6 Must Have Features In Your Multi Vendor Marketplace App

Why should you invest in a marketplace app when you have a mobile marketplace website to sell online? 

Well the reasons are many.

To begin with, customer journeys are no longer linear. To make your your brand successful, you need not only to sell through your multi vendor marketplace website, but also on other channels loved by the new-age buyers. With modern buyers connecting with a brand over 4-6 channels on an average, it becomes imperative for marketplace brands to have a multi-channel approach. What’s even more interesting is the fact that buyers that shop omnichannel have 30% higher lifetime value and 91% greater Y-o-Y customer retention rates.

The new age buyers love shopping on online marketplace platforms and their preferred shopping channel is mobile apps. 

Need proof?

Here we go;

• 72.9 of total ecommerce sales come via mobile commerce

• 70% of m-commerce sales are made through mobile apps

• 66% of e-commerce traffic directly comes from mobile apps 

• 89% of the users are happy to place orders via mobile apps 

• $79 is the average value of an order completed via smartphone

• 145.2 million users monthly  for Amazon’s app 

• 66 million users worldwide for eBay’s app

Source: Statista, Google

The figures speak for themselves. A marketplace website along with apps is the winning formula to create a niche for your brand.

Why Marketplace Apps Are Essential For Your Multi Vendor Website 

A marketplace app complements your marketplace website by creating a stunning customer experience.
Websites are best for making your brand discoverable, bringing new buyers, and increasing online reach along with brand awareness. Mobile applications, on the other hand, boost conversions, build customer loyalty, help with personalized real-time marketing and keep your customers engaged for return purchases. 

Your marketplace app not only makes your brand more accessible but also makes your products more shareable. Apps are the weapon to enhance your customer engagement. It gives your customers the freedom to shop from anywhere, anytime. With 53% of people likely to buy spur-of-the-moment items while surfing online stores, your marketplace app offers the best opportunity to convert impulse buyers into loyal customers.

Also, customers love it when their concerns and complaints are heard out and resolved with minimal lag time. Through online helpdesk, chatbots and support systems in your mobile app, you can resolve issues in seconds. 

A marketplace app is basically, so many things in one. From being the face of your marketplace brand to being your marketing channel to offering customer support, your multi vendor mobile app is one of the best and  simplest growth hacking tool for your brand.

Why Do Customers Prefer Multi Vendor Marketplace Apps?

Customers love their smartphones and online shopping. Anything that facilitates this journey is automatically their favourite. Also, marketplace platform apps offer the following benefits:

1. Variety of vendors with a diverse product catalouge to choose from 

2. Better comparison options as many vendors sell same or similar products

3. Accessibility  and ease of use

4. Fast shopping experience 

5. Less frustration and works even offline

6 Must-Have Features In Your Marketplace App

While customers love shopping on apps, it is imperative for marketplace brands to offer the most engaging and seamless buying experience on apps. Customers uninstall mobile apps as quickly as they install them if they find the apps to be cumbersome or draining space and battery life.

Here are the tried and tested tips and features that make your marketplace app your buyers’ favourite shopping hub.

1. Personalized Shopping Experience To Each Buyer 

For marketing departments, personalization improves marketing ROI. ROI is equal to high customer engagement, more purchases and higher revenue on the marketplace app. 

How to do personalization? 

Gather data about customer's preferences, demographics, location and purchase history. Your app automatically traces the customer behaviour on your multi vendor marketplace to give custom recommendations and updates on their devices. 

What can you personalize? 

Personalize anything that matters to your customer. Like mobile application content, paid media messages, discount offers, sale alerts, product and service recommendations. 

What tactics can you use to offer a personalized experience?

• Push notification: Attract customers and convince them to take action with push notifications. To take full advantage, make your notification urgent, and compelling to motivate marketplace app users to buy 

• Automatic Emails: Whenever customers leave their cart, you can bring them back by sending emails. To drive immediate action from your mail, include FOMO elements. For example, flat 500 off on the total bill, valid till midnight

• Personal Shopping Feed: With Artificial intelligence in your marketplace builder, personalizing customers' feed is easy. How AI works in ecommerce? AI-driven platform prepares a custom feed for each buyer based on their preference, purchase history, wishlist products, and browsed items

2. Easy Search And Navigations

In order to accelerate checkouts and time spent on site, your marketplace app should be easy to navigate. Users should be able to go from product 1 to product 2 quickly. Follow the steps below to make your customer journey smooth:

Stage 1

When a user lands on your website, he wants responsive design, a comprehensive menu and an informative homepage. Based on these factors, users decide whether to continue shopping or not. 

Steps to take: Link your marketplace platform’s homepage with multiple product categories. Homepage design should be device responsive i.e. it should fit the screen of any mobile, tablet or desktop. Create a comprehensive menu so that users can easily discover products and buy them.

Stage 2

After visiting, users search for desired products and compares them  with similar products from other vendors. 

Steps to take: To make this stage smooth, make your marketplace app’s product pages easy to read and navigate. Add elements like Add to cart button, Buy now button, responsive image, fully optimized videos, product comparison option, etc to help buyers in making fast decisions. 

Stage 3

After adding products to the cart, they proceed to checkout. At this stage, the site asks to fill in the delivery address and payment details. Only then, the customer can place the order. 

Steps to take: To avoid buyers frustration, shorten your checkout process. Create a 3 step checkout process i.e. Delivery Address > Payment > Place order. For fast payment processing, choose reliable payment gateways. Save user’s delivery and payment details automatically to reduce repeat manual tasks.

To conclude, users need a fast and effortless navigation experience throughout their purchase journey on your marketplace platform. If you miss this, you are  bound to lose many buyers.

3. Informative Product Pages To Convince Buyers 

Have you ever done a deep analysis of Amazon’s product page? What makes Amazon’s product pages so compelling and buyer-friendly? This is because they offer complete and unbiased information.

Top Qualities Of High Performing Product Page

• Honest Customer reviews and ratings 

• Effectively displaying prices with discounts and coupon codes  

• Informative product description with an emotional hook

• Clear images and fast loading videos. 3 images and 1 video is highly recommended

How to create beautiful pages with no design experience?

Don’t have design knowledge? No problem! StoreHippo multi vendor marketplace platform gives you readymade themes and pre-designed templates that are 100% editable. You can easily create pages by editing existing templates with the drag-drop feature.

4. Easy Wishlist And Save For Later Options

Why wishlist and save for later option is critical to your marketplace app’s success? It improves the customer experience and lowers shopping cart abandonment. Customers also love the feature for many reasons, such as -

• For comparing same products from different brand 

• For purchasing items at a lower rate whenever a sale happens 

• For making the right purchase decision

• For saving browsing time 

For marketplace owners, a wishlist is a way to collect customer data. Eventually, using the same data to send personalised recommendations.

StoreHippo marketplace platform comes with inbuilt wishlist feature that helps you gather detailed information on customers’ tentative purchases and interests. By building a smart marketing strategy and combining it with data-driven insights you can set up your marketplace brand for success.

5. Simplified Checkouts Process

Do you know the popular roadblock to achieve sales targets? It’s a long checkout process. Online customers are impatient. While they can wait in queues in a physical store but things are opposite in an online store. Obviously, their main motive for purchasing online is convenience and fastness. 

Thus, it makes sense to optimize checkouts for long term success. Here are things to do- 

• Short delivery address forms and checkouts stages 

      Statistics: 18% of online buyers voted long, complex checkout as the cause behind car abandonment. 

• Remove distractions during the checkout stage. Like pop-ups, navigation bars, ads, etc.

• Give payment  flexibility by offering multiple payment gateways 

• Offer products recommendations highly relevant to cart items. 

• Mention taxes, shipping charges, etc clearly at the first step. 

      Statistics: 49% of online buyers say high delivery/tax cost is the reason to abandon the cart. (Source: Baymard) 

With a marketplace platform like StoreHippo, you can easily optimize the checkouts right from the dashboard. StoreHippo offers a single page checkout on all possible devices. Thus, you can accelerate fast checkouts to customers. 

In case you have international customers, StoreHippo multi-currency feature will automatically show your products prices in the user’s currency.

6. Comprehensive Dashboard For Customers

Customers dashboard is a record of customer’s current orders, past orders, earned coupons, rewards, etc. 

Every customer has a unique dashboard that gives them an overview of orders, deliveries and transactions done with a multi-vendor marketplace. 

It also gives ecommerce store owners an insight into customer preferences, helping them in personalising the shopping experience. 

On the other hand, customers can track orders, view their saved addresses, saved payment details, earned loyalty points, wishlist items, etc. 

This way, you can ensure complete transparency and increase customer loyalty.

StoreHippo offers an intuitive and detailed customer dashboard for its marketplace platform and apps. 

Need inspiration? Multi vendor marketplaces like Amazon, Nykaa, Myntra are real-world examples, offering comprehensive dashboard to customers.

Final Takeaways

To build a high performing marketplace app, including all of the above features is crucial. But if you have a common misconception that apps are expensive, then it’s time to shift your mindset. 

StoreHippo lets you build mobile apps right from the dashboard at no additional cost. Enterprise brands can quickly design and deploy apps without any coding. To top it all, you get the power, agility and speed of MACH architecture along with 300+ features in StoreHippo marketplace software. What’s more you can easily have a multi store set up for your marketplace and build store specific marketplace apps as well. You can even customize these apps for the targeted customers, product line or geography and language. 

StoreHippo marketplace software and apps offer a complete ecosystem for enterprise brands to register growth like never before. Get started with StoreHippo 14 days free trial to build a marketplace app and take your brand to new heights of success.