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Starting up a business in WebAR, like any business, needs cash injection. That's where it's necessary to focus on onboarding new customers fast. Now this is theory. Anyone, who has started a buisness understands that achieving that feat isn't easy.
But it is that hard? Perhaps not. Let's dive today to find that out.
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Niche Down to Ecommerce – What about Marketplaces?
Unless you want to focus your WebAR business into art, museum, sports or similar industry, ecommerce is the most favorite place to grow AR based customer experience. But it is not easy to find ecommerce customers, since B2B business deals take longer time to seal.
That's where ecommerce marketplaces come into place. This is a gold mine for you to scale your business to the next level.
Ecommerce Marketplaces – Status in 2023
Do you know that there are 11 million+ active online ecommerce stores around the world in 2023? That's an insane number of businesses who can become a potential customer to your business. Even a tiny fraction of this business population will be sufficient to make your business a success.
Here's a list of top 10 Ecomm marketplaces hosting online active stores in 2023:
1.Custom Cart 1,453,844
2.Wix 651,032
3.Squarespace 279,467
4.Cafe24 220,616
5.Square Online 212,284
6.OpenCart 212,902
7.PrestaShop 211,716
8.Bigcartel 188,574
9.Magento 163,725
10.Weebly 50,504
The top players here are of course Shopify (4.5+ million active stores), WooCommerce (3.9+ million active stores), BigCommerce (47,000+ stores) etc.
How to leverage this huge B2B lead source?
There are two ways you can approach the marketplaces to address your potential clients.
Method One:
Shopify has its product store from where store owners can buy and use plugins and software, customized in a Shopify way (PHP add-ons). It's a great idea to launch a PHP add-on on Shopify store which can enable store owners to click and integrate WebAR services to their stores. You can create a source of subscription via that process.
Similar process can be followed to launch your WebAR add-on (API based AR creation) in different platforms like BigCommerce, WooCommerce or Prestashop.
Cons: However, this can be bit expensive since you need to build a PHP based plugin for the marketplaces along with their own customized framework to integrate AR APIs (to automatically create, delete AR experiences). It's a good idea to hire a developer to build such plugins. But once done, it is a steady source of revenue for a long time.
Method Two:
The other way is more traditional and less expensive (and less complicated too). Instead of building a plugin for each marketplaces, you can use your lead generation tool to target the business running on these marketplaces. This way, you'll never run out of leads, even in next few years.
Target them based on your ecommerce niche focus (furniture, electronics, home-decor, fashion, jwellery, clothes, eyewear, bikes or anything that you like). Reach them out via cold email or call to pitch your service effectively and grow.
Cons: This is a more tedious but proven way to manage your sales pipleline. Most of the store owners in the marketplaces are aware of the benefits of WebAR since there are already WebAR plugins available in the stores. So it would be easy to convince them while selling WebAR service to them.
What are you waiting for?
The difference between a successful and a not-so-successful business is the ability to take action fast and consistently towards any opportunity. Selling WebAR as a service in the market will only increase its demand with time. You need to plan to take action fast to grab the seat before others eat them out.
Marvin XR has compatibility with 20+ ecommerce marketplaces to help brands launching their desired WebAR service in least time.