Producers of health, beauty and wellness products are being given a ‘no risk' opportunity to increase sales and awareness of their healthy lifestylegoods by online marketplace Makesmehealthy.com. The site, which launches in October, offers small to medium producers a greater chance of their products reaching the dedicated target audience as it tackles the issue of smaller brands being ‘lost' in much larger online retail websites. Here, RetailTechNews speaks to Jaspal Singh Nijjar, founder, Makesmehealthy.com, to discuss why he set up the site and how he is helping smaller brands engage their niche target audience. 

What is Makes Me Healthy (MMH), and how is it tailored towards start-ups and small producers?

MMH is a marketplace website that gives small to medium sized brands healthy and beauty an extra sales channel. MMH was made to give a quick and easy way for retailers to get to the market and stay in control of their listings. Larger brands are able to bring out new products quickly, have to budget to stay on top of search rankings, drive up the prices of key words and generally be the first choice put in front of consumers.

Small brands, usually have a small, niche selection of products and focused only in one area. Consumers can miss out on them if they only look at the first two pages of search results on Amazon or Google. We want to bring together all these small to medium sized brands and show case their products on MMH.

There’s supply and demand for the products we are listing on MMH, and were creating a platform to match them together.

A lack of data fed back to the manufacturer when selling on platforms such as Amazon is a major issue for sellers. What sort of an understanding will brands selling on MMH have as to who is buying their products?

Brands can add their google analytics tracking code into their MMH admin panel and they can see all the data in their google account. Secondly each brand has their own dedicated account manager who is there to answer any queries and questions for them and help them get the most out of listing with MMH.

Why is this a better option than selling through larger marketplaces, with more established brands?

The MMH marketing team will be running ads and promotions through our social channels to actively promote the brands & products listed on our marketplace. For exampleEvery week we will showcase a health & beauty brand with more information about them and their products, and any new products the brand is launching along with its future development. This will help raise their profile and get consumers attention. Onsite we give users as much information as we can about the brands and will have several banners such “behind the brands”, “launchpad”, and all brands get their own microstore which we are developing to allow them to show case as much as possible about them and their products. With our ethos of building a partnership with every brand that lists, we want to get to know as much as possible about them and work with them to run promotions, new product launches and share their story.

What have been some of the challenges of setting up your website so far? How have you overcome them?

Building a marketplace means we need manage both consumers and sellers, a chicken and egg problem. Once of the challenges has been getting retailers to buy into the concept from a early stage of the website. We had contacted over 100 retailers before we even had a website live, and a lot were enthusiastic about the concept, which helped validate the idea so we pushed on with development. Another major challenge has been setting up the checkout system, which is designed for marketplaces so sellers can see their income and get payments on order sold. We had meetings with various fintech options and found the best solution for us which will be ready in two-to-three weeks.