing, and supply chain software. He leads the company's strategy and operations, driving innovations across sales, marketing, and development. So, let's welcome Chris to the show. Hi, Chris. How are you today? 

Hi, Claus. Thank you for having me.

Chris, a lot of brands start in the first place with their own store, website, start selling there. Then, obviously, Omnichannel is a big topic and, also recommended to sell on every platform. channel that is out there. Tell me a little bit about the benefits of selling on multiple marketplaces. 

Yeah, when you're a brand or you're a seller, you want to get to where your customers are.

And that is any good organization wants to do is they're going to go find out where their customers are and they're going to go and, and engage with them. And I think when we find, a lot of our, our customers, when they're, Looking to expand their business and looking to continue to grow and solidify kind of the strength of their business They look at multiple marketplaces.

They may start with one You may be starting with amazon or you're leveraging shopify or something like that But we feel like they've got to continue to reach out to more and more customers um, they have the ability to do that and this interconnected platform that that we enable through linnworks allows customers to Find where their proper customers are depending on what they might be like, if I'm an automotive seller, right.

eBay is really, really big in that that's a huge market for them. We're a partner with eBay and we're actually a preferred partner with eBay. But that's a channel that they can leverage. And so part of our platform is how do we connect more effectively with, with all the different marketplaces so that our sellers and our brands have the ability to go where their customers are and continue to expand their business and not think about having to do that with a one off type of business process.

It's all seamlessly integrated within the business flows that we have within that, within the platform. 

Okay, I want to take one step back and dive a little bit into the challenges, risks, and downsides of selling on these multiple platforms. you're starting a new business or you're brick and mortar and venturing in the world of online, obviously, the tech that is involved is overwhelming.

give me a couple of examples what people, merchants struggle the most with. 

Yeah, some of it is just the order fulfillment and the inventory management. I would say from our, platform, that's, that's what we see as some of the biggest challenges. Then the proliferation of listings. So I've got to continue to update my pricing and have a pricing capability.

But like when you're looking at, how they're effectively understanding what the demand is. On these marketplaces, what the requirements are in the marketplaces, what the integrations need to be, and then how that flows from an order management perspective efficiently through the inventories that they have, or even the warehouse that they have, or they're third partied out these capabilities from a platform perspective.

linnworks, to give you a little bit of background, linnworks is a, is an e commerce, commerce operations platform doing, order management, inventory management, listings, warehouse management, forecasting. It's kind of, I would say the back end stuff that people look to do. not the selling and not the financial management, but it's all the rest of the nuts and bolts that take place when I want to get to my customers and have them have the right experience and get the right orders in place.

Um, so I think some of the challenges that our, customers find is when I'm dealing with multiple marketplaces is what are the requirements? What are the integrations that need to take place? What are the expectations and how do I make sure that I have the proper inventory available to be sold as well as understand how I get a customer experience through that channel that allows my customers to come back?

we hear is a common theme from our, our sellers is, I want recurring sales, you know, whatever you might be selling. Now I want recurrent sales, which means I got to go back to the customer And then if there's a problem in the shipping, if there's a problem in the order management or inventories are delayed or what have you, it just creates noise and inefficiency within their, operation.

And that's where we kind of step in. We create that efficiency in the operation while being connected to all the different marketplaces and the idiosyncrasies that are associated with that. 

Let's touch on the different parts of it. Start with listings. obviously maintaining listings on multiple platforms is a total pain in the neck.

How do you help with that? 

It is, it is, it is. And part of it is understanding kind of how we, so we have a listings technology that, integrates seamlessly with the rest of our product, as well as with the marketplaces to ensure that when I need to be make updates, I'm doing that seamlessly.

I'm doing it efficiently. a lot of these marketplaces, you might be selling hundreds of products on those marketplaces and trying to update your pricing and what have you. And from a listings perspective, it gets really, really cumbersome. We automate that process through, through the technology we, deploy, which allows you to then to scale and be efficient.

You know, it's, again, it's kind of want to get to everybody. But how do I do it in a way that doesn't cause me to make mistakes, to have bad, bad experience and actually be costly for I cause I either overrun my inventory or I carry too much inventory. And that's the other piece of this is how do you get.

Your inventories balanced effectively based on demand, which falls into the forecasting piece and allows us to kind of see what's happening within your marketplaces and gives you that visibility and that intelligence to, to manage those complexities, which I'll tell you, this is a, this is a complex business to see commerce business.

it's not getting simpler. So our mission statement is, and our vision is to make. Selling easier. And so as I look at that, it's a very simple statement, but really it's like, how do you take out the waste? How do you take out the inefficiencies?

what would be a manual process? How do you automate that? How do you bring in AI to help you do that more effectively? And, that's been part of all of our, our development capabilities or our roadmap and our vision from a product perspective. 

It makes perfect sense. It's a complicated business and there's more and more puzzle pieces coming to the game with new players, changing algorithms, changing platforms.

When it comes to forecasting and inventory and you just mentioned AI, is that something that you use? Because I think that's very, very complex to forecast because no one wants to oversell or outsell whatever they have because then you definitely lose customers. How do you manage that? 

So we have a, we have a forecasting capability that leverages the data, the information, historical trends and what have you to help you make better decisions with that.

AI is, part of, our development innovation that we're, we're building into our platform holistically. And AI can affect those, areas of the forecasting capabilities and, As we continue to advance the product, because we will always continue to advance the product, AI is going to play a role in a lot of our technology, not only the forecasting piece.

Tell me, how does a day to day job of a store manager look like using your system? where's the starting point? 

it all comes down to what's your role. So we have, the size of our customers are anywhere from a very, very small organization that, you know, one person is doing everything.

They're looking at their orders on a daily basis. Then they're allocating them. That's automated that allocation. They're printing the shipping tags and, and they're executing and bundling it up and doing it themselves to, you know, organizations that have multiple functions, whether you're in the warehouse, whether you're, you're managing the order, the order management capabilities, or whether you are working with the shipping, it all depends on the size of the organization, kind of how you interact.

One of the ways we, we try to, Enhance our user experience is that we want as many people as we possibly can within an organization to get value out of what we do so based on function based on functional roles. How do we create value for that individual so that their job becomes easier? And so again, it's kind of like based on where you where you sit in the organization and the size of the organization and complexity because we go very small to very, very large.

Which is also an interesting dynamic of how to see innovation, entrepreneurship, and then on the flip side, the large companies that are just trying to be efficient and get to their customers effectively blending with their own brands. again, it says, and it's a sliding, um, area of.

Of our industry. I've been in supply chain for the last 30 years, and I would say this, is moving faster and continues to move faster than any other area of the supply chain that I've been involved in the past, which is, uh, you know, with my tenure and my age, it's pretty good. It keeps me young. 

makes two of us.

Um, give me an example of a, a onboarding process for a new client, maybe a small medium enterprise doing, I don't know, five million or something like that. How does that look in real life? 

Yeah. our implementations, we'll sit down with you. We'll understand the needs that you have.

That's usually scoped out on the front end. When we go through implementations, again, depending on the complexity of your business, it can take anywhere from a few weeks to a couple months. but really within a short period of time, you're up and running and you have the ability to kind of execute effectively.

And then we have, uh, this is maybe a little bit different nuance for our businesses. we want to ensure adoption and we want to assure value. So we have a customer journey process that we run with our customers at 90 days, 180 days every 12 months. We're going to be engaging with you to check, monitor, do customer updates that you understand kind of like a what we're doing and how we can be more efficient, but doing this 30 years we know that there is a level of once you go through an implementation to really be proficient.

You, you really have to really understand all of what the technology can provide. And that's the value that we can provide back to our customers is get everything you can out of it. I know with, you know, I, I joke with my, my family, you know, use my iPhone, but probably the capabilities of that iPhone that I use is probably 20 to 25%, not the full capabilities of the iPhone.

So you have to understand technology and what it can do for you. To truly get the value out of it. And that's what we're trying to ensure that our customers get value. So really between a few weeks and a couple months, depending on complexity, you're going to come on board and we're going to wrap ourselves around you to make sure that you're successful.

The success of being a omni channel seller and using tools around that is obviously how many platforms can you connect with? Tell me a little bit about the APIs that you provide and give me some examples. 

we have APIs into probably 150 different, marketplaces at this point. so from Amazon , to eBay, to TikTok, to we're bringing on, , Temu and this year, uh, just a plethora of these, integrations in these API.

So we've got that we maintain and monitor. So that's the other aspect of this. Some of the complexities. How do I stay connected in the way? Because their requirements change on a, on an annual basis. Sometimes with some of them on a quarterly or biannual basis. I mean, we're looking really consistently across, all of these channels that the requirements change.

So we need to be able to be agile enough to be able to address that. for, you know, 90 percent of our, sellers sell on Amazon. So if Amazon makes a change to something. We better make sure and take care of that and take care of it effectively, so that they can continue to thrive as a, as an organization.

and we see that with scale, right? So we've got a, interesting customer that, was looking to scale their business globally, which is another aspect of this. You know, you've got all these marketplaces that they're dealing with. Um, it's a company called Life Interiors. It's a UK based, furniture retailer, and they've got warehouses in the U S they've got warehouses in the UK, in Germany.

even in the far east. And so what they were looking to do is how do I connect? across all of these channels and across all of these geographies at the same time, as a furniture retailer with multiple inventories. And so they put our platform in place, which was really critical because they needed the network.

They needed what we call the ecosystem. To be in place to be able to do that effectively and you know, they reduced order processing time by 40 percent. great. I love when customers measure this stuff because it's really important. They reduce processing time by 40 percent. They decrease their discrepancies by 25 and they cut their overselling by 30 percent.

Part of it is to efficiency. Part of it is to actual cost, right? I don't want to oversell. want to reduce my inventories I want to keep just the level of inventory I need if I have too much carrying cost That's a lot of cash flow that you need into your business A lot of these companies as they're growing through their their growing pains need to be cognizant about How all that works and we work very effectively with a lot of our customers to be able to do that and help them with those challenges 

I think specifically with shrinking profit margins, it's important to optimize every part of your business because otherwise it becomes really, really difficult.

And I think you gave a good example on how complex it can be. It's not only one country, not only U. S., you can be selling in multiple countries and multiple warehouse and becomes really complex. How do you deal with brands that approach you that have in house built solutions and are not like on a standard platform like Shopify?

many ways the same way. so it depends on , the capabilities that they're looking for. If they have in house solutions, uh, if they own, they have their own website. their brand themselves, kind of thinking about our platform as a platform. It's an ecosystem that's connecting into all of these capabilities.

It functions in the same way. , so if I've got my own brand, I'm selling on my website. You, you had mentioned earlier, the omni channel, situation. And that really comes down to the complexity of the marketplace. Cause we have customers. That are not only selling, through their own website, through marketplaces, through aggregators, but also brick and mortar.

We're seeing strategies around, to enhance my brand, um, online, I'm going to put a brick and mortar store in a certain geography. And we've had customers that have seen their online sales go up dramatically every time they drop a store in a, in a geography. So it's, there's these evolved, business strategies again, which makes us really exciting and intellectually challenging that, you know, you wouldn't have thought that right.

You know, five, six, 10 years ago, you're thinking about brick and mortar stores like, wow, do we really have to sell online? You know, is that really a channel for us? And it becomes this part of their business. And now you have companies that are doing the opposite. They're doing brick and mortar not to sell more in the brick and mortar, but to actually sell more online.

Which is, it's just great. It's business evolution. , that's why, why a free enterprise system is so good. 

No, absolutely. It's totally surprising. I was sort of coming full 360 back to having a brick and mortar store, but from a complete different angle from a business that started as an online business.

So that's definitely exciting times. Is there any kind of homework that a merchant or that a company or brand needs to do before they can get started? 

Yeah, I think, understanding your own processes is always really good. Understanding where your challenges are, from a, an order management standpoint, from an inventory management standpoint, what are those identifying and kind of mapping all of that as good homework?

I think the other area that we find is really critical because we find certain success factors for our customers when they really get, I would say efficient in leveraging the marketplace strategies. What we find is most of our high performing customers, Internally, their own high performance are customers that are selling on more than five channels.

So if I'm solely selling to my website, I can only get to this many customers. But if I expand out and that usually it's strategically, where do you think your customers are going to be? How do you, you know, do a, market analysis on those that you're trying to touch and understand.

That's another piece of this , that's really critical. Back during COVID, the whole e commerce, mushroom cloud came and it just opened up the marketplace dramatically. And you, you're well aware of that. What's happened is, is that now the competition has become really competitive.

Anybody that could find something could sell it online and people were buying. Right now it's become, how do I become professional at it? How do I become a professional entrepreneur? What is the business plan I have? Where do I want to go with my products? And then what's my best way to not only attain the inventory.

So source those products or create those products or manufacture those products. But how do I want to properly get them through the process to get them to customer, get that ultimate customer experience that they want?, I usually buy from our customers.

We have a great customer Foco in the U S they make the hats and t shirts and paraphernalia for all the sporting teams, for the NFL and the NHL and, uh, NBA, college football, MLB, they're actually moving into the UK as well, which is great , we're being able to support them in that capability.

But you go online and it's like, what's the customer experience they have with them. I have their, you know, hats with my favorite team on it and what have you. And, you stand to understand the philosophy of what they're trying to do from a customer engagement and, selling perspective and you try to feed into that.

And giving them that same experience as you are, from a support and what have you. Try to be part of their business as an organization. And that's where we consider ourselves a very, very customer centric organization. We want to understand as much as we possibly can about not only what you want that, what our platform to do, But why and what you're trying to accomplish as a business.

And I think the more we understand that, and the more we as having a broader perspective can come to the table with some additional solutions that's kind of a philosophy we have. And we're really excited about, where we're going with that as well. So, 

yeah, I totally understand that because a solution that you provide to your clients is a major, if not the most important pillar of a business.

If this That's not contribute to the business that you're in trouble. So I think you become not only a supplier, you are initial key part of this whole business at the end of the day. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about the pricing structure. How does that work? 

Well, from a pricing perspective, it is really dependent on kind of , the modules you need.

Right. and your capabilities to, adopt those. And so it's based off of volume, based off of, complexity of, the usage. so we was talking about IMS, OMS, WMS, forecasting listings, each one of those has a pricing structure based on the amount of volume we're going to use that.

So it's a usage base. Model that gets locked in and you get a price for a period of time that is locked in. and so, it's not user based. So one of the things, and here's a philosophy that, may, counteract Some of the marketplace. but I believe this as a, as a SAS provider, you want as many people to use the technology as you possibly can, because what happens is, is they're getting value and your job as a software providers to provide value.

So we don't charge by seat license or by user, because we want whoever wants to be in the system. Come on in, get in, use it, get value out of it, even if it's just visibility. Okay. And so, it is largely, volume based and that kind of thing. 

Okay. No, that makes perfect sense.

Very cool. Before our coffee break comes to an end, is there anything that you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet? 

we've spanned everything. I would say at the bottom line, this is that. You know, our organization was designed to create software that enable that seller, whether you're a large seller or whether you're a small seller to completely optimize your commerce operations.

We're behind the scenes. We're the ones that kind of do the hard work. The software does the hard work that nobody else sees the order management, inventory management, uh, warehouse manage, all those things, forecasting. It's the intelligence behind the rest of this, the things that occur marketplace, the marketplace, the engagement with the customer, where the stuff that helps you take care of the rest.

And we kind of like that. That's our, spot. And, you know, ultimately we want to partner with our customers and help them grow, we talk about as an organization, we talk about how wonderful it is to watch a customer grow. And so we take pride in that because we know that there's in some form or fashion, We've helped that or we've enabled that to occur.

And that gives us satisfaction and our team thrives on, watching that, seeing that every month we have a customer come in and share their experience, for the broader company. So we have a, a session that basically says it's a customer spotlight. And and we ask them all kinds of questions know, what's doing well, what's, what's challenged, what would you like us to do more?

And that kind of thing. And it's, uh, it's been just great. And that's probably our most well attended sessions. but we thrive on that. Yeah. So we want to be our partners with our customers and we want to provide them more capabilities and leverage all the, the innovation that we possibly can to, to, to do that.

Yeah, having a in-person meeting with one of your customers, I think that that sounds like fun and, uh, it is. Yeah, it is. Absolutely. Cool. Chris, where can people go and find out more about you guys? 

Best way to go is uh, go to our website, www dot dolin works, L-I-N-N-W-O-R-K s.com.

And the, will you have the opportunity to get a demo? You have opportunity to engage with somebody, get some more information, download some case studies, read more about what we really do. Um, that's probably the best source for, for, for that. And then any other, the other, you know, our trust pilot and what have you, we have great reviews on all of that because of the experience that our customers have.

So it's a good way to validate it, but the best way to get information is go to our website. 

Cool. I will put the link in the show notes as always. Then you're just one click away. Chris, thanks so much for giving us an overview for your solution. I think it's an integral part that needs to be optimized for every business to be successful.

And I hope a lot of people will reach out to you and become new customers of yours. Thanks so much for your time. I 

appreciate it. Thank you.