In this brief article I hope to introduce the concept of Multichannel visibility on the internet: Why it is required for an online retailer like you and how this can be achieved. The Online Consumer As is expected in Marketing let's start from the consumer. A typical consumer on the internet never buys anything on the very first website he finds the item. He always uses the tools available to him to search around a bit before buying online. The sites he used to research an item are: . Search Engines like Google . Shopping comparison sites like Shopping.com . Big retailer websites like an eBay or Amazon directly Infact this should not be a big surprise as we notice this behaviour in the offline world too. So in the online world where the cost of hopping around is much lesser, this behaviour is more common. The Problem This leads to a BIG problem for the online retailer. How would I attract a consumer to buy my products? The Solution Interestingly somewhere within the origins of the problem lie the solution too. If it is easy for the buyer to hop around on the net than offline, then compared to the offline world it is easy for the online retailer to be present over multiple channels too! Wonder how? Well lets go back to the key ways in which the consumers do their research and see how we can increase visibility in each of these channels (to an eretailer every avenue to showcase his products is to be called a channel): . Search Engines like Google Your visibility can be increased on search engine results pages! This can be done in two different ways. Natural Search: The processes and tools that let you be visible on the left side of the results i.e. the normal search results is called Natural Search. If you always thought that these were determined by the clever computers at Google and Yahoo you were right. But then human beings are smarter than computers and so we have figured out clever ways to get your website pages higher on those results. :-) Paid Search: This is about becoming visible on the right side of the search results i.e. the ones called "Sponsored Links" or "Sponsored Results" etc. This is actually an advertising program except that the advertisements appear based on how much money you are ready to bid for keywords on the search engine's advertisement program. This is AdWords for Google, Search Marketing (Overture) for Yahoo and adCenter for MSN. There is a great advantage in this kind of advertising because you are now being visible to a consumer who has taken the initiative to type a keyword onto the search engine. So this advertising is very targeted and thus very effective. . Shopping comparison sites like Shopping.com You can make your products available through the shopping comparison sites by feeding your product info to these sites on a regular basis. . Big retailer websites like an eBay or Amazon directly Depending on what you are selling it might not be a bad idea to epxeriment selling on eBay or Amazon. So the basic idea explored in this article was that of Multichannel visibility. You must have been exposed to many different ways of gaining visibility for your products and website pages on various channels that are regularly used by the consumer. By using a clever combination of these driven by data analytics you can maximise your visibility to the consumer at the minimum costs. The more times and ways in which the consumer sees your product the more is your sales and profits. Hope this article benefited you in some small way. Cheers.