Updated: Sep 28
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Multi-channel selling is how today's eCommerce business owners reach customers across your online store, marketplaces, social platforms and beyond. As buyers move freely between channels, adopting a multichannel strategy is no longer optional. It's how brands stay competitive and grow. Wix eCommerce supports multiple business models on a single backend, making it easier to manage your channels without juggling separate systems.
In this guide, you'll learn what multi-channel selling is, where to sell online and how to build a strategy that works for your business.
Grow your business with Wix's multichannel sales.
TL;DR: What is multi-channel selling?
Multi-channel selling puts the same products in front of buyers on your own store, on marketplaces, on social platforms and in person, so shoppers can buy wherever they already are. It pays off when the channels are chosen deliberately and run from one source of truth for pricing and stock, and it goes wrong when a business spreads itself across platforms it cannot maintain. Wix supports omnichannel sales across online marketplaces and social platforms.
Sales channel | What it does best |
Your online store | Owns the customer relationship and gives you full control of brand, pricing and data |
Online marketplaces | Reaches shoppers already searching for a product like yours, in exchange for fees and rules |
Social platforms | Drives discovery through content, in front of buyers who were not shopping yet |
Search engines | Captures intent from shoppers who start on Google rather than inside a marketplace |
Physical retail | Serves local buyers and doubles as a showroom for the stock you sell online |
Ready to start selling online? Build a custom online store with Wix and get the tools to sell, manage and grow your business from one dashboard. Customize every detail, reach customers across channels and market your brand with built-in SEO and marketing tools.
What is multi-channel selling?
Multichannel selling is when you list your products on more than one sales channel at a time. A multichannel selling approach lets you tap into the existing customer bases of other platforms and online selling sites, growing your reach and sales.
A strong multichannel strategy doesn’t simply rely on a spray-and-pray approach. Rather, it leverages a select mix of channels, based on who’s shopping on each channel, customer expectations or assumptions and the overall competitive landscape.
For this reason, multichannel retailing requires a deep understanding of your target buyers and thorough investigation into the channels you’re looking to test.
Where should you sell?
With all that in mind, here are several main types of sales channels worth considering.
Your online store
An eCommerce website legitimizes your brand by offering real estate that’s entirely controlled by you. Your site should be mobile-friendly, fast-loading and carefully branded. It should act as a space where customers can learn all about your brand, browse your latest products and complete a purchase with ease.
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It's also a hub that lets you collect customer contact information, promote special events or deals, and build loyalty, several things that are much more difficult to do on a third-party platform.
Merchants who start out on marketplaces tend to notice the difference once they have a store of their own. “Having your own website gives you a level of professionalism, creative freedom, and ownership that's hard to achieve through marketplaces alone,” says Rosie Ferguson Gathings of Rosie Hues Fine Art, who moved her print sales off Instagram DMs and onto her own store.
Read Also: How to start a business
Online marketplaces
Online marketplaces include many of the sites that we’re all familiar with. They’re often one of the first places people look when researching products or are looking for alternatives to higher-end (read: pricey) brands. Selling on these channels gives you instant access to a large audience of shoppers, so long as you abide by each channel’s regulations and are able to differentiate your products from the competition. Wix integrates eCommerce stores with Amazon, eBay and Google marketplaces.
Here are several of today’s most popular marketplaces, though the list goes far beyond these.
Amazon: Amazon remains the largest online retailer in the U.S. This also means that it’s one of the most competitive channels to sell on, so it’s important to learn the ins and outs of selling on Amazon before jumping in.
Read also: Amazon seller fees you need to know about.
Walmart Marketplace: The retail behemoth allows third-party sellers to list their items alongside Walmart-exclusive merchandise, just like you would on Amazon or eBay. Walmart Marketplace manages a relatively strict application process for new sellers, so plan for a longer onboarding than most marketplaces.
eBay: eBay counts around 136 million active buyers worldwide. Selling on eBay is a particularly good option if you offer niche products like vintage items or collectibles, and it helps that the cost to sell on eBay is not as steep as others.
Google: Google is not just a search engine. It's also a key player in your multichannel sales approach. Google Shopping reaches shoppers who begin a product search on Google rather than inside a marketplace. You can get started by learning more about how to sell on Google.
Etsy: Etsy has around 87 million active buyers. Now a household name, Etsy continues to be a go-to sales channel for merchants who excel in the DIY space (read: how to sell on Etsy). However, there are other Etsy alternatives worth entertaining, especially if Etsy fees start to rack up.
TikTok Shop: TikTok Shop turns short-form video into a checkout, so products get discovered inside content rather than through a search bar. It suits visual, demonstrable products with an impulse-friendly price, and it rewards sellers who can keep publishing content rather than just maintaining a listing. Wix allows merchants to sell directly on TikTok and Instagram.
“A marketplace can help people discover you but a website gives you a home that is entirely yours,” says Anjana G, founder of The Tinted Palette, who sold more than 1,000 calendars through her own store after outgrowing order management in Instagram DMs. The useful way to read that is discovery on the marketplace, relationship on your store.
Worth noting: the address can say what kind of channel you are. A .market domain reads as a venue where goods change hands, which helps when you host other sellers rather than only your own stock.
Learn more: What is multichannel eCommerce integration?
Social media
Platforms like Instagram, Facebook (see our guide on how to sell on Facebook Marketplace) and TikTok are growing in popularity, not only as social platforms but also as sales channels in their own right.
Think: Instagram Shopping, which enables customers to purchase products without ever leaving the app (see our guide on how to sell on Instagram). These social commerce features are a powerful complement to existing selling capabilities, such as being able tag products in your Instagram posts and drive people to your site.
The beauty of social media is that you’re engaging customers on the channels they visit every day. While some users may not be looking to make a purchase right away, participating on these channels can keep your brand top of mind.
“Social media is wonderful for connecting with customers, but having a website solely for showcasing your work is very important,” says Caitlin Grace, an artist who built an email list of over 10,000 subscribers through her own site.
Search engines
Search engines offer a plethora of organic and paid opportunities to draw attention to your products, such as Bing Shopping, Google Shopping and Google Ads.
Unlike traditional SEO strategies, the latter two are managed through the Google Merchant Center, where you can upload your product feeds and select which Google properties (including selling on YouTube, Gmail and Google-owned apps) to feature your products on. If you're a Wix user, you can create a GMC account directly from your site’s dashboard, then use the built-in Google Merchant Solutions connector to sync listings with the products in your online store.
Participating in these programs will allow you to showcase your products more prominently as shoppable posts. Search engines will then drive users to your site to complete a purchase, supporting each stage of the buyer journey.
Physical (aka brick-and-mortar) stores
Physical retail is far from dead. More accurately, it’s changing.
Nowadays, many DTC brands are adopting clicks-to-bricks approaches, using physical stores as showrooms if not fully stocked stores. As you list your products to multiple online channels, it’s worth considering how to better integrate any store locations with online experiences, moving towards a true omnichannel retail experience. That shift usually forces a platform decision, since not every eCommerce platform for omnichannel retail handles it the same way. Taken further, this connected approach becomes extended commerce, where your store, social platforms, marketplaces, in-person sales and AI assistants all operate from a single backend.
Rather than treating each channel as separate avenues, think about how they all play together, and how your customers are likely moving fluidly from one to the other.
Top benefits of a multichannel retail strategy
While increased sales opportunities is the most obvious benefit of multichannel retail, it's not the only one. Other benefits include:
New customers
Every shopper is different. Some prefer to go straight to the source, while others may search for the best price across multiple channels. Adding more ways for people to buy from you only makes sense to reach the maximum amount of potential customers.
A competitive advantage
If you're not on a sales channel that your competitor is on, you obviously lose out on a sale, but worst of all, you run the risk of the competition completely dominating the mind share of your target audience. This means, you automatically lose out on even the potential of a sale in the future, as customers will never think of buying from you when in product-search mode.
‘Free’ marketing
Joining an online marketplace gives you the advantage of that marketplace’s marketing efforts and technology. For example, the attention driven by Amazon’s Prime Day gets your brand in front of millions of potential buyers who may buy from you that day and even in the future through your own website.
Increased brand recognition
The more places you are, the more people come to recognize your brand. This in turn builds trust and increases the likelihood of a future sale.
Reduced risk
Many eCommerce businesses tend to over-rely on one particular sales channel, especially if they’ve seen pronounced results from it. But the eCommerce industry is dogged by many carpet-pulls, leaving merchants in the lurch when a channel changes drastically due to internal or external forces. A multichannel approach helps mitigate channel risk.
Top challenges of multichannel selling
But for all of its advantages, multichannel selling still comes with its own challenges. Those include:
Deciding where to sell
It’s all too easy to stretch yourself thin across too many channels at once. To avoid becoming overwhelmed or wasting your time on channels that don’t attract the right audience, you’ll need to be intentional about where you sell.
Maintaining consistency
The more channels you add, the more complicated it gets to keep your product details (e.g., prices, titles, descriptions, pictures, branding) in order. You must establish one source of truth for your product data and a system for implementing any changes across every channel.
Remaining compliant
Each third-party marketplace has its own way of doing things. Be it the way it categorizes its products or how it evaluates seller performance, each has its own requirements for merchants on its platform. You need to familiarize yourself with marketplace regulations, alongside any policy changes (no matter how suddenly they crop up) to retain your selling privileges.
Multichannel fulfillment
Beyond catering to various shipping expectations, you’ll need to consider which fulfillment method makes most sense in terms of speed, cost and competitiveness. For example, many Amazon sellers use FBA, at least in part, for fulfillment because it gives them a competitive edge (read: the coveted “Prime” status).
Inventory management
Poor inventory management can lead to out-of-stock items or overselling, two things that can damage customer trust in your brand. To avoid inaccuracies, especially as orders stream in for the same product on multiple channels, you’ll need to develop an inventory management system that’s able to keep up with orders and inventory movement 24/7.
6 survival tips for multichannel sellers
In short, multichannel retailing is a proven way to boost sales, but it takes the right strategy to avoid inefficiencies and costly errors. The below tips can help you to get started the right way.
01. Evaluate your channels carefully
Avoid falling victim to “shiny object” syndrome and blindly selling on channels just because they’re popular. This spray-and-pray approach often leads to massive disappointment and causes many sellers to prematurely rule out channels as failed platforms.
Instead, do your research and focus on the channels that make the most sense for your business. Look at important factors, such as:
Target buyers
Top-selling products
Average price points
Seller services and/or features
Reviews from other sellers
Fees and commissions
Taxonomies
Ranking algorithms
Listing policies
Pricing policies
Payment options
Customer service policies
Returns policies
While there will always be a learning curve, it’s well worth it to take the time upfront in researching and learning how each platform operates.
02. Automate repetitive tasks
When you’ve got products listed in multiple places, it quickly becomes impractical to manage each channel by hand. From creating your listings to updating available quantities, there are many tedious tasks that can be done faster and more accurately with automation.
Wix’s multichannel features, for instance, include listing, inventory, pricing and order management tools. You can save yourself from hours of manual data entry by importing your Wix catalog to new channels. Or, you can manage shipping policies and promotions on a channel-by-channel basis. Moreover, as sales start coming in, you can rest assured that channels will be updated with the right inventory counts automatically.
Great businesses are built on great conversations, but you can’t always be online to start them. Wix Smart Chat bridges that gap by answering questions automatically, handing off to live chat when you're available and keeping visitors engaged across every channel that sends them to your store. You can also check out the Wix Smart Chat overview for a deeper look at how it works.
Save your energy for more strategic tasks and leave the redundant ones for Wix to manage.
03. Optimize for mobile shoppers
Most online shopping now starts on a phone, and that is especially true on channels like social media where nearly all users arrive from mobile.
For this reason, it benefits you to audit the mobile experience of your eCommerce site, ensuring that any mobile visitors can seamlessly navigate your store. From Wix, you can preview and customize the mobile version of your store before it goes live. All in all, you’ll want to make sure that the mobile experience:
Is fast-loading
Includes text, images and buttons sized appropriately for small screens
Has a clean, easy-to-use navigation menu
Offers mobile payment options like Apple Pay and PayPal
Is free of clutter on every page
04. Make sure that your product details are consistent
Inconsistent pricing, outdated information or pictures and expired offers can sideline a sale or, worse, turn customers away from your brand completely.
To prevent this, establish a central database for storing and updating your product data. For example, you can use Wix to create your product listings. From there, you can choose to sync your listings to other sales channels, and customize certain details by platform.
You’ll want to ensure that everyone on your team knows to check this database for the most up-to-date product information. Your database should also be synced with your in-store POS systems so that everyone from your eCommerce team to your in-person sales team is kept up to speed.
05. Practice price parity
As a general rule of thumb, you’ll want to make sure that your pricing is consistent across channels. It’s not uncommon for marketplaces to “ding” your account if it finds that your product can be bought at a much lower price elsewhere on the internet.
That said, you can always reserve certain products for certain channels, and tailor your pricing that way. In other words, you could sell your latest or premium products via your online store, while reserving overstock items or last year’s models for marketplaces like eBay. This gives you more flexibility in terms of pricing.
06. Protect your brand identity
When you sell on a third-party platform, you inherently lose some control over how you brand and display your products. However, there are still steps you can take to drive brand awareness while playing by each channel’s rules.
For starters, create detailed product descriptions that demonstrate your brand’s personality, quality standards, values and other differentiators. Avoid copying and pasting the same description to each channel, and tailor your copy to each unique audience.
Another idea: provide strong, memorable product images. Make sure any product labels are easy to read. Take photos of your product at every angle, as well as lifestyle photos that illustrate the intended use and mood you’re looking to create.
Perhaps most importantly, you’ll want to provide the best customer experience possible. Often the best way to build connections on any channel is by showing that you care and will follow through on your promises (e.g., ship times, product quality, etc.). So, you’ll want to be extra mindful of responding to user queries quickly and thoroughly, no matter which channel they come in from. Handle complaints and/or return requests sensitively too, understanding that even negative first impressions can be turned into positive experiences.
Embrace multichannel retail with Wix
A successful multichannel retailing strategy can bear lots of fruit for your business. Just make sure to do your research, choose your channels wisely and automate what you can.
Wix Store owners can seamlessly manage multiple channels from their Wix dashboard including selling on Amazon, eBay, Facebook and more. Simplify and streamline the process so that all you need to worry about is making more sales.
Wix provides high-performance retail infrastructure through automation, AI-driven merchandising and scalable systems designed for multi-channel growth and increasing transaction volume.
What is multi-channel selling FAQ
What is the difference between multi-channel selling and omnichannel selling?
Multi-channel and omnichannel selling differ in how connected the channels are. Multi-channel means your products are available in several places that each run on their own, with separate listings, data and fulfillment. Omnichannel connects those channels so a shopper can start on one and finish on another without repeating themselves. Every omnichannel setup is multi-channel, but not every multi-channel setup is omnichannel.
How many sales channels should a small business sell on?
Most small businesses should start with two channels and add a third only once the first two run without daily intervention. The ceiling is operational rather than strategic, because every extra channel adds listings to maintain, policies to follow and stock to reconcile. A useful test is whether you could add a channel tomorrow without a product detail going stale somewhere else.
Is multi-channel selling worth it for a new business?
Multi-channel selling is worth it for a new business once its first channel is running predictably. Marketplaces and social platforms carry reach you would otherwise have to buy, and spreading sales across channels cushions you when one of them changes its rules or its algorithm. Launching on several at once usually splits your attention before any single channel has earned a return.
How do you avoid overselling when you sell on multiple channels?
Avoid overselling by syncing inventory automatically from one system instead of updating each channel by hand. Overselling happens when two channels sell the last unit before either one learns what the other did, so the fix is a single stock count that every channel reads from and writes back to as orders come in.
Should your prices be the same on every sales channel?
Prices should generally match across channels, because marketplaces watch for the same item selling cheaper elsewhere and can penalize a seller account for it. What you can vary is which products go where, for example keeping new and premium lines on your own store while sending overstock or older models to marketplaces.
Is Wix good for multi-channel selling?
Yes, Wix suits multi-channel selling because listings, orders and inventory for every channel are managed from one dashboard. Wix integrates eCommerce stores with Amazon, eBay and Google marketplaces. Wix allows merchants to sell directly on TikTok and Instagram. Sales made in person through a connected point-of-sale system draw on the same inventory as your online orders.
