Success Story: Seller Communication is Key

The Client: 
The client is a well-known American-based outdoor recreation company. Its products include outdoor clothing, footwear, backpacks, camping equipment, and related items ranging from $15 to over $500. Our focus for this project was to provide the client with effective third-party seller communications for their entire catalog of thousands of ASINS. 

The Situation: 
POTOO has been working with the client’s U.S. and Canadian Sales and eCommerce teams for over three years. The client was plagued with unauthorized third-party sellers on the marketplace and needed POTOO’s help to identify and contact these sellers to remove unapproved listings. Safeguarding such an extensive portfolio of products that changes seasonally can be an enormous task, so the client needed to tap into POTOO’s expert outreach strategies to target unauthorized sellers. The goal of the initiative was to keep the active seller list to under 300 at all times. 

Best Practices for Unauthorized Seller Outreach: 
Brands need to advocate for themselves on digital platforms because the marketplace is not monitoring or enforcing 3P sellers on their behalf. There are some measures in place that allow brands to file a claim when discovering a listing violation. Still, the marketplace will not remove a listing unless there are clear copyright or intellectual property infringements. With that in mind, brands are usually more successful when they take matters into their own hands. 

POTOO worked with the client to categorize the type of unauthorized sellers listing on their products. Next, the criteria were established based on the violation and sent to the seller in question by the POTOO team. We worked with the client to create targeted, effective messages and sent them to third-party sellers. Some communications addressed specific policy violations, while some outreach required attention from the brand’s legal counsel. 

What to Include When Reporting a Violation:
* The store or business name of the seller you are reporting.
* The ASIN or ISBN of the item’s detail page and the product title.
* The marketplaces for which the violation has occurred.
* A concise explanation of the violation based on the policy.
* Supporting documentation (for example, order IDs, related messaging, or receipts).

Action:
The client used POTOO’s Dashboards to monitor third-party activity on the marketplace. From there, our team sent the list of unauthorized sellers to the client’s sales team every week to determine the next steps. The outreach included a series of email communications followed by a hard copy correspondence. We created a master spreadsheet to keep track of the outreach progress. Consistent outreach was sent by our team regularly until we achieved the desired response. 

Results: 
At the start of the program, we discovered that a large percentage of the brand’s listings were coming from unauthorized third-party sellers. Throughout this partnership, POTOO has reduced the number of unauthorized sellers by 80%, translating to approximately 1,100 sellers being removed from association with the client’s products. 

Does your eCommerce team need help sending effective 3P seller communications? Connect with our team today to learn more about how POTOO can you support you: potoosolutions.com/contact-us

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