Ankush Mahajan — October 1, 2018 — October 1, 2018
Take a look at the top ecommerce companies in the world “Amazon” “Alibaba” “FlipKart”, and you’ll notice all of them are multivendor stores, and for a reason. Multivendor ecommerce websites offer much greater practicality in comparison to their single-vendor counterparts. They have a bigger range of products (thanks to multiple sellers), no need to set up a store (the vendors have their own stores), are cost effective and have a greater web presence.
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For all these advantages to be utilized in the most effective manner, a multivendor ecommerce marketplace should be feature rich from admin, vendor and buyer point of view. Keeping the same thought in mind, we have prepared a list of features that your ecommerce marketplace must have for a 360° user experience.
Multivendor Website Features from Buyers’ Perspective
We all know how important customers are for any business; there are numerous blogs out there about it. So, we will simply cut the chase and see what all features your multi-vendor marketplace must have for your customers:
- Easy Navigation: Easy navigation makes the whole pleasure of shopping even more pleasurable. When moving from point A to point B (here: from choosing an item to checking out) is like a walk in a park, your customers will love your website even more.
- Easy Checkout: It’s been said many times, and we state it again: keep the checkout page simple, short and engaging. There’s no other way about it. This will help you generate more sales from the same amount of traffic. Here, you can read in details about how to optimize your store checkout process.
- Order Tracking: It’s good to notify your customers when their order has been approved, processed, shipped and/or ready for delivery. But you can up your game by giving your customers a tracking number for their order.
- Multilingual/Multicurrency: Both of these features enhance the customer experience as shoppers will be able to view a website in their preferred language and pay in their preferred currency.
- Multiple Payment Options: By giving your customers the freedom to choose a preferred mode of payment, you are not only enhancing their shopping experience, but also moving them quickly through the checkout funnel
Multivendor Website Features from Sellers’ Perspective
Sellers are an equally important part of the business as customers. Being at the supplying end of the demand and supply chain, make sure your sellers get the following features on your multivendor marketplace website:
- Import/Export: From tax categories to catalogs to sell products, this feature allows sellers to import/export all the data that they want to migrate from their system to the ecommerce website. Instead of doing all the work manually, an automated system makes things quicker and easier.
- Powerful Vendor Dashboard: Providing sellers/vendors a dashboard is great idea for allowing them to manage their profile, their products, sales and inventory from one place.
- Promotions: An inbuilt Pay per Click (PPC) advertising feature can help sellers promote their products and see how their ad campaigns are performing. By allowing sellers to choose their overall marketing budget, cost per click and duration of a campaign, the promotion feature can help them increase their revenue.
- Shipping Info: Giving your sellers to choose a shipment company of their choice is a great way to enhance convenience for sellers. Moreover, shipping info also helps them inform customers of the time it may take the product to reach their doorstep.
- Multistore Functionality: There are many instances when a vendor has multiple stores. A marketplace website that offers sellers the facility to add as many stores as they have will be good for the vendor as well as admin’s business.
Multivendor Website Features from Admins’ Perspective
Admins are the people who use an ecommerce marketplace most often. They are the ones who manage everything and everyone, including customers and vendors. And this is why a multivendor website needs to have the following features for admins to have complete control:
- Product Catalog: A product catalog not only makes thing easy for sellers, but admins also get to reduce the hassle of managing various stores. One catalog where all the vendors simply add their price, managing vendors doesn’t get easier than this.
- Scalability and Customization: An ecommerce marketplace should grow in tandem with the growth rate of business. From adding more vendors to adding more product categories, admins should be able to add and customize the website as per their requirements.
- Product Review Management: This feature helps admins establish credibility for a product and maintain its brand value among customers. Also, features products feature only helps sellers showcase their high-value products, but also helps admins by creating a revenue channel
- Automated Task Processing: From setting commissions to real-time tax and shipping calculations, automation is the key to a hassle-free marketplace management.
- Report and Data: From analyzing sales reports to campaign reports to fetching customer data to make better recommendations, this feature helps admins grow their revenue multifold.
Any multivendor website that packs the features mentioned above can be touted as a perfect marketplace. With entrepreneurs falling short on time because of cutthroat competition, going for a turnkey ecommerce solution would be a smart business decision.
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