How to Make your Multi-Vendor Marketplace a Delightful Experience for Customers?
E-commerce websites are on a roll nowadays. Right from a small screw or a nail to furniture and even vehicles are sold online. Each and every need of ours is getting fulfilled with the help of these sites and such sites bring some irresistible offers and discounts to which no one can deny.
Earlier, sites used to sell a single type of products, with limited stock and single seller, but as the time has passed, the culture of multi-vendor marketplace is now prevalent. If any product is not available from one seller or vendor, then the customers can approach the next seller and get the product from them. This not only provides options to the customers, but also saves their time and gets them their desired product. It also provides a great stage to the sellers to showcase the product. Moreover, this was just one of the many reasons that multi-vendor marketplaces are a great option in the e-commerce world.
E-commerce giants like Amazon and Ebay have made their grip in the market due to their amazing variety of products availability and the no of sellers working along with them, which is the reason it is flourishing. But, for the vendors to showcase themselves there should be some features of that e-commerce website which would help to display the product in a better manner, thus helping the vendors and customers finally.
Multi-vendor Marketplace Commendable Experience
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SEO
Only if the customers know about your website, they will be able to buy anything from it. Appearing in Google’s search list requires a little bit of SEO techniques like-
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Product Title Tags
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Optimising Product Meta Descriptions
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Optimising Product Images
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SEO URLs for product and category pages
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Fixing the errors and broken links on the pages
2. Know your competitor & Marketing Analysis
Knowing what the other e-commerce sites are doing helps to look into one’s own drawbacks and helps to resolve it. It is required to know what is going on in the market and be prepared for it accordingly and try to woo the customers according to it. Marketing would be quite helpful at this point, as the marketing managers can handle the social media accounts of the business as in this time, and keep a personalized touch to the customers. Social media sharing is an excellent method of getting more customers.
3. Promoted and Featured Products
Any website offering promoted products are bound to attract the customer’s attention. This helps to maintain the site’s popularity, brand value and the product companies would want to collaborate with them to sell their products, benefitting everyone.
4. Flash Sales
It is one of the most effective and proven method of getting more customers and this feature is inevitable for any e-commerce site. People get attracted by the offers and buy the products.
5. Loyalty rewards
Multi-vendor marketplace has numerous people shopping from the website. Loyalty rewards, coupons should be given to the customers as they would love to come back .Such customers would always try to come back.
6. Easy Navigation & Easy Checkout
The shopping experience of the customer should be such that, he should enjoy shopping. This can be only possible, if the navigation, search process of finding the product is easy till the process he makes the final payment.
In simple words, it should be simple and short.
Not only, the customers should be favoured, but the sellers/ vendors are a big part of any multi-vendor marketplace and need to be provided some features which would make selling easy for them and in- turn generating revenue for the e-commerce business.
7. A Rich Vendor Dashboard
Dashboard is the control center of any vendor and it is necessary to provide them the best and feature rich options in order to sell, manage their inventory and sales through it. This would not only help them, but also the e-commerce site as they wouldn’t need to address the issues of the vendor all the time.
8. An-Inbuilt PPC
Business is the manner in which everyone works together to gain something. If the businesses give a chance to the vendors to gain more through an inbuilt Pay per Click (PPC) advertising feature, it would help them knowing about their marketing campaigns and its performance, which they can modify when needed and in-turn, increase sales.
9. Automatic payments via Paypal
The easier the payment process is made better and the waiting period for the vendors/ sellers is less, the better they feel. Sites like Marketplace have rolled out an extension which helps the sellers get their payment automatically when any one of these three conditions get fulfilled-
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Payment when a purchase is made on the site.
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Payment when an order is shipped to the customer and marked as complete.
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Transfer funds manually to each vendor according to their earnings as they appear on the admin billing panel.
This also makes another important feature to be added, the admin panel for sites like marketplace, need an effective admin panel, which would help the vendors to customise and control.
10. Ratings & Reviews
For any business, it becomes necessary to maintain the transparency of the products they are selling, in order to gain the customer’s trust and maintain their credibility. This can be achieved by keeping the ratings and reviews page for any vendor/ seller.
The customer can provide their feedback along with any kind of positive or negative reviews, which will help the other customers in buying, help the seller in knowing their drawbacks and help the e-commerce company know the performance of the seller, whether or not, they are working as per the standards of the company.
If the customer post negative reviews, it does not mean only bad about their products and selling, but in a way, it builds a trust with the customers as they feel that the seller is honest enough to keep a negative review of theirs, posted on the site itself for everyone to see.
Conclusion
A marketplace really is an ecosystem that needs active management and nurturing. Organically you will keep buyers coming in via the trust-building initiatives outlined on point six. These allow for great SEO. Go the extra mile — if you build a marketplace that trades high-value items – like high-end furniture, boats, cars and homes – then why not use video testimonials
