10 Must-have modules To Start an Online Marketplace Platform

With millions of buyers flocking to popular marketplace websites to buy groceries, electronics, furniture , clothes and more, the marketplace model has long proven its worth as a lucrative business venture for enterprises. 

The main reason for the popularity of the multi vendor marketplaces is that they bring customers and sellers together and offer volume like never before for both parties. While customers get rich and extensive catalogs, vendors can leverage the traffic volume to sell existing products and diversify to new ones.

The best part is when you build an online marketplace for your enterprise brand, you launch a scalable online business with multiple revenue streams without any hassles of managing your own inventory.

If you have already decided to start an online marketplace platform, here are more reasons to solidify your resolve.

Why Enterprises Should Build An Online Marketplace in 2024

The Global E-Commerce Market size is estimated at $ 8.80 trillion in 2024, and is expected to reach $18.81 trillion by 2029, growing at a CAGR of 15.80% during 2024-2029.

Certainly, exciting times are ahead. Enterprises need to leverage the business model their buyers favor to make the most of these opportunities.

Some figures further highlight why your enterprise brand should start an online marketplace platform.

Multi Vendor Marketplace: Trends and Stats

• $6.3 trillion is the global spend on online marketplaces in 2023
• $8.7 trillion is the project sales volume on marketplaces by 2025
• 35% of digital enterprises have switched the marketplace model by 2023
• 48% buyers prefer going straight to a multi vendor marketplace for online buying
• 62% of global e-retail sales come via online marketplaces
• 94% of B2B buyers use online marketplaces to source products/services

Source: Digital Commerce 360, Finextra, Bain & Co., Accel Partners, Gartner

The market conditions indicate a clear shift towards online marketplaces as the preferred hub of digital commerce, with staggering figures indicating the immense potential for growth and profitability for enterprises with strategic business moves.

How to Build an Online Marketplace Easily

The easiest way to build an online marketplace is by leveraging an advanced multi vendor marketplace platform with expertise and experience in building various marketplace solutions.

While building the marketplace website from scratch is always an option, using turnkey marketplace solutions enables enterprises to go to market in record time without spending time and resources in iterative development cycles.  

Enterprises can choose from a plethora of marketplace website builders that offer user-friendly interfaces, customizable templates, and integrated features for managing products, vendors, payments, and customer interactions. 

Turnkey marketplace software also takes care of complete tech infrastructure thus freeing enterprises to focus on strategising their marketplace operations, attracting vendors, and driving customer engagement. 

While marketplace website builders offer a host of benefits choosing the right one for your business needs careful market understanding and goal visualizations. Whatever the size or verticals of your enterprise you need to choose a future-ready marketplace builder.

To help you make an informed decision, we have put together the must-have modules you should consider before finalizing your marketplace solution.

10-must have modules to Start an Online Marketplace platform for Enterprises

While choosing a flexible, scalable and secure platform is of utmost importance, it is also crucial to check on the built in modules and features that help to run the multi seller business efficiently and effectively.

Here are the must have modules to build a future-ready marketplace website for enterprise brands:

1. Simple Onboarding of Vendors

When you start an online marketplace for your , taking your entire vendor/distributor network online can be a challenge. Vendors used to handling business offline might feel overwhelmed by the new ways of doing business digitally. Having said that, a great onboarding process with clearly mentioned vendor terms and straightforward registration can help you big time. This seamless registration module can work as a catalyst for getting your sellers positively attuned for selling through your enterprise marketplace website.  

 StoreHippo provides a lucrative new sales channel to your brand through a ready-to-use multi vendor marketplace solution. With a simplified no-fuss vendor onboarding module StoreHippo eases the vendor onboarding process and enables your distributors and sellers to manage key business parameters i.e. products, orders, payments, and customers in a hassle free manner.

2. Vendor Dashboard

Once your vendors are online and learning the ropes of digital selling, their primary concern is to get better visibility for their products, sell more and manage their fulfilment easily. This means your multi vendor marketplace solution should have a detailed and intuitive vendor dashboard with features to manage the end-to-end order processing effortlessly.

You should offer a vendor dashboard that comes with features like easy product listing, selling and dispatching the products, receiving payments seamlessly,. 

 StoreHippo provides a separate admin panel and an  individual dashboard for each vendor so that your vendors can handle their complete business independently. The friendly user interface allows vendors to manage the inventory , order status, shipping, returns, refunds etc. easily.

A feature-rich and separate dashboard and mobile app provide your vendors with complete transparency and allows them to manage their business just the way they want. With the mobile admin app your vendors can run the business from anywhere easily.

3. Central Admin Dashboard for Comprehensive Business Overview 

When you start an online marketplace platform, a feature-rich,  intuitive admin with a complete overview of your enterprise business is all that you need to make your online business a success. The central master admin dashboard should provide a clear overview of the business, vendors, customers, orders, shipping, payments and have reports on key business performance parameters like sales, fulfillment, time-specific order count, best selling products, top vendors etc. 

StoreHippo multi vendor marketplace solution’s admin dashboard helps you to manage your marketplace easily and compiles the whole ecosystem in a single view. Right from adding sellers, approving and rejecting products, setting up vendor commissions, splitting order payments, managing taxes, keeping an eye on business profits, and a lot more can be done from the easy to use central admin of your marketplace website. 

4. Seller Ledger 

Every vendor on your enterprise marketplace website might have different offerings, terms of service and product catalogs. Your vendors also might be some ancillary service providers who have different business practices, terms and conditions. So, their transactions, orders, products, and payment conditions vary accordingly. Your multi vendor software should have a comprehensive module to deal with different types of sellers and enable you to set different commissions and payout rules for them.

StoreHippo multi sellers software’s Seller Ledger makes it possible for enterprise marketplace brands to manage individual vendors and set up their rules based on their business terms. Seller ledger enables the online marketplace owners to set up rules for vendor commissions, payments etc. 

Using the comprehensive seller ledger  marketplace, admins can calculate and track the payments for vendors, check the transactions, pending orders, invoices, and more. In nutshell, you can manage everything related to your vendors directly from your dashboard in a few clicks. 

5. Adaptive Payments for Multi-Vendor Orders

When you start an online marketplace platform, having more vendors adds to your website's charm and product diversity. However, with more vendors and orders comes the challenge of splitting the order amount among multiple vendors when a buyer places an order with a multi-seller cart. 

StoreHippo comes to your rescue here. With StoreHippo’s built-in adaptive payment feature, you can seamlessly distribute the amount among different vendors on your marketplace website. The order amount gets automatically split between the admin and sellers from the payment gateway itself thanks to the adaptive payment feature. This singular solution makes the online buying process easier and better for every party involved in the transaction.

6. Robust Tax Engine

Tax management and compliance pose significant challenges for businesses of all sizes. As the number of vendors increases, navigating tax obligations across diverse product segments becomes increasingly complex.

To help you manage the taxation on your marketplace website, you need a robust and powerful tax engine that can calculate multi-level taxes based on the sellers’ location, products etc.

StoreHippo enables your sellers to manage their taxes easily with its powerful tax engine that simplifies their ecommerce tax calculations. StoreHippo offers full GST support, GST compliant invoices, group taxes, tax-based rules, tax-inclusive and exclusive pricing and more.  

The built-in tax engine not only makes it easier for sellers to decide the taxes and final pricing of their products but also makes tax compliance seamless. Your online multi vendor marketplace store can seamlessly integrate the best accounting software of your choice and offer timely tax calculations synced with the rules of the geography you are selling in.

7. Powerful Discount Engine

The power of marketing is the magic wand all businesses use to hack growth. Marketing when done strategically and with the right tools using the right channel-product-market mix works wonders. However, to implement marketing you need a host of different tools that can be used in different scenarios.

When you build an online marketplace with StoreHippo, you get a powerful discount engine along with a gamut of marketing tools to create a data-driven marketing strategy for your multi-seller brand.

Using the discount engine you can offer you can offer multiple coupons and promotions to boost your multi vendor marketplace website’s conversions. You create their customized marketing campaigns by offering:

• Product Level Discount
• Seller Specific Discount
• Order Based Discount
• Custom Discount Codes
• Time Specific Discount
• Device Based Discount
• Group-Based Discount

Along with this you can also use the abandoned cart follow up, unified notifications etc to follow up with buyers in real-time and nudge them towards conversions. StoreHippo also offers features to rapidly roll out dynamic marketing pages and add dynamic forms on your marketplace website to collect more user inputs for offering personalized recommendations.

8. Vendor Approval Workflow

When you start an online marketplace platform, you need to be on top of the products being listed and sold on your website. It is essential to guarantee your vendors are selling genuine products and your customers are getting value for money when they buy from your marketplace brand.

As an online marketplace website owner, you should have complete control to approve or reject the products of  your vendors. You can set a customized approval workflow with StoreHippo that allows you to keep a check on every product uploaded by the vendors. 

The uploaded products will be visible on the marketplace only after the approval of admin so that the customers do not get to see any unwanted, fake or sub-standard products that can tarnish your multi vendor marketplace’s reputation.

9. Integrated Shipping

To start an online marketplace platform, online operations always need to be supported with offline business processes. And shipping is one of the key business processes in an ecommerce business. You can win or lose your customers due to shipping. So it is essential to have a streamlined fulfillment process to ensure your vendors’ products reach the customers on time.

StoreHippo offers 30+ pre-integrated shipping solutions to optimize the shipping costs of your vendors. Your sellers can directly manage their shipping and pickup of products from the dashboard, and admin can easily get an overview of the shipping processes on the marketplace website.

10. Flexible Returns and Refund Management

Ecommerce orders have a 20%-30% return rate. When you build an online marketplace and start getting thousands of orders daily, managing the return and refund of thousands of vendors simultaneously can pose a huge problem.

To help your brand manage the returns and refunds on your marketplace, StoreHippo provides a simplified return and refund solution where individual sellers can manage their returns and refunds easily through their dashboard. The sellers can't even handle the reimbursements at their end. When these processes are swift, your marketplace brand wins customer confidence and even buyers who have returned or refunded orders once, tend to buy more in future.  Enhanced customer experience builds strong brand connect and trust making your marketplace website a clear winner..

Why is StoreHippo the Best ecommerce platform to build your online marketplace website

The decision to build an online marketplace platform is a strategic move that can pay rich dividends when powered by an advanced marketplace builder. To ensure your brand is equipped to meet buyer and market demands, support your vendors in growing their business and help you manage your enterprise brand seamlessly your enterprise marketplace builder should have all the above modules.

StoreHippo enterprise marketplace solutions are built on mobile first approach and MACH architecture. With StoreHippo you can build marketplace websites as well as apps without any additional cost or coding. The decoupled headless platform gives you the creative control and flexibility to build innovative solutions tailored to your unique brand requirements. 

StoreHippo offers all the must-have modules and 300+ enterprise features and solutions to build a marketplace website. The fully hosted and managed solution offered by StoreHippo helps business owners to accelerate business growth without any worries of managing the IT aspects. 

StoreHippo supports a variety of business models like B2B, B2C, B2B2C, D2C, hyperlocal, multi store and more. Your enterprise marketplace can begin with one model and combine one or more models to create hybrid marketplace solutions for your brand.

Schedule a 14-day trial to explore the features of our multi-seller ecommerce solution.