10 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Starting an Enterprise Marketplace

Starting an enterprise marketplace can be an exciting but challenging venture.

Ever wondered why some marketplaces thrive while others struggle to take off?

The truth is, even the best business ideas can fail due to avoidable mistakes along the way.

Starting to feel nervous about your plans?

Fret not. 

To help you build an enterprise marketplace for your business, StoreHippo is here with all the guidance you need.

Since you are curious about what you might be missing, let us start.

Building an Enterprise Marketplace Made Easy

But, before we look at the list of common avoidable mistakes to build a platform primed for success, let us take a sneak peek at some ecommerce industry trends:

• 2.71 billion people around the globe are making online purchases from dedicated eCommerce platforms 
• 23% of retail purchases are expected to be online in 2027
• 60% of online orders come from two-tier cities and smaller town
• $3 trillion is the estimated sales via mobile commerce globally by 2027
• 99% of customers look for reviews when they shop online
• 83% of people do their research online before visiting in-store.

Source: Forbes, Statista

With a large chunk of people turning to enterprise marketplaces for their purchases, and with a large share of online orders now originating from smaller towns and two-tier cities, online shopping is the norm. Shoppers today are more informed, relying on reviews, giving importance to quick delivery, security, marketing, etc. This emphasizes the importance of establishing a strong online presence and engaging with customers when you build an enterprise marketplace. 

10 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Starting an Enterprise Marketplace

It can be a complex and ambitious task to build an enterprise marketplace. However, with the right marketplace platform, you can unlock significant growth opportunities. Right from poor vendor management to overlooking customer experience, it is quite common to quickly get derailed for even the most promising ventures.  

Since many businesses fall prey to common mistakes, here is a list of 10 such mistakes to avoid when starting an enterprise marketplace.   

1. Choosing the Wrong Enterprise Ecommerce Platform 

Choosing an enterprise ecommerce platform can make or break your business. A wrong platform can affect your performance, increase costs, and limit your business growth. When choosing your platform, look for a robust and scalable solution that fits your business model and future growth plans. You need built-in marketing features like multi-vendor solutions, mobile-first design, scalable platforms, seamless integrations, etc for smooth business functioning. It is important to assess different factors like security, customization, and ease of use when choosing your ecommerce platform. 

StoreHippo is powered by the MEAN (MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, and NodeJS) stack, the most scalable technology stack currently available. With the next-gen MEAN stack and with SPA (Single Page Application) StoreHippo helps build cutting-edge multi vendor marketplace, innovate, and scale, The powerful MACH architecture, provides unmatched flexibility, inherent scalability and super-fast performance giving you an extra edge over the competitors. StoreHippo ecommerce solutions come with 120+ integrations and inherent flexibility to help you build tailor-made solutions for different industries. 

2. Ignoring User Experience (UI-UX)

Not paying attention to user experience and the design of your multi vendor marketplace is a crucial mistake to avoid at all costs. A poorly designed platform that is difficult to navigate, slow to load, or not mobile-friendly will drive your customers away. Wonder how to keep customers coming back to your marketplace for more? Focus on creating an intuitive, seamless, and mobile-friendly user interface that enhances customer satisfaction. A visually appealing website design that is easy to navigate helps improve engagement, increase conversions, and foster customer loyalty. 

StoreHippo ecommerce solutions come with a rich design theme library to help you play around with the store’s design and completely overhaul the look and feel of your enterprise marketplace in just a few clicks. With the easy drag-and-drop tool from StoreHippo, even a novice user can create unique designs without having to indulge in coding. With StoreHippo’s 100+ device-optimized themes, you can seamlessly create professional-looking designs. With the support of developer-friendly interface that offers heavy-duty programming support, you can edit the HTML directly to make your existing widgets behave as per your requirements or add a completely new widget to give unique appeal and flow to your online store. You can also increase your conversions with easy-to-use features that make your site more engaging.

3. Not personalizing your marketplace

One of the most common mistakes to avoid when you build your enterprise marketplace is to overlook personalization. Many businesses rush into building their marketplace without analyzing the needs of their customers, and researching their competitors and the market trends. With thorough market research, you can position your brand in the market in a better way and address the customer needs effectively. Without customization, your multi vendor marketplace will lack a personal feel, leading to poor customer engagement and low conversions. It’s therefore essential to understand your audience’s preferences and behaviors and offer a personalized touch that meets their specific needs. 

Built on the decoupled headless architecture, the StoreHippo enterprise ecommerce platform StoreHippo can be tweaked inside out. You can implement multi-level personalizations like building multiple storefronts/sub-stores for different locations, audiences, or different categories. From customizing your shipping solutions and digital payments to offering localization with multilingual content and personalized pricing, different store designs, discounts etc. you get a wide range of features and tools with StoreHippo.

4. Overlooking Mobile Commerce

Mcommerce has taken the ecommerce industry by storm. Overlooking your presence on mobile apps is a major mistake for your multi vendor marketplace. With the rapid growth of mobile commerce, a marketplace that isn't optimized for mobile users will miss opportunities and see lower sales. You not only need to be present on mobile screens for your customers but also offer responsive design, support mobile payments, etc for a smooth experience across all devices.

Built on a mobile-first approach, StoreHippo comes with a built-in mobile app builder you can seamlessly create multiple Android and iOS mobile apps right from your admin dashboard and at zero additional costs without having to code. The enterprise marketplaces built on StoreHippo are PWA websites that look, feel and work like mobile apps even on entry level devices with poor internet connectivity. StoreHippo also provides built-in apps for delivery boys, vendors and admin to help them manage the business on the go. 

5. Not Planning for Scalability

A non-scalable platform can hinder long-term growth. It is essential that when you build an enterprise marketplace, you look for a scalable platform that helps you grow your business without having to worry about platform migration. With a non-scalable platform, you will struggle with performance issues like slow load times, system crashes, or difficulty handling high volumes of transactions and users. Ensure that your ecommerce platform can handle increased traffic, vendors, and transactions as your business grows, without compromising on performance or security.

Built on the most advanced technology stack, StoreHippo offers an inherently scalable infrastructure for a fast-growing ecommerce business like yours. When you build an enterprise marketplace with StoreHippo, you can offer consistent high performance to your customers even when your business scales up to millions of users. With autoscaling and redundant server architecture, StoreHippo offers an amazingly fast-speed online store. It offers peak-load tolerance even during seasonal peaks and with 99.99% uptime. With StoreHippo, you do not need to worry about ecommerce migrations when you scale your business. 

6. Underestimating Vendor Onboarding Challenges 

Vendor onboarding can be a challenging process, and underestimating it can lead to significant delays and operational setbacks on your marketplace. Poor communication, lack of support, or unfavorable terms with your vendors can lead to vendor churn. It is advisable to invest in building strong relationships with your vendors and providing them with easy-to-use features to help them thrive. Failing to streamline this process might hinder your marketplace's ability to scale and maintain a strong, diverse vendor network.

StoreHippo comes with an end-to-end multi vendor solution that helps you build and manage a feature-rich multi vendor marketplace for B2B or B2C businesses. It offers a quick and easy vendor registration process to make onboarding an easy process even for novice sellers. The admin can seamlessly manage their vendors, payouts, commission rates, vendor-based taxes, discounts etc. right from their dashboards. With the adaptive payment feature from StoreHippo, you can easily divide a single payment made by a customer into multiple sellers as well as admin. StoreHippo offers a separate vendor dashboard for each seller to manage their complete business independently. StoreHippo also creates a separate seller page for each of the vendors giving them the undivided attention of the buyers.  

7. Lack of Future-Proof Business Strategy

With the digital landscape and customer behaviors constantly evolving, you need a future-proof business strategy that can work in tandem with industry trends. The best enterprise ecommerce platform is one that helps you focus on immediate goals while also considering long-term innovation, market changes, and other potential disruptions. It’s important to regularly evaluate and adapt your strategy to ensure sustainability and continued growth. When you look for future-proof solutions, you can stay competitive, and agile, and meet the demands of an ever-changing marketplace environment. 

StoreHippo ecommerce solutions help you build a range of marketplaces in no time. You can pivot to a different business model or create a hybrid model for the unique needs of your business with StoreHippo ecommerce solutions. Brands can seamlessly build horizontal, vertical, B2B, B2C, D2C, B2B2C, hybrid or custom multi vendor marketplaces with its advanced ecommerce solutions. While other marketplaces offer plug-ins or extension-based solutions, StoreHippo does not require complex coding to scale your marketplace. You can build innovative out-of-the-box custom marketplaces with StoreHippo’s headless architecture.  

8. Inadequate Marketing and Branding

Well, we all know how important marketing and branding is to boost sales and conversions. Simply launching an enterprise marketplace doesn’t guarantee customers will come. Without effective marketing and branding, there will be low visibility and engagement. It's essential to invest in clear and personalized messaging, targeted campaigns, and consistent branding that resonates with both buyers and sellers. When you invest in marketing strategies, you differentiate your platform from competitors and build a loyal customer base. 

StoreHippo ecommerce solutions come with multiple built-in marketing tools and features. You can create multi-level discounts on your enterprise ecommerce marketplace with the powerful built-in discount engine from StoreHippo. You can send out real-time personalized notifications to your customers about the running offers with the notification feature from StoreHippo and recover abandoned carts with follow up mails. The in-built SEO tools help you rank your multi vendor marketplace higher on SERPs. As you seamlessly integrate your marketplace website with platforms like Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, etc. you can have rich customer data at your disposal and strategize your marketing plans. 

9. Underestimating Security and Compliance Requirements

Security is a significant risk for any enterprise marketplace. A breach in security or failure to meet regulatory standards can lead to severe consequences, including financial penalties, legal issues, and damage to your marketplace’s reputation. Ensure your marketplace complies with data protection laws, tax regulations, and marketplace-specific requirements like handling third-party liability. A lack of focus on security can make your platform an easy target for data thefts and cyber attacks.

StoreHippo provides robust multi-layer security with an SSL certificate and highly secured payment gateways. With StoreHippo the best enterprise ecommerce platform, you can get a free SSL certificate directly from the admin. You can also ensure safety of payment information and customers’ data by building PCI DSS compliant sites when you build marketplaces on StoreHippo's secure ecommerce platform. 

10. Not providing seamless payments and shipping

A complicated or unreliable payment process can lead to increased cart abandonment and a poor overall experience for your customers. Similarly inefficient shipping options, lack of tracking, or limited delivery methods can deter customers from purchasing from your platform. It’s crucial to offer a variety of secure payment methods along with flexible and transparent shipping solutions that can meet customer expectations. 

With StoreHippo, the best enterprise ecommerce platform, you can seamlessly integrate with multiple shipping and logistics partners to automate the delivery processes. StoreHippo comes pre-integrated with 30+ shipping partners to help you integrate with multiple logistics partners and streamline your supply chain. StoreHippo also offers built-in delivery boy management solutions to help you manage your own fleet of delivery boys and ensure smooth order deliveries. To create a frictionless payment process on your marketplace, you can choose from 60+ integrated domestic and international payment gateways like COD, digital payment, card payments etc. You can integrate with more than one payment solution offering your customers a chance to pay in their preferred payment method. 

Conclusion

Building an enterprise marketplace is a tricky endeavor that requires strategic planning, attention to detail, and the right tools. It becomes paramount to avoid common mistakes to be able to significantly boost your chances of success. By conducting thorough research, choosing the best enterprise ecommerce platform, and focusing on user experience, your multi vendor marketplace can avoid these mistakes and set itself up on an upward growth trajectory. 

StoreHippo is a 360-degree enterprise marketplace website builder that offers next-gen solutions to brands. You can diversify to new geolocations in both domestic and international markets with hyperlocal ecommerce and go-global solutions from StoreHippo. The SaaS-based ecommerce marketplace website builder helps businesses seamlessly cope with the changing market dynamics and make a kill in the ecommerce industry.

It's time to avoid these mistakes and build an enterprise marketplace with StoreHippo ecommerce solutions. Explore the wide range of features by starting your 14-day free trial now.