The Top 8 eCommerce Platforms for Leading CPGs

In today’s marketplace, eCommerce is an essential and effective approach for top Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) firms to connect with clients and maximize revenue. Using a multichannel approach has become a necessity to meet a fragmented customer base everywhere they’re shopping for products online.

Smart sellers realize the benefits of expanding their audience and boosting visibility by selling through more than one channel with eCommerce platforms, meeting the demand of modern consumers who frequently use multiple online channels to browse and buy products. As many as 80% of customers do online research before making a purchase, whether online or in a physical store, and 72% of consumers prefer connecting with brands and businesses through multichannel marketing.

However, selling multichannel can be very complex due to varying rules and regulations and the challenges of maintaining consistent pricing and marketing. That’s why using a multichannel eCommerce platform is critical to success.

With a variety of eCommerce platforms available that suit the different needs of leading CPG organizations, how do you choose the right one? In this post, we’ll take a closer look at multichannel eCommerce for leading CPGs and why it’s necessary, the advantages of using an eCommerce platform, and survey eight top solutions that might be right for your business,

Why are companies all-in on multichannel eCommerce?

Multichannel eCommerce is the term for how companies sell their products through various sales channels, including online marketplaces, direct-to-consumer websites, and physical brick-and-mortar stores.

In the shadow of the global pandemic and its resulting financial crisis, digital transformation to multichannel eCommerce became necessary for most companies to survive and thrive, especially CPG firms. 

Multichannel eCommerce offers distinct advantages to CPGs, including:

• Increased sales and revenue – Selling through multiple channels allow CPGs to reach a wider audience and potentially increase their overall sales and revenue.
• Improved customer experience – CPGs can enhance the customer experience by providing various sales channels to make buying their product a seamless experience. 
• More opportunities for data collection – Multichannel selling can increase the amount of data CPG companies receive. This data shows how customers behave and their preferences for ordering products and services. 

To fully take advantage of the opportunity that multichannel eCommerce offers, businesses are turning to eCommerce platforms.

What are eCommerce platforms?

A multichannel eCommerce platform is a web-based tool that allows businesses to offer their products across various channels, including social media, websites, physical stores, and online marketplaces.

Multichannel eCommerce platforms make the lives of CPGs easier by giving them a central area to manage all their sales channels from one place. A significant 86% of senior-level marketers agree with the importance of creating a cohesive customer journey across all touchpoints and channels.

These platforms simplify client engagement and connection, making it more straightforward to increase sales and customer satisfaction. eCommerce platforms also help leading CPG companies gain helpful information and insights about their clients’ purchasing patterns with advanced analytics. Companies can better understand what their clients want by studying this data and adjusting their marketing and sales strategies accordingly.

3 Ways Leading CPGs Benefit from eCommerce Platforms

1. Improved Efficiency

Since these eCommerce platforms provide a single dashboard to manage multiple sales channels, CPGs can handle them quicker and more efficiently. This single source of truth can help lower the number of mistakes made and increase operational effectiveness. It also ensures that product pricing and marketing remain consistent through various channels.

2. Increased Reach and Accessibility

A central eCommerce platform allows more sales channels to be managed simultaneously and helps improve CPG company’s lead generation. It also makes it simple to add products to any new channel serviced by the platform. For example, a product listing can quickly be uploaded in the correct format from Amazon to Walmart or Shopify.  

3. Enhanced Flexibility

Multichannel eCommerce platforms allow leading CPG companies to analyze and act upon advanced data more effectively. For example, if a CPG company notices that one of its channels is performing better than the others, it can direct more resources to improve that channel and adjust others in return.

How to choose an eCommerce Platform?

There are various multichannel eCommerce platforms; some are more comprehensive, while others are more niche in function.

The first thing required is to determine your budget and any particular requirements your organization’s multichannel strategy requires from the platform. Then you can narrow down your selection to fit your company’s unique situation.

Next, confirm that the platform is compatible with your desired sales channels. It’s also a good idea to ensure the platform is capable of future scalability to handle new channels, increased traffic, and future growth.

A multichannel eCommerce platform needs to be compatible with your current tech stack. If one of your existing tools doesn’t play nicely with your eCommerce platform, it will be a time-consuming headache that could lead to more significant problems later.

Finally, your eCommerce platform should have sufficient security (and regular updates) to protect your customer’s information.  

To help you through the selection process, here’s a quick guide to eight of the top eCommerce platforms available today.

The Top 8 eCommerce Platforms for Leading CPGs

1. BigCommerce

BigCommerce is a leading B2C and B2B platform that offers enterprise-level functionality combined with ease of use. It casts a wide net across 150+ marketplaces, social media channels, and ad channels. Key features include store creation and hosting, marketing, SEO, and security.

Pros:

• Custom templates to create a unique and professional look for your online store
• SEO and marketing tools like Google Shopping Integration, email marketing, and social media integration
• 24/7 customer support by phone and email

Cons:

• Expensive
• Limited support is offered for different currencies and languages, so probably not the best for CPGs with international customers.
• Limited flexibility on product page variants

Pricing: 4 pricing levels are offered, from $29.95 to $299.95/month, and a 15-day free trial.

Reviewer says: “Easy to get started and decent looking templates. Difficult to use custom fields and to reach developer support”.

2. Noogata

While Noogata is not strictly an eCommerce operations platform, it is an essential tool that an eCommerce organization needs in their tech stack because of the immense advantages it offers in harmonizing, enriching, and extracting insights from multiple marketplace analytics. 

Noogata is an automated multichannel platform offering premium retail analytics and reporting. 

It’s the only multichannel eCommerce Competitive Intelligence Platform designed for consumer goods and digital brands companies with a large and growing portfolio of products. The platform’s AI-powered insights help your company analyze data from multiple eCommerce marketplaces to make the best data-driven decisions from the C-suite to channel managers. 

Noogata’s eCommerce analytics integrates data collection with powerful measurement, reporting, recommendation engines, and predictive models. You can easily scale analytics throughout your portfolio, across hundreds of products, categories and channels. The results? You save time and resources while growing revenues and profits.

Pros:

• Customizable starter kits enrich your data with external sources and predictive modeling to create the perfect analytics-ready dataset.
• The user-friendly no-code interface provides a seamless experience that allows you to get started fast.
• Noogata has a secure payment system to protect customers’ personal and financial information.

Cons:

• Limited to specific regions
• The time from sign up to start using the platform is so fast that you might not be ready for it.

Pricing: Free trial available. Pricing is customized by inquiry. 

Reviewer says: “Noogata is perfectly positioned to address the significant market need for a best-in-class, no-code data analytics platform to drive decision-making. The innovative platform replaces the need for internal build or the use of out-of-the-box vendor solutions, which are limited. The company’s ability to unlock the value of data through AI is a game-changer”.

3. ChannelAdvisor

ChannelAdvisor is a veteran of eCommerce platforms, serving retailers and brands since 2001. It’s a multichannel solution to streamline eCommerce operations from marketing to sales and fulfillment. The platform helps you to manage channels, product data, inventory, orders, and sales, with performance-tracking metrics across all your marketing channels.

Pros:

• Integrates with various platforms such as Amazon, eBay, and Google Shopping
• Provides automated marketing and advertising to optimize digital marketing campaigns like SEO, SEM, and social media advertising
• The analytics and reporting tools provide detailed analytics that help track performance. 

Cons:

• Not very user-friendly
•  Difficult for those new to digital marketing or eCommerce
• Customization is limited and does not offer the same flexibility as other platforms.

Pricing: There’s a free demo, and pricing is customized based on your organization’s size and needs.

Reviewer says: “ChannelAdvisor connects to many different platforms, making it very versatile. Unless you have a tech background, or a developer to help you set things up, it is not user-friendly”.

4. Expandly

Expandly helps growing SMB and D2C eCommerce retailers to connect, manage and automate listing, inventory, orders, shipping, and accounting. Expandly’s key features are its dual focus on helping SMEs grow to multichannel and inventory management.

Pros:

• Integrates with multiple marketplaces and sales channels
• Offers various inventory management, shipping, and accounting tools to automate your eCommerce business
• Great technical support

Cons:

• Subscription-based, so you will pay a fee regardless of the sales generated with the platform
• The interface is a bit complicated.
• Some issues with bugs

Pricing: Monthly packages range from $255 to $520 per month, with customized plans available.

Reviewer says: “If you are looking for a low-cost multichannel stock management solution, I would definitely recommend Expandly for the task.”

5. ExportYourStore

ExportYourStore’s unique focus is on allowing multichannel sellers to use their primary marketplace as their product information source, then easily export to any of the twelve major marketplaces. It’s best for businesses making international sales, with plenty of tools to help companies manage and improve their online stores.

Pros:

• User-friendly, easy for beginners to navigate
• Supports various payment options and different currencies
• Detailed analytics tools allow users to track sales, customer behavior, and marketing efforts

Cons:

• Fewer integrations than other platforms 
• Fewer design templates than other platforms
• Customer service response time is slow

Pricing: Four pricing tiers, starting at $29/month for Starter and up to $199/month for Enterprise.

Reviewer says: “I exported my Shopify store to eBay with ease. The process was quick and easy, and I was able to get my store up and running on eBay in no time.”

6. SellerChamp

SellerChamp is primarily designed for small to medium-sized eCommerce businesses, helping to process orders and track inventory. It offers a variety of helpful features, including a RePricer, a Bulk Lister, and Inventory Sync.

Pros:

• Fast and easy to list items on Amazon and eBay
• Repricing functions excellent
• Very good customer support 

Cons:

• Support is only offered for physical products, meaning digital product providers must use a different platform
• Limited shipping options
• Issues integrating with Etsy

Pricing: Pricing tiers range from $39 to $479 per month. A 14-day free trial option is offered.

Reviewer says: “The product itself is great with a wide range for potential improvement. But in the current state it does what it is supposed to do. The software did save us a lot of time and organized our multichannel eCommerce.”

7. StoreAutomator

StoreAutomator’s flexible platform helps B2B and B2C companies with inventory management and multichannel listing. It offers 200+ channels and marketplaces, custom store templates, product sync, and listing optimization features.

Pros:

• Custom templates to create a unique brand design
• Plenty of automation features for email marketing, order fulfillment, and inventory updates
• Templating and mapping features make multichannel listing easy once set up.

Cons:

• Expensive compared to other eCommerce platforms
• Quite difficult to navigate
• Reporting features could be improved

Pricing: Pricing is custom on inquiry at three levels: Growing, Scaling, and Enterprise. A free demo is available. 

Reviewer says: “The software is easy to list on multichannel marketplaces while keeping all of the data and images centralized. 

8. Zentail

Zentail is a multichannel listing automation platform that enables sellers to manage product data and optimize listings across channels through SMART types. It’s an ideal solution for universal change management, so your products aren’t delisted when marketplaces suddenly change their requirements.

Pros:

• Easy-to-follow reports
• Can manage inventory in multiple locations
• Simplifies scaling

Cons:

• Sales forecasting could be better
• Limited international support (US and Canada only)
• The software has quite a lot of bugs

Pricing: Pricing information is by inquiry for three plans ranging from Starter to Enterprise. An Amazon Unlimited plan is also offered.

Reviewer says: “The software has all of the functionality that I need to manage my multichannel marketplaces. The Zentail support team is super responsive and a pleasure to work with.”

Multichannel eCommerce Solutions for Leading CPGs: The Bottom Line

Ultimately, multichannel eCommerce platforms can benefit leading CPG companies by improving their reach, sales, data analytics, and customer experience. These platforms save time by managing eCommerce companies’ sales channels more efficiently through one centralized dashboard.

Noogata is the only solution built especially for CPGs that provides comprehensive tools and reports for intelligent decision-making and impactful ROI. In one seamless AI-powered platform, it combines multiple data sources, including customer interactions, sales data, and marketing metrics.

Noogata empowers teams with the tools and reports they need to make intelligent, data-driven decisions that drive real business impact. Try a free demo today if you’re ready to experience how Noogata can positively impact your eCommerce business.