Joining Target Plus (Target+) can open doors to a wider market and increase your sales. With the right strategy, you can boost sales within reach. Target Plus offers significant advantages for sellers to sustain their business there. Sellers should focus on organic sales with an effective plan and strategy.
Before diving into strategies, it’s important to understand what makes Target Plus unique. As Target’s curated online marketplace, it offers a select group of third-party sellers the opportunity to reach Target’s vast customer base. The platform is known for its quality control and emphasis on a seamless customer experience, which aligns with Target’s brand reputation.
A quick overview of this article:
- Understanding the Target Plus Marketplace
- Best practices for increasing sales
- Analyzing Content Scorecards
- Implementing best practices
- The Strategy for Success
- Improving Content Health at the Item Level
- Tips for Increasing Content Ratings
Understanding the Target Plus Marketplace
Target Plus is an exclusive third-party marketplace designed to enhance Target’s online shopping experience. Target Plus allows third-party sellers to offer their products directly on Target.com.
Here are some key features of Target Plus:
- Target Plus is not open to all sellers. Target handpicks and invites third-party sellers based on their reputation, quality of products, and alignment with Target’s brand values.
- The marketplace offers a wider variety of products, including niche items and specialty goods that may not be available in-store.
- Sellers must meet Target’s high standards for product quality, shipping reliability, and customer service.
- Sellers are responsible for shipping their products directly to customers.
- Returns are typically handled through Target’s customer service, making the process easier for customers.
Best Practices for Increasing Sales
Content is one of the most important factors in increasing your sales. In Targer Plus, better content will lead to bigger sales. Target Plus also provides various resources to reach the expected level.
Target Plus will analyze your content based on their requirements. They will provide a rating for your content. If the rating is low, then you have to improve your listing. The perfect content is the only way to boost sales on Target Plus.
Now, let’s see how you can get the resources and use them to increase your sales.
From your Target Seller Account dashboard, click Performance from the menu. Then click on item insights.
On the new page, download the score report by clicking on Download Score Report. Then open the downloaded file.
If you can enter Target Plus as a seller, there is a guarantee you can make a minimum sale. Because there is an advantage for the sellers if the competition is low. Sometimes sellers ignore some important points and get a lower amount of sales than expected.
There is a concern for sellers as well. If your item fails to make any sales for 120 days, Target Plus will unlist your item. So sellers should be more serious about it.
Analyzing Content Scorecards
Target provides this Excel sheet to every seller. It shows the content’s health and the scope to improve it.
You will get a summary of your content health. Target recommends your overall content score be a minimum of 80. If your score is below 80, that means you should work on that. If you can keep more than 80, that will be better for your item. But you should ensure it won’t be lower than 80.
But if you can increase this score from 80 to near 90, that will ensure your sales will automatically jump.
That means if the score has crossed the minimum requirement, you are in a good position. But there are many things to do to increase your sales. If you can increase your sales, you can earn more profit.
If you look at our following content scorecards, Target analyzed over two thousand SKUs and provided a summary of how many products are affected by content health issues.
In our content scorecards, some items belong to high-priority conditions. We have 1965 products with no reviews, 1784 products without any size chart, and 2282 products that do not have video. Also, some products have unanswered questions, some have only one image, and a few of them don’t have feature bullet points.
Implementing Best Practices
To improve content health, you need to implement the best practices that Target Plus suggests. Let’s have a quick overview of Target Plus guidelines:
1. Images
Target Plus recommends that your listings should have a minimum of 3 images or more. Image can influence customers to buy the products 4-6 times higher. Additional images can showcase key features and provide size or scale context. This can increase customers’ confidence in purchasing and help reduce negative reviews by providing more item details.
2. Unanswered Questions
Target Plus is always serious about customer questions. It is suggested sellers should answer the questions within 48 hours. According to the data, customers who receive an answer within 48 hours are 11 to 13 times more likely to purchase. There is a chance to increase this purchase as well.
3. Reviews
You should have a minimum of 8 reviews in your listing. As you know, reviews help shoppers by providing them with information and insights from other consumers who have already used the product. So, positive reviews build trust with potential shoppers, provide social proof, and help them make purchasing decisions. So, more positive reviews lead to more sales. On Target Plus, even one review can lead to a 2.5-fold increase in conversion.
4. Long Copy
Your long copy should have at least 50 words. Customers convert 13 to 17 times higher when they interact with Long Copy. A unique copy can increase search ranking and traffic. Also, long-tail keywords account for 70% of searches. Sellers should use these keywords to increase their organic search ranking.
5. Features Bullet
Target Plus suggests using at least 4 to 50 feature bullet points in your listing. Their data says customers convert 13–17x higher when they interact with feature bullets. The feature bullets help a client easily spot key item information.
6. Size Chart
The size chart should exist on the product detail page in Target Plus. You should have at least one video to present your product professionally in a more graphic way. Size charts are effective in increasing sales, reducing return rates, and reducing negative reviews.
7. Videos
Sellers are required to include videos in their listings. They said 74% of internet traffic uses video, and 96% of users find video helpful when making purchase decisions online.
8. Attributes
Then comes the number of attributes you’ve completed. Attributes help drive our product detail page badges. If you fill in the attribute value, there is a creative badge present, and it will apply automatically.
9. Product Detail Page
You should have at least one rich medium on the product detail page. This page will display comparison charts, interactive product tours, step-by-step instructions, and more.
10. User-generated Content
User-generated content is sourced from Instagram and displays after your images in the image carousel.
The Strategies for Success
The following strategies would be perfect for sellers to gain success on Target Plus:
- Ensure high-quality product images and detailed descriptions
- Participate in Target’s promotional campaigns to gain more visibility
- Utilize Target’s analytics tools to understand customer behavior and adjust your strategy accordingly.
- Monitor your competitors’ pricing and adjust yours to stay competitive without compromising profit margins.
- Keep track of your inventory to avoid stockouts and ensure you can meet customer demand.
- Provide prompt and helpful responses to customer inquiries
Improving Content Health at the Item Level
This is detailed content and health information for each product. If you look at the content health column, you will see that it has three colors: green, yellow, and red. You will be able to find them easily if we sort them by cell color.
- Green means that a particular product has good content health and is doing a fantastic job.
- Yellow means the health is OK, but there are scopes to improve it more.
- Red means they are in poor health. We must find the red items, see what’s wrong with them, and take the necessary actions to improve them.
We selected a random TCIN to utilize this data more significantly. If you look at the right side, you’ll see it has one unanswered question, only 4 reviews, and no size chart on its product detail page. Also, this item has no video as well.
After the analysis, we found our selected TCIN didn’t meet the standard listing requirements of Target Plus. We need to answer the question, which has been ignored. We need more reviews, a size chart, and a video. If we can do these, the health rating will increase.
In this way, you can find the issues with your items and take action to solve them. Then you will notice an increase in our overall health rating.
How to Increase the Content Rating
It is quite difficult to get a good number of reviews and ratings. But we can use some strategy to get ratings. We should use more than three images in our listing. It is the best practice on Target Plus. Target also mentions working with an integrator to upload additional images.
There is another way to get reviews. That is Bullseye, a sampling program that sends your products into the hands of Target’s most loyal customers. Then they will provide honest reviews on Target.com based on their experience with your product. These reviews can be collected pre-launch, which is a great way to launch a new product.
Conclusion
To sum up, Target Plus has become very popular over the years. As a seller, you can reach a large number of shoppers looking for quality products in this marketplace. There is a guarantee you can make a minimum sale in this marketplace. But most of the sellers think they make huge amounts of sales without following their guidelines, which is a wrong thought. If you compare it with other marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, eBay, etc., Target Plus stands out for its strong reputation and brand recognition. You can make your business sustainable by generating sales. If you follow the above-mentioned guidelines, you can enjoy a peak rise in your sales.
If you need any help with Target, feel free to let us know in the comment box or email us at the following email address: info@ecomclips.com
To learn more about e-commerce marketplaces, please check out our other blog. Also, you can check out our YouTube videos as well.
