Retail in Asia

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Why traditional retailers need small businesses

Small Business Owner - Retail in Asia

Amazon is widely known as one of the world’s largest online retailers, but might not be known is that around half of the goods sold on Amazon are sold by third party merchants, the majority being small businesses.

In fact, Amazon has around two million third party merchants that account for half of its retail marketplace sales. This provides an opportunity for small businesses, whether product manufacturers or even smaller retailers in their own right, to access the 300 million Amazon shoppers from around the globe.

SEE ALSO: Amazon’s next steps into Indian e-commerce

While Amazon has been a pioneer in embracing small businesses as selling partners (a move emulated very successfully by China’s Alibaba Group), other traditional retailers have been slow to follow suit.

Benefits of partnering with small businesses

For larger retailers, partnering with entrepreneurs and small businesses can create the ultimate win-win situation. For entrepreneurs, it allows them to leverage each retailer’s online traffic, and gain exposure to a far larger customer base.

For retailers, it not only broadens product selection, but if it plays it smartly, it should help it optimise product availability in-store as well.

Not to mention, these opportunities help small business owners with access to additional resources. Just recently, Amazon held a conference targeted at women entrepreneurs to help them be more successful in their businesses (and as sellers on the Amazon platform, of course).

Of course, retailers have to do this smartly, or it will crash and burn. But those with a savvy omni-channel strategy will have a great opportunity to leverage even more entrepreneurs as the next part of their own retail success stories.

(Source: Enterpreneur)