How to have the perfect festive season: a brand's guide with Fynd

The festive season brings along with it the busiest quarter for the retail industry, where every brand vies for success and dominance on marketplaces. Fynd partners with more than 50 such brands, helping them tap into this great opportunity for growth on all prominent third-party online marketplaces.

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From onboarding to growth, our teams provide relentless support to brands so they can make the most of this eventful quarter. Let’s take a look at what the different teams have been up to.

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Onboarding

Everyone wants to seize the opportunity on online marketplaces during the festive season, as the period attracts the highest traffic of the year. Whether it is a new brand, an established retail champion with negligible online presence, or an existing brand launching a new sub-brand, we offer our services to assist you in all phases and processes of onboarding.

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Standard onboarding process

The usual period for onboarding a brand on any marketplace is nearly 80 days, however, it may vary based on multiple factors. The process involves a close knit coordination between Fynd’s onboarding team, brand POCs, and marketplaces.

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Let's understand what the process looks like and the people involved:

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Integrations

For brands to fulfill marketplace orders efficiently, a crucial step is integration with POS / ERP systems used at different locations. This enables smooth, real-time inventory and order flow between different systems.

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A huge spike in order volume and sales during the festive season puts a strain on these integrations. That’s where our Real-Time Integrations (RTI) team comes into the picture.

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Standard integration process

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1. The team anticipates the order volume on all marketplaces based on the historic performance of the brand, customer preferences on marketplaces, and the brand’s inputs.

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2. Based on these inputs, Fynd RTI team scales their systems so there’s minimal-to-zero lag in order processing and inventory sync during the sale event.

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The keys to ensuring smooth order flow and inventory sync on all marketplaces during these events are integrating health and readiness.

Cataloging

Cataloging is an essential element for ecommerce businesses. The importance of having everything smooth for cataloging during the festive season shouldn’t be underestimated. Let us understand the process and people involved.

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The festive season is a great opportunity to showcase your latest collections and styles. Hence, even when most of your styles are live on all marketplaces, the festive season can be a busy time for you. It is important to catalog and photoshoot your new launches on time, especially while adhering to the timelines for marketplace freeze periods.

Growth

The key objective of our growth team with any brand ahead of the festive season is to analyze and close all preparedness gaps and cascade good practices well in time for the big sales. This entails paying equal attention to product display page (PDP) health and fulfillment readiness for every marketplace where your business is live.

Standard process

The regular roles and responsibilities of your Fynd Growth Manager include catalog and inventory sanity checks, discount strategies, performance marketing, training, etc. However, before the festive season, the growth team streamlines its approach to efficiently utilize resources and get better results during the festive sales.

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Here’s how our growth teams work with brands: 

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The team extends strategic and operational support to brands wherever necessary to ensure complete festive season preparedness

Shortlisting products for festive season sales

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With our years of experience, we help brands identify the right products to take live during the festive season sales based on past performance, top-selling categories, average selling price on different marketplaces, ideal discounts, etc. 

Conducting thorough gap analysis for live inventory and catalog

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Our Growth Managers (GMs) then conduct a thorough catalog & inventory gap analysis, streamlined only for these selected products. The objective of this analysis is:

• To ensure all listed products are live on all marketplaces
• All listed locations are live on all marketplaces
• Inventory is smoothly flowing across all locations on all marketplaces

Giving product listings enough time to gather clicks and reviews

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Next, we recommend that the brands take the new product listing page live at least 2 months before the freeze period sets in. Even if the existing pages are edited, it should be done a few months before the sale goes live. Doing this gives the product pages enough time to gather clicks and reviews from customers, and eventually marketplace algorithms rank them higher.

Maintaining equal presence all marketplaces

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Many apparel brands may prefer listing a higher number of products and taking more locations live on apparel-dominant marketplaces like Myntra. However, we recommend listing the maximum number of products and locations on every marketplace that you are on. Having lower inventory and few live fulfillment locations pushes down your products in search results, causing you to miss out on great sales opportunities. 

Keeping track of discount banner offers from marketplaces

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Another way brands tend to miss out on good sales opportunities is by ignoring discount banner offers from marketplaces. Our growth teams check for and keep your brand updated on these discount opt-in announcements from marketplaces.

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While a smooth festive season prep is what everyone wants, some hurdles come unanticipated. Our teams at Fynd leverage their decade-long experience to help you navigate them and set up fruitful processes ahead of the sale season. Upon working closely with several brands, our team has also compiled a list of the most common mistakes committed by the brands before the festive season, for you to avoid.

Want to become a part of the growing Fynd family? Reach out to us and let our teams transform your business with their decade long retail experience and expertise. This festive season, trust Fynd to help you achieve all your sales goals and surpass them. 

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