Marketing Channels for Online Marketplace

While Shopify provides many useful applications for business owners who own their own brands, I felt that one group of hardworking online business owners have often been under-served. This is the group of business owners that bring in products from Asia (Mostly China and Thailand) and sell them in Marketplace like Amazon(in some countries like Singapore where I came from, it's Qoo10.com) .

I understand from friends selling on these platform full time that because the items they sell are often commodities and low in margin, Shopify does not meet their needs well.

I always wanted to develop solutions that can help these sellers who do not have the skills to build their own products but are savvy in bringing value-for-money product into marketplace. I have spoken to many of these sellers and understand they often have difficulties in improving sales since there is limited marketing channels (Bidding for keyword is the main channel in Qoo10.com).

So the question, where advertising cost is very limited due to low margin, is there any channels that can be provided to help sellers in online marketplace improve their sales? I do understand this may be a problem that have no good solution, but like to bounce off the idea here as I felt this is a problem for many sellers in online marketplaces.