How to showcase a brand on Kaufland international Marketplaces #LTM147

There are other sellers selling on our marketplace, which is the DNA of the marketplace, but they have very poor information about the products of the brands on their pages or they have not the right images.

So for the brands, it's a very important step to think about content and to address these challenges and help others to improve their content so that you own, in the end, the image of the brand on our marketplace.

Let's Talk Marketplace, the Marketplace podcast with Ingrid Lohmer and Van Vridichte.

Hello and welcome, everyone.

Welcome back to let's Talk Marketplace.

I'm Ingrid and as always, I'm very happy to have you, especially today, because we will really earn the title of our show.

Today we will be talking marketplaces, specifically one marketplace, and that is Kaufland.

Today we want to explore how brands in particular fare on the platform.

And as always, when we talk about a marketplace, we have made sure, sure to have an actual brand on board who can tell us the where's and what's of their daily marketplace business so that you can really take home good and valuable insights for your own business.

So today, helping me pull back the curtain is Jan Weiss from the home textile brand Sleepling.

They've managed to take an incredibly complex assortment of bedding and make it work on Kaufland.

And Jan is here to tell us exactly how they did that.

Hi, Jan. How do you do?

Hi, good morning.

Great to have you.

Right, and secondly with us is Markus Anstos from Kaufland who specializes in retail media.

And I think, yeah, he tries to get the many requests that brands may have around branding to work on his platform.

So.

Hi, Markus, it's really great to have you too.

Hi, Ingot.

Great to be here.

Right, gentlemen, welcome to the show.

So I'm looking forward to an open and in detail discussions with lots of insights, but maybe first let's go get a few insights about the two of you.

Markus, why don't you start?

Who are you, how did you get here, and what do you do best in the Marketplace business?

Yeah, thanks.

Thanks for the invite again.

Yeah.

My name is Markus and happy to be here.

So I'm responsible at Kaufland for the development of our retail media business.

So hence working a lot with all our brands and trying to find the best solutions for them.

Actually, I started my career in the financial industry, so in banking, so completely different topic and completely different background.

Throughout my time in the financial industry, I also worked a lot with embedded finance topics.

And there I got into contact with marketplaces and at some point I thought it might be cooler to join them.

So, yeah, here I am.

And I joined Kaufland like two and a half years ago, and since one year, I'm in Vitamidia.

That's an interesting journey to be sure.

Okay, Jan, same question to you.

Who are you, how did you get here, and what do you do best in the marketplace business?

Yeah, my name is Jan.

I'm senior e commerce manager at Sleeping.

I worked there for the last three and a half years, and my business there is.

Yeah, the off Amazon market.

So where we started as an Amazon seller, and now we want to diversify it and sell on other marketplaces.

And that's basically my job with my team and the team of sleeping to make that happen.

Okay.

Right.

Yeah.

Okay.

Do you also have a fun fact for me, Marcus?

Something about you that maybe people wouldn't think at the first moment.

Oh, that's a nice one.

I wasn't prepared for this one, but let me quickly think about it.

I mean, at least it's fresh in my mind.

I run a half marathon last weekend, so that's maybe a fun fact that I have the time and the energy to go for sports at some point, at least in the week.

So, yeah, that's what I tried to do as a balance to my.

My desktop life.

That's absolutely an achieve.

Yeah.

Jan, from what I heard in the beginning, you prefer more two wheels to move around.

Is that correct?

Yes, I like riding my motorcycle, especially when the sun is great and we're having nice weather.

Yeah, that's maybe one nice thing to know.

Maybe to add one thing that Marcus said before, I actually work in the e commerce business just for the last three and a half years.

So what I did before I was in sales, I was in key account management.

And so I'm kind of a newbie.

But, yeah, I made my way very fast.

Okay, great.

Okay.

Right.

So now that we know a bit more about you too, and how you got here, I guess it's time to have a look at how brands do on Kaufland global marketplaces.

Maybe, Jan, first give us a bit of a lookout on what is sleeping.

What is Liplink's e commerce strategy?

So on what channels are you active?

What role do marketplaces as a whole play for your e commerce setup?

And inside the setup, what role does Kaufland play for you?

Yeah, yeah.

So that's when we started to diversify our selling strategy.

We started with Kaufland right after we had the opportunity to do that.

We know it's a strong market shareholder in Germany, but we knew they would diversify to other countries.

So that's what we are looking for.

And yeah, we started with a small selection there of top sellers and we identified them from other marketplaces.

But then we learned, okay, that's a new marketplace with new top sellers and new good articles.

So that's part of the strategy to broaden our product range on different marketplaces.

So that worked very well.

And then Kaufland became a bigger part of our strategy and a bigger part of the, of the turnover.

So that was a cool thing and that showed us why it's so important to be on different marketplaces with different target groups.

And yeah, the most strategy point was actually to diversify and reduce dependencies from single marketplaces.

Okay, Markus, is that something that you hear a lot from brands that they are looking for a greater variety of platforms, internationalization and just to looking for an additional channel?

Is that what Kaufland is for most brands?

Yeah, I think it's great to hear right.

From someone who's doing that firsthand.

And I think that is something we tend to see quite often.

Right.

And I mean, Jan said it, for example, the internationalization factor, I think that's quite a strong argument for us nowadays because right now we are in seven growing marketplaces in Europe and I think that's something not everyone can offer.

So we offer all in one solution for our partners.

So be it sellers, brands or vendors to really with one solution, achieve and go into multiple storefronts and reach the audience which is far bigger than one single country and one single registration with maybe other marketplaces where we try to handle most of the administrative burden sellers would face if they want to go in different countries and different markets on their own.

So yeah, I think that's a cool sign and I think something we can be proud of and which we want to obviously leverage in the future.

Further, maybe you can tell us a bit more about the partner models that Kaufland offers because that is a tad different to what brands might know from other marketplaces.

So there are four models, am I right?

Yeah, we tend to say, say it's for models.

So it's.

You could be a seller, you can be a vendor, you can be a content partner or just an advertising partner, which is obviously closest to my heart.

But I would break it down in like a two step process and we try to guide, let's say brands through this journey together.

So we have a dedicated team who sits down with the brands and then discuss, hey, what is the strategy and what is the goal you want to achieve on our marketplace?

So do you want to be a seller?

Do you want to sell your own products?

Do you want to have, I would say, the most control over the whole customer journey when dealing with your products, do you want to be a vendor?

So that's more like a wholesale relationship, which probably most of brands know.

Or is there a reason why you don't want to sell products on our marketplace?

Or you can't maybe, or you don't want to.

And then once you define that and once you start with that, I think it's very important to think about the second step.

And that's, for me, content and advertising.

Because, no, there are examples where we have brand partners who are just very focused on the content because they see, hey, there are other sellers selling on our marketplace, which is the DNA of the marketplace, but they have very poor information about the products of the brands on their pages or they have not the right images.

So for the brands, it's a very important step to think about content and to address these challenges and help others to improve their content so that you own, in the end, the image of the brand on our marketplace.

And I think that's a great opportunity that even if you don't sell on our marketplace, we still try to connect with you, we still try to talk to you and think about, hey, how can we improve the content of your brand?

So the image of your brand is what you want to have on, on the marketplace.

And maybe last sentence on the advertising.

I mean, there might be reasons, again, why you don't sell on our marketplace, but there might be still good reasons why you want to advertise on our marketplace.

Because we reach, we say, 43 million customers on a monthly basis in the, we already said it's in storefronts.

So we have customers with a very high purchase intent.

And us brand can reach these customers on the digital point of sale at the moment when you buy products, which is a very good, very strong moment for a brand to talk to the customers.

And yeah, that's what we want to help brands to leverage.

And that's why we talk to brands and think, hey, from all of these aspects, what do you want to do?

What's your strategy?

What do you want to achieve?

When working with us, there was a lot of in there that I would like to dive into a bit deeper.

But before we do that, Jan, what is your model on Kaufland?

So which of the partner models are you going for at the moment?

Yeah, to be honest, I wasn't completely aware of that.

There are four different models.

I knew there's a, there's a seller system and vendor system.

Yeah, we always act as a, as a seller.

Normally we work together with producers directly.

Who offers a drop shipping fulfillment, for example.

Yeah.

Or you have your own fulfillment center.

But yeah, the advantages when you, when you're a seller, you have complete control of your, of your content.

As you said, Markus, content is very important within the marketplace rules because every marketplace has its own rules.

You can create your own spa campaigns, SDA campaigns.

So your own marketing, which is in my opinion very important to sell, to build a bridge between where you are listed and where you want to be like on the top of the search engine page.

And that's something you can control yourself.

You can set up your own deal strategy where you can put or take part in deals even with small discounts.

But to get awareness, to earn awareness, that's a very cool thing.

And yeah, last but not least, you have your own stock control.

Like you have your own stock pushed to the marketplace so you don't have to wait for restock orders from the vendor manager.

So that's a cool thing for us.

It's to be in control.

It's cool to be a seller and to have all these tools to use.

And that's maybe.

Ingrid, one additional comment.

Exactly the reason why I said let's move a bit maybe away from this four different partner models more to this two step process.

Because as Jan exactly said, they're a seller.

But as a seller, you obviously are still caring about the content and you're still caring about how do I advertise my products or my brand.

And that's the process I would like to go through with brands.

Right.

You are a seller and that you want to have this full control.

That's perfectly fine and that's why you should sell on marketplaces.

But you should still think about the next step which is sleeping is doing very well.

How do I position my content and how do I position my brand on the marketplace?

Yeah, absolutely.

Let's go into that a bit more.

Jan, can you maybe give us a few examples on how you use rich content and all the content opportunities that are available to you on Confluence specifically for your products?

What do you do to, you know, really showcase your products?

Yeah, yeah, of course.

We use rich content as much as we can to put in additional explanations, to use more pictures and to do stuff like that, especially in the bedding.

Category customers can touch or feel the product before buying.

So that's the reason why you have to put in as information as you have and as much explanations.

Because normally maybe you go to the storefront, to the store and you get some, maybe a good salesperson there that tells you everything about you have to know, but then you have questions and you can ask.

So you need to answer the questions in advance.

And we use the rich content for that.

Yeah, a lot.

So yeah, that's maybe it.

Do Kaufland customers appreciate this effort?

Because when I talk to sellers about Kaufland Marketplace and often what comes up is, okay, this is a marketplace that is about price mostly.

So I guess the two of you might disagree, but let's go a bit into this.

Doing all this rich content and building up a brand shop and having, yeah, just putting a lot of effort into content creation is of course, yeah, it's effort and it's money.

Is it worth it?

Are customers really looking at all that stuff?

Yeah, I would definitely say yes.

I think it's a fair point.

Price will always be one of the most important factors to decide if a product is being sold or not.

I think that's clear.

And that will always be the case on E Commerce.

But I think as a brand you have the chance here to also think a bit more long term driven.

Right.

And think about, hey, okay, what, what do I really want to position my what, what identity do I want to create on the marketplace?

Do you just, am I short term focused, sales driven?

Right.

There are also tools that you can use to leverage short term sales like no vouchers, coupons, et cetera.

But if you want to position your brand long term, I think then rich content, but also a brand shop creates opportunities to really position your brand with your own content in the way you would like to have it and separate also to be honest, from competitors.

For example, in a brand shop, you create an exclusive space where no one else can show products.

You can show your products in the way you would like to.

And in the end we as cowfront set up up the branch up for you so you can create the, or you can provide the content.

You can help us to create a space which is tailored to what you want to position the brand long term.

And I think that pays off ultimately.

Jan, would you agree?

Are you measuring maybe all the effort that you put into content creation?

Yeah, we try to generalize our content creation so we can put it on different marketplaces with a few adjustments, I have to say.

But yeah, the thing is Content explanations.

And.

Yeah, and rich content is only the second step.

The customer already clicked on the product, so he's maybe okay with the title, he's okay with the picture he sees, which is.

Yeah, which is not so easy when you look on pictures because when we sell a mattress or a duvet, for example, it's white.

It's white on a, on a white background, so that makes it harder to see.

But maybe he clicked on it, the title was okay, then the price definitely was okay because otherwise he hadn't clicked on it.

And then you see the second, I would say second content with rich content and stuff like that.

And then it's all about conversion, you see, sticking to the product.

I see is he spending some time with it, reading the content, and that makes it more likely that he or she orders it on the marketplace.

So that's where rich content kicks really in when the customer is already interested and then you have to get him to push the order button, for example.

Okay, as we have a retail media expert here with Markus, let's turn to retail media for a second.

What is Kaufland offering regarding retail media tools?

Marcus?

Well, that's a question I could obviously speak a bit longer about, so hold me back if you need to do.

But yeah, I think in general, obviously when you think about the classic standard marketing funnel, then we try to cover every steps of the process in E commerce, right?

So from awareness creation to in the end, giving the final push to a purchase via sponsored product ads or via vouchers.

But I think as a brand, I mean, I said it before, right, let's sit down and let's discuss, okay, what's your strategy?

What do you want to achieve in terms of positioning?

And then we have, I think, all the tools you would expect from an E commerce marketplace to push your brand, right.

So be it.

Top of the funnel in awareness, in like a brand shop.

We already said it.

We have specific placements on our marketplace that we sell to brands that want to position certain products or certain themes in this very specific moment of the customer journey.

And yeah, in the end form a package which is interesting or which, which hits the customers in the right times in the right scenarios.

I think one very important aspect is that we try to keep everything in house when talking about retail media products.

So as we said, we have millions of customers on a monthly basis, which means we get a lot of data points.

Right.

And we know in the end what customers are buying.

This one phrase of a colleague, which I very like is, so Google knows what you're searching.

But we know what the customer is buying.

Right.

And we, we try to use that knowledge in our in house tools to train the algorithms, to train the models, to really display the brand's advertising tools where it has the most impact.

Right.

So speaking about spas, Jan already mentioned it.

So when and how is the product or has the product the best input and when does it achieve the best uplift for our brand partners?

Okay, Jan, let's turn this to the practical side.

You said before that you have an overall content strategy for your brand which you use to push the brand to different sales channels.

I gather that might be the same for retail media.

Question mark.

So do you have overall campaigns that you are running and then looking for the right tools on the different marketplaces to go for that campaign, or do you have specific campaigns for Kaufland or for other sales channels?

Yeah, actually we do have different strategies for every marketplace because every marketplace works differently.

So at Kaufland we started with spa, so product campaigns.

That is a basement we need.

So we built the basement, we put articles and products in there.

And then it's kind of a try and error principle.

So you put it in, you look for it, does it work?

Does it not work?

Which articles work, which articles doesn't work?

And then you work on that basis, you try something new, you put not selling products out of the campaign, put news in.

Maybe not from the beginning, but very early.

And then we build up a strategy.

The thing is, we do have top selling products which have a separate campaign, like a top seller campaign.

And we do have what I said, a basement campaign.

So you put some traffic on every article, but you specialize on specific articles.

So that's what we work on.

That work very well, especially combined with deals on the marketplace.

So you put your deals in a specific way on the top of the list.

What worked very well for us, we were one of the first sellers who tried that was SD campaigns.

So SDA campaigns, display campaigns, that worked very well for a while.

Not so many other sellers who are trying that.

So that pushed a lot of viewers in, but not that much traffic.

So we needed to make that a smaller part of it and the spa campaign is a bigger part of it.

Yeah, thanks for going a bit into what works and what doesn't work.

Markus, how should brands measure their retail media success on Kaufland?

What are the main KPIs to look for?

Yeah, I think it depends on the.

Obviously depends A bit on the partner.

So what I'm hearing from Jan and what I know about stippling campaigns, obviously they are quite sophisticated and they are very, as we just heard, very experienced already on how campaigns on marketplaces perform.

And obviously that's what we try to communicate to any seller or any brand that is operating on our platform because not all of them know what their capabilities are, what their opportunities are.

So we first try to like, what is a big focus of this year is also like, how can we automate certain services, how can we give more guidance to certain sellers and brands on what works and what doesn't work?

And when it comes to the measurement.

Yeah, I think it's Obviously the common KPIs, like an ACOS number or ROAS numbers are very well known and there are a lot of sellers also looking obviously at conversion.

Right.

So do I have high impressions?

But maybe low conversions might indicate that you have an issue with your content.

Which brings us back to the other topic.

But what I always try to recommend and what I still feel like might be a bit underrated is looking at the takeos so your total advertising costs in relation to your total sales.

Because looking just at the acos obviously tells you about something about the advertising business, but looking at the takeos tells you something about the total business on the marketplace.

So is your business really sustainably growing?

No, it might probably be thanks to the advertising you put in place, but that also covers the rest of the picture and that's something I would recommend if I can, to try to look also at the total picture via the takeoffs.

Jan, which metrics are you looking at?

Because as Marco said, you have quite sophisticated campaigns running.

So what are you looking forward to gather if they are successful or not?

It's actually exactly as Marcus said.

So the acos, luckily, yeah, the acos is very important for us.

We know our margin and now what ACOs, we can spend what we can give but earn some money anyway.

So that is okay.

Yeah, we sometimes forget to look at the tacos because that's actually what's your now, what's your.

What's that called, what your budget is?

Because the budget is the total amount of money you have from your turnover.

So you have to look on it.

When you say you can spend 2 or 3% of your total amount, you're getting in into marketing.

That's cool, more is better.

But then you have to look.

Okay, you need organic sales as well.

I cannot buy any cell I have on the marketplace.

But for example, if you Have a campaign which has an ACOS of 8% or less, you can spend money on it and it's just creating more turnover, more numbers, and it's not costing you any money in that case, because it's in your general calculation.

Yeah, absolutely right.

Looking at the time, I'd like to return to something that Marcus said earlier, which I found is interesting because you said there might be reasons why brands don't want to sell on Kaufland, but then they should at least advertise the products.

What could those reasons be?

It's hard for me to find those reasons because I would always argue to sell something.

But obviously, yeah, there might be.

I mean, we still have limitations of our marketplace on what products we can sell, so that might be a reason.

It might also just be a strategic choice of the brands to focus on their own web presence or to focus on their stores or whatever.

I mean, feel free to add examples here.

But I think there might be strategic choices, but there might still be good reasons then to care about the marketplace or to focus on third party sellers that are authorized by yourself to sell on such marketplaces and then deal with them and check the content, support them with advertising.

So we also have the opportunity that you, as a brand who is not selling on our marketplace, but you can still invest, for example, in spa or sponsored or brand ads for or on behalf or in the favor of other sellers selling your products.

I think there are still good ways to interact with the platform even if you don't sell with us.

I see.

Difficult question for the marketplace guy.

That was a bit mean for me, I think.

So let's place that one to the brand, maybe.

Jan, can you maybe illuminate why my.

Why there might be reasons that a brand might be active on the marketplace through other means, but not selling by themselves.

And is then advertising a good way to, you know, I don't know, reconcile this gap?

Yeah.

To be honest, I haven't thought about not selling on a platform that's new for me.

Yeah, I mean, there might be good reasons.

I mean, you have a lot of traffic, not only in Germany, but different countries.

That might be a reason to get awareness for your brand.

Yeah, that would be kind of the only reason.

Because it's very easy to sell on Kaufland.

You have so much support, and when you have your supply chain, when you have your fulfillment, why not selling there?

I would use both.

I would use the retail part and the selling part.

Because that makes absolutely sense for me.

Yeah, definitely.

Okay.

Right.

Yeah.

Then I guess let's close this discussion with my typical next Monday question.

So if a brand manager is listening and wants to improve their brand presence on Kaufland starting next Monday, do you have a quick win for them?

Markus, why don't you start?

First of all, I would recommend to look at what sleeping is doing because I think they are doing that very well and that makes it easy for me to answer.

But now, I mean referring to the whole discussion we had, I think there are two main checkpoints you should do and that the first one is your content.

So if you're selling on our marketplace, hey, check how does my content compare to others?

So are you really on top of your content?

Are you utilizing all the opportunities you have as as a partner of us when it comes to content?

And the second one is I think retail media activation.

Right.

I need to say it from my perspective but I think it's also very, very, we have very, very powerful tools to help to increase your sale or help to just increase your brand recognition if that's your target.

So yeah, send us a quick message next Monday and let's sit down to discuss what opportunities we have together.

Okay.

Jan, any low hanging fruit for your fellow retailers to.

To pick?

Maybe to pick?

Yeah, I would say never aim for a quick win.

Just have a strategy, have a target where you want to be in a long term.

But yeah, of course there are things you can do immediately.

I would always suggest to, to put on some spa campaigns, just not only try to sell.

I would say it will not work by itself.

So support that with spa campaigns based on data you have from analytic tools or from your Kaufland seller portal and even keywords from other marketplaces.

You know, just put them in, try them out and see what's, what's working and a real quick win.

Just maybe a little insight.

Just fix your product titles.

I see so many product titles with any information very technical and I wouldn't even click on it even if that was exactly the product I was looking for.

So have, I would say warm titles that are speaking to you and motivates you to just have a look and see what product that is.

That is maybe the easiest thing to do.

You can start today or if you want so next Monday.

That one never gets old, does it?

I mean 20 years into Marketplace development and fix your titles is always up to date.

It's absolutely not new.

Yeah, that is.

But still helpful.

Yeah.

So as was the rest of this conversation.

Thank you very much for joining me today, Jan and Markus, and for your openness and insights.

It was great to have you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Right, so and if you like today's episode and our case study with sleeping, then you should definitely check out next week's episode as well, because there we have another great case study coming up.

We will be talking about price strategies on marketplaces and how automated repricing really works.

And for this, I will welcome Alexander Yoffi from DMEX International, that's a brand for garden equipment and energy production, and Matush Vrobil from Base.

And together we will discuss the finer points of pricing and smart repricing and dynamic pricing and.

Yeah.

And how to ensure competitiveness without jeopardizing your margins.

So if you're into this, you should definitely check it out.

And if you don't want to miss it, I suggest subscribing to let's Talk Much Marketplace.

That's always a good thing, right?

And for today, thank you very much for tuning in and bye bye.

You listen to let's Talk Marketplace, the Marketplace podcast with Ingrid Lommer and Vanari Dichtel.