Takealot.com Seller marketplace integration: how does it work?
In this article we look at how integrating the Takealot.com marketplace with your accounting system/ERP can automate the entire sales cycle on the 3rd party marketplace.
Product vendors are often excited to take advantage of Takealot.com’s marketplace offering, whereby you can list your own products on their platform and take advantage of the large volume of customer traffic to increase your sales, all for a small fee.
We look at:
- Why is integration important with Takealot.com’s seller marketplace?
- Is integration for every business, or only for larger businesses with resources?
- The three strikes you’re out! Takealot.com integration solves this
- Can I run a Takealot.com integration and also an online store?
1. Why is integration important with Takealot.com’s seller marketplace?
Running an online marketplace account like Takealot.com requires a lot of hands-on application to ensure stock, price and product merchandising information stays up to date. Any failure to maintain this will leave you with expensive refund/return processes, and also lower your Takealot.com marketplace vendor rating significantly.
You also don’t want to spend valuable time that could be spent elsewhere growing your business, logging in to your Takealot.com marketplace dashboard to update stock or price multiple times per day.
A Takealot.com integration syncs all the critical data to and from your Takealot.com merchant profile that needs to change regularly, like product price, stock, description, images, lead times etc.
2. Is integration for every business, or only for larger businesses with resources?
Takealot.com has an incredibly strict vendor policy, and operates on a ‘3 strikes and you’re out’ regime. This is to ensure their customer service and logistics are world class. So what does this mean?
If you’ve listed a product as “available” on Takealot.com’s marketplace, but a customer has just purchased your entire stock in-store, you’re unable to fulfill any orders placed on Takealot.com. Strike 1!
If your price is incorrect, you’ll be forced to swallow the cost on your account.
3. Three strikes you’re out! Takealot.com integration solves this
Takealot.com has an incredibly strict vendor policy, and operates on a ‘3 strikes and you’re out’ regime. This is to ensure their customer service and logistics are world class. So what does this mean?
If you’ve listed a product as “available” on Takealot.com’s marketplace, but a customer has just purchased your entire stock in-store, you’re unable to fulfill any orders placed on Takealot.com. Strike 1!
If your price is incorrect, you’ll be forced to swallow the cost on your account.
4. How to I keep my data in sync between Takealot.com and my WooCommerce store?
We get asked “can I run both at the same time” and the short answer is “yes”. Adding a Takealot.com marketplace integration as well as an eCommerce store works by using the same product merchandising information across both sales channels.
This does not mean you must sell all your products residing on your online store on Takealot.com marketplace as well, as you can easily select which products you want to toggle as “active” or “inactive” per sales channel via the Storehub.io dashboard.
For each sales channel, you can pick a pricelist to use, e.g “pricelist 3” is used for Takealot.com marketplace integration, but “pricelist 1“ is used for my retail Woocommerce or Shopify store.
For orders to sync back from Takealot.com marketplace and your online store, we recommend creating 2X cash customer accounts for each, so orders placed on Takealot.com marketplace are raised against “Takealot Sales” customer and your WooCommerce sales are raised against an “Online Sales” customer account. This will make reporting on sales easy.
Need more information?
We’re here to help and offer guidance where needed on your Takealot.com marketplace integration requirements. Please contact our helpful technical staff at Storehub.io and we’ll gladly assist you
