Sales channels: Definition, strategies, and best options

Reading Time: 10 minutes

Sales channels are platforms or locations where your business directly sells products to customers — whether through your website, Amazon, Google Shopping, or a physical store.

Depending on your strategy, these can be standalone platforms, combined in a multichannel approach, or unified to provide a consistent customer experience in an omnichannel strategy.

Each approach has its benefits and challenges:

• Standalone is simpler to manage, but limits reach
• Multichannel increases reach but can lead to inconsistencies
• Omnichannel provides the best customer experience but is more complex

A clear sales channel strategy and a thorough understanding of your audience’s preferred shopping behaviors will help you choose the best path. 

Join us below to learn more about sales channels, including types, strategies, and the best options for your ecommerce store. 

What are sales channels?

Sales channels are the platforms where you sell products. They form the critical link between your company’s offerings and its customers, influencing how products reach end consumers.

Your sales channels can be direct, where you sell products and services straight to consumers (e.g., through your website), or indirect, involving intermediaries between your company and end customers (e.g., Amazon).

Sales channels can also be online, offline, multichannel, or omnichannel, impacting reach, cost, and customer experience.

Types of sales channels 

There are five main types of sales channels:

1. Online

Online sales channels comprise the digital platforms where you sell your products or services directly over the internet. These include ecommerce websites, social media storefronts that engage your followers, and online marketplaces like Etsy, eBay, Amazon, and Google Shopping. 

An ecommerce site gives you complete control over your brand and customer data but requires more effort to drive traffic. Marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy offer a large existing customer base but come with higher fees and increased competition.

As an illustration, Etsy is a popular online platform for creatives and handmade product retailers, but the cost of accessing its large user base is high transaction fees:

2. Offline

Offline sales channels are physical avenues for selling products or services, such as brick-and-mortar stores, pop-up shops, and direct mail catalogs.

These channels allow customers to interact with products and people, receive immediate assistance from staff, and enjoy the social aspect of physical retail environments.

Some retailers operate a multichannel selling model with online and offline sales channels to reach a wider audience and provide more purchasing options. 

Nike is a prime example of a global retailer with an excellent offline and online presence. It maintains its physical locations for brand awareness and provides customers with hands-on product experiences.

Check out its Kentucky store:

3. Business-to-consumer (B2C)

B2C is a sales model where you sell to individual consumers through retail stores, ecommerce sites, and direct marketing campaigns.

Your strategy could address personal needs and preferences with emotional marketing and personalized recommendations or focus on convenience and competitive pricing. 

For example, fashion brand Chubbies has a personalized “Recommended For You” section on its product pages to improve its customer experience:

Most B2C models have short sales cycles, low transaction values, and a focus on brand loyalty and customer satisfaction through convenient shopping experiences.

4. Direct-to-consumer (D2C)

D2C bypasses traditional intermediaries like retailers or wholesalers and sells directly to consumers through branded sales platforms. 

For example, a tinned foods company might sell its products in supermarkets and offer a direct-to-consumer option through its website.

Heinz’s D2C website, Heinz To Home, is a perfect example:

The D2C approach gives you more control over your brand, lets you collect customer data directly, and allows you to offer special deals. 

5. Business-to-business (B2B)

B2B targets businesses through industry-specific digital sales channels, offline platforms, and corporate account management. 

B2B sales often involve more complex decision-making processes, longer sales cycles, and higher-value transactions than B2C. 

As such, these channels typically require specialized knowledge of business requirements, customized pricing strategies, and the ability to provide comprehensive solutions rather than individual products.

Wholesale restaurant distributor US Foods demonstrates this with a website that curates products for different restaurant types:

Sales channel strategies 

Sales channel strategies include single, multichannel, and omnichannel approaches to reach and interact with customers. 

Selling only through your ecommerce store is known as a single-channel approach. Expanding to sell on multiple channels — such as marketplaces, social media, or physical stores — makes a multichannel strategy. Integrating these channels to deliver a cohesive customer experience evolves into an omnichannel sales strategy. 

These approaches also apply to marketing your products. Relying solely on email for newsletters is a single-channel marketing approach. However, using Omnisend to combine your email and SMS efforts creates an omnichannel marketing strategy.

How to implement a multichannel sales strategy

A multichannel sales strategy will spread your products across multiple platforms, potentially increasing your reach and sales. But, it will also complicate inventory management and require more diverse marketing skills.

Read on for how to implement a multichannel strategy:

Identify relevant sales platforms

Identify the most relevant platforms for your target audience. These could include your website, a Facebook storefront, Google Shopping to target people searching for your products on Google, and popular marketplaces like Amazon or Etsy.

Identify best-fit marketing platforms

Identify the best marketing platforms for your products, such as Google Ads for pay-per-click (PPC), TikTok for social media, Omnisend for email marketing, and LinkedIn for B2B. 

Research each platform’s audience and automation capabilities. For instance, Omnisend is designed specifically for ecommerce, offering automated email and SMS workflows like abandoned cart recovery:

Develop channel-specific presence

Customize product descriptions, images, and pricing for each platform. Create Instagram-worthy lifestyle photos for social media, detailed technical specifications for your website, and keyword-optimized listings for search engines. 

Maintain brand consistency

Maintain consistent branding across all your sales channels while optimizing for each sales platform’s strengths, ensuring your core brand identity and values are communicated effectively throughout the customer journey.

Implement inventory management

Use software and apps to create robust and separate inventory management systems for each channel to prevent overselling, enable real-time stock updates, and maintain accurate availability information across all platforms.

Analyze and refine

Analyze your sales platforms’ performance metrics and refine your approach, allocating resources to areas that can improve your sales. Omnisend tracks sales performance across email, SMS, and push messages, helping you pinpoint where your efforts can make the most impact. 

How to implement an omnichannel sales strategy

An omnichannel sales strategy creates a seamless, integrated shopping experience across all channels. It takes more management, but unifying customer interactions provides a cohesive brand experience that enhances satisfaction and sales.

Follow these steps to implement an omnichannel strategy:

Create a seamless shopping experience

Implement a single login system across your website, mobile app, and in-store kiosks. Sync shopping carts across devices, allowing customers to start shopping on their phones and finish on their computers without losing items.

Unify customer data

Consolidate your customer data across all platforms. This integration enables a comprehensive view of each customer’s journey, allowing for more relevant interactions and personalized email marketing efforts that deliver better results. 

Align your marketing platforms 

Build consistency into your marketing efforts to provide an identical or similar experience across PPC, display ads, social media, email marketing, affiliate, video, and more. Prioritize the platforms that combine marketing efforts, such as Omnisend for email and SMS. 

Personalize the customer experience

Use collected data to segment your customers and provide personalized product recommendations and marketing messages. 

For example, Omnisend lets you filter your audience based on various transactional events and purchase behaviors for targeted email marketing:

Implement real-time inventory management

Establish systems for real-time inventory updates across all channels to ensure accurate stock information on your website, in physical stores (if applicable), and third-party marketplaces. This will help prevent overselling and improve customer satisfaction.

Maintain consistency in pricing and promotions

Offer consistent pricing and promotions across all channels. Pricing uniformity builds customer trust and prevents confusion or disappointment when customers encounter different prices on various platforms.

Enable cross-channel features

You could use augmented reality (AR) apps that work both in-app and in-store, allowing customers to try products virtually. Offer QR codes on physical products that, when scanned, show online reviews and suggest complementary items from your ecommerce site.

Empower customer service

Give your customer service team access to information from all sales channels with a CRM system like Salesforce or HubSpot. Integrate your CRM with your ecommerce platform, social media, and other sales channels to create an omnichannel view of customer interactions.

Best sales channels for businesses

You can use hundreds of sales channels to grow your business, but focusing on those that align with your unique product, target market, and operational capabilities is best.

Best online sales channels

Here are some of the best online sales channels:

Ecommerce platforms 

You can quickly build a Shopify, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce store with a pre-built theme and app integrations that enable your desired features.

Selling products on your ecommerce store provides complete control over your brand, customer experience, and pricing strategy. 

You will need a marketing strategy to attract website traffic, a conversion path that makes it easy for customers to buy, and an email and SMS marketing solution to automate your welcome series and cart abandonment workflows.

Omnisend enables email and SMS automation, covering all the scenarios that lead to sales, such as abandoned checkouts, and those that improve customer experiences, such as order follow-ups and shipping confirmations. 

Watch this video to find out more:

Online marketplaces

Listing your products on popular marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Vinted provides instant access to a large, established customer base.

The advantage is you don’t need a marketing strategy to sell on online marketplaces other than accurately describing your products to appear in search results. 

Some online marketplaces, notably Amazon’s FBA program, also offer logistics solutions for inventory storage, packing, and shipping, allowing you to focus on product selection and sales.

Keep in mind, however, that most online marketplaces have expensive selling fees, and you might be forced to accept unsuitable returns programs for your business. 

Social commerce

Social media platforms have evolved beyond connection and entertainment to become powerful sales channels. 

Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok now offer robust shopping features, allowing you to sell products directly where your audience spends time.

Facebook and Instagram Shops provide customizable storefronts where you can showcase collections for your customers to browse and purchase without leaving the apps. 

TikTok Shop, available in select markets, transforms your business account into a digital storefront with multiple shopping touchpoints, including shoppable videos, live shopping events, and a marketplace tab for product discovery.

All three platforms integrate with ecommerce solutions like Shopify, streamlining inventory management and order fulfillment. 

Search engine product discovery 

Google and Bing have product discovery features allowing you to showcase your products directly in search results without fees. 

Google Shopping and Bing Shopping work similarly: you create a merchant account, upload a product feed with landing page URLs, and optimize your listings with images, pricing, and descriptions to make them stand out in search results. 

Your landing pages provide Schema markup to Google and Bing for automatic price updates, availability, and unique product identifiers, such as GTIN, brand, and MPN.

Search engine product discovery features can drive targeted traffic to your ecommerce site or online marketplace listings. When potential customers click your product listings, they’re directed to complete their purchase.

Best offline sales channels

Consider these offline channels to grow your business:

Brick-and-mortar stores

Physical retail locations allow your customers to interact with products directly before purchasing, providing a tangible shopping experience, building trust, and fostering community connections. 

Your brick-and-mortar stores offer immediate gratification and personalized customer service, which can lead to increased customer loyalty and higher sales. 

Focus on creating an inviting atmosphere, effectively training your staff, optimizing store layout, and seamlessly integrating online and offline experiences.

Pop-up shops

Your temporary retail spaces, which appear for a limited time, create a sense of urgency and exclusivity. 

They are perfect for testing new markets, products, or concepts without long-term commitments, generating buzz, and attracting media attention.

For best results, choose high-traffic locations, create Instagram-worthy designs, use targeted marketing to drive foot traffic, and collect customer data for future marketing efforts.

Trade shows and exhibitions

Industry-specific events where you showcase your products and services to potential customers, partners, and media can drive sales. 

Trade shows provide opportunities for face-to-face networking, product demonstrations, and market intelligence about competitors and trends. 

These events can lead to valuable business connections, immediate sales, and increased brand visibility within your industry. 

You can attend or exhibit at these events. If you’re exhibiting, prepare engaging booth displays, train your staff on effective pitching, and follow up promptly with leads after the event.

Best B2B sales channels 

Direct sales teams

Direct sales teams personally engage with potential clients through meetings, presentations, and product demonstrations to promote and sell your products or services. 

Your direct sales approach can win high-value customers by tailoring solutions to their needs and demonstrating in-depth product knowledge.

Invest in ongoing sales team training, equip teams with detailed product guides and case studies, and implement a customer relationship management (CRM) system to build a direct sales strategy with a high conversion rate. 

Distributor networks

Distributor networks are third-party companies that purchase your products in bulk and resell them to other businesses or consumers. 

They can help you expand your market reach quickly without requiring a significant upfront investment in infrastructure or local market expertise. 

Your distributors can also provide valuable local market insights, handle logistics, and offer additional services to end customers. 

However, you might need to provide product training and support to ensure your distributors effectively represent your brand and maximize sales opportunities.

Online B2B marketplaces

Online B2B marketplaces like Alibaba and ThomasNet are platforms where you can list your products for other businesses to discover and purchase. 

They provide access to a global audience of potential buyers, increasing your visibility and opportunities for international sales. 

Your presence on these platforms can lead to new business relationships, increased credibility, and a diversified customer base. 

Expand your B2B reach and maximize inquiries with comprehensive product guides, price lists, professional product listings, and clear contact information.