Every online marketplace starts empty.
But to make your enterprise multi vendor marketplace successful you have to ensure:
- You attract and retain quality vendors
- You offer a rich and varied catalog ( using sellers’ inventories) to acquire more and more buyers
With these two boxes ticked and amped by strategic marketing, you have the mantra to business success at your disposal.
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How do Vendors help Enterprises Build the Best Multi Vendor Ecommerce Website
Having reputed vendors with quality genuine products listed on your multi vendor ecommerce website, your enterprise brand can chart an upward growth trajectory fairly easily.
But the question is, what’s so amazing about your marketplace website that compels vendors to join your marketplace brand when there are dozens of others out there?
The answer is pretty straightforward.
Empower your vendors with unique selling opportunities and innovative features to streamline, optimize and elevate their online selling experience!
Let us take a deep dig into the topic by first understanding the current multi vendor marketplace trends.
- $8.1 trillion expected global online marketplace sales by 2024
- 73% of sellers on Amazon plan to sell on other marketplaces
- 81% of online sellers sell on two or more online marketplaces
- 62% of global online retail sales come through online marketplaces
- 75% of frequent online buyers wish their favorite retailers had marketplaces
- 94% of B2B buyers use online marketplaces to source products/services
Source: Statista, Channel Advisor, Marketplace Pulse
The immense growth potential and widespread adoption of multi vendor marketplaces by both sellers and buyers across sectors is undeniable. All you need to grow your enterprise brand is the best marketplace software that comes loaded with tons of features to make online selling effortless.
8 Multi Vendor Website Builder Features to attract Sellers
Simply put, a marketplace is nothing without its vendors.
Even though a marketplace offers immense opportunity to reach a diverse set of audience, convincing the sellers to join your multi vendor ecommerce website is still a daunting task.
Put yourself in the shoes of vendors and think, what attracts you the most to a marketplace?
Well, clearly the ease of selling along with the traffic.
To ensure you get more footfalls on your enterprise marketplace here are the features your multi vendor website builder should offer your vendors:
1. Simple Registration
Offering a simple and easy registration process to vendors reduces the hassle of going online for vendors. No wonder it is one of the first requirements you should ensure on your marketplace platform.
Effortless onboarding ensures your vendors enter the world of online selling without any hassles. StoreHippo, the best multi vendor website builder comes with a simple vendor registration module that enables your sellers to register on your marketplace website in a few clicks and allows them to start selling as soon as their products are verified and approved by your admin teams.
The longer vendors spend on registration for an online marketplace, the more frustrated they become. Recognizing this, StoreHippo prioritizes vendor convenience, and offers simplified onboarding enabling vendors to concentrate on their primary business activities. Your vendors can be ready to sell on your multi vendor ecommerce website by just entering their company details, address, payment details etc. easily on the vendor registration page.
StoreHippo takes care of everything from registering vendors easily, to making online selling and fulfillment easy, thus offering a hassle-free online selling experience.
2. Individual Seller Panel
To be able to sell freely and strategically each seller needs their own separate admin panel where they can have a snapshot of their business. When vendors have access to a unique, feature-rich vendor dashboard, they not only manage their business effortlessly but also help in boosting the overall order volume on your multi vendor marketplace.
StoreHippo multi vendor website builder offers a one-stop solution for managing the eBusiness for sellers. Sellers can easily manage every aspect of their business from their vendor dashboard. With this panel, the sellers can easily edit their profile, view their business portfolio, add/delete new products, see their transactions, check their total earnings, manage shipping and payments, get notifications about order placement and new transactions etc. The clear insights offered right in the vendor panel of the multi vendor app for vendors enable sellers to grow their business via your online marketplace website.
3. Easy Product Management
Efficient catalog management, inventory tracking and order management are essential to growing any business. It becomes even more important to sync the offline and online worlds and have a streamlined product management solution to manage vendors’ inventory on your multi vendor marketplace.
StoreHippo offers a full-fledged product management system to make your vendors’ order and fulfillment processes faster, more efficient and streamlined thus enabling them to sell more. With rich features like product options, option sets, product attributes, categories, 360-degree product view, inventory management solutions and more, StoreHippo makes it easy for the vendors on your multi vendor app to sell their products.
4. Hassle-free Return Process
Across ecommerce verticals, the rate of returned orders stands at a considerably high 20%-30%. While shipping and other product tactics are used to encourage fewer returns, the fact is that ecommerce returns take the wind out of the sails. We live in an era where returns are most common, especially when we talk about online sales. It is often daunting to restock the returned products, initiate refunds, manage return orders, and so on.
But all your vendors can have a return process that is as easy as pie with the best multi-vendor website builder in place. Whether it is a holiday season or promotional sales, there are absolutely no worries of managing orders and returns (if any) with StoreHippo. StoreHippo’s Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) functionality enables your vendors to process returns and refunds. This functionality also gives options to update the condition of the returned item and helps you correctly update the inventory after return or order cancellation.
5. Flexible Commission System
The primary revenue model of any marketplace is the commissions levied on vendors. However, when you have a fast-growing marketplace with thousands of vendors, you need a robust mechanism to calculate the commissions for different sellers selling diverse products/services through your marketplace platform.
While your enterprise brand might plan to have a fixed commission for certain product categories, having a flexible commission structure for high value orders ( based on different sales thresholds) can be a more lucrative business model.
To manage a flexible commission system, StoreHippo gives you a built-in commission calculation module wherein you can set up diverse commission structures. You only need to fix the commission and tax rules and the automated commission calculation feature will take care of the commissions on every order sold through your multi vendor app and website.
6. Vendor-Admin-Customer Chat and Notifications
Well, to run and manage an enterprise multi vendor ecommerce website, it is essential to have clear communication channels between the sellers, buyers and the admin. This becomes even more important for a B2B marketplace where sales are closed after multiple negotiations.
Effective communication not only fosters transparency but also streamlines transactions and builds trust among all parties involved, ultimately driving success and growth for the marketplace ecosystem.
Hence, your multi vendor website builder should provide features that keep your vendors, buyers and sellers informed at each stage of the order and negotiation process and also enable B2B buyers to directly connect with their chosen vendors for further negotiations.
StoreHippo offers unified notification over SMS, email and push (mobile phone + webs) to the customers and vendors to keep them updated about their orders, payments, shipping, refunds, delivery and more. storeHippo also comes with admin-vendor-client chat to enable faster negotiations in a B2B set up. StoreHippo enables your enterprise brand to enhance the communication on your multi-vendor marketplace and helps your vendors run their business in a more organized and informed way.
7. Automated Logistics
Streamlining your multi vendor ecommerce website’s logistics is not merely having a good fulfillment process. It is more about keeping your brand promise and building a reputation through streamlined fulfillment.
Shipping remains the backbone of any ecommerce business. A well-managed and streamlined logistics system on your marketplace platform can save the vendors from an endless number of shipping hassles. With handy tools and availability of multiple shipping options they can streamline their fulfillment and in the process solidify your marketplace brand’s reputation in the competitive market.
With StoreHippo multi vendor website builder, you can give your vendors access to 30+ pre-integrated shipping partners that helps them streamline their shipping and optimize their shipping costs. You can also set up vendor-specific shipping charges to promote the bestselling products and vendors. Moreover, the quick delivery of products, regular updates with estimated delivery time, managed returns and exchanges deliver the most amazing user experience for the buyers and hence boost orders for the sellers on your multi-vendor marketplace.
8. Adaptive Payments
Managing the payments of your vendors can become tricky with buyers opting for multi-seller carts which have products from different sellers. Imagine a scenario where a buyer orders a pair of earbuds, a frying pan and a t-shirt all from different sellers with different commission rates and tax rates. Manually calculating and splitting the money between all three sellers can be a huge effort. Also, add to this getting thousands of such multi-seller carts converted each day. The calculations involved can be mind-boggling.
It’s here that you need an adaptive payment solution that automatically splits the payment among different vendors and makes it easy for your enterprise marketplace to manage the payouts of different vendors.
With a variety of payment methods and secure payment gateways StoreHippo also gives you adaptive payment solutions that easily manage vendor payments right from source and without complex manual calculations. With adaptive payments, you can automate the payments to the sellers and admin in the easiest possible way. StoreHippo also offers 60+ pre-integrated payment gateways to help your vendors get quick checkouts.
How to keep vendors loyal to your Multi Vendor Marketplace
After acquiring the vendors, it is the ease of selling online and managing the business smoothly using your multi vendor website builder that makes them stay with you for long. We have come up with some of the most effective ways to attract the best vendors to your online marketplace.
- Understand your value propositions and communicate the benefits. It is important to establish your core brand and value propositions as a first priority to understand which set of sellers will be the right fit.
- Reach vendors on the existing platforms where the target sellers are already active. For example, online forums or Facebook groups where the individuals have similar interests.
- Utilize the business listings, trade fairs, and merchant associations to promote your multi vendor marketplace in an outbound manner. Find top online listings like Yellow pages, Google maps, or attend local trade fairs and vendor associations to reach the right audience.
- Advertise on forums, social media, and communities as it is one of the easiest ways to reach maximum vendors. You can share promotional and informative posts on social networks to gain traction.
Why is StoreHippo the best Multi Vendor Website Builder for your business
While the best multi vendor solution differs for each business, there are some unique features that make StoreHippo the best multi vendor marketplace platform for businesses of all scales and business models.
Here is how StoreHippo offers an environment of growth and innovation for your marketplace business:
Comprehensive Features
StoreHippo offers a wide range of features tailored specifically for building, running and growing multi-vendor marketplaces. These features include vendor management solutions, inventory tracking, order fulfillment, and more. Along with these, StoreHippo multi vendor website builder also supports diverse business models and is equipped to handle B2B and B2C business models from the same platform and a central admin.
Scalability
Built on scalable cloud architecture, StoreHippo can effortlessly align with your business growth by accommodating increased vendor onboarding, adding new geographies and stores, product listings, traffic, and transactions without compromising performance.
Personalization and Customization
Built on decoupled headless architecture, StoreHippo provides extensive customization options, extendable entities, customisable design themes etc. thus allowing you to tailor your multi-vendor marketplace to meet your unique business requirements and branding needs.
Mobile Commerce Solutions
Mobile is the hottest sales channel for brands and StoreHippo ensures that your multi-vendor website is available through multiple mobile touchpoints like PWAs and iOS and Android mobile apps.
While your customers get a multi vendor app your admins, vendors and delivery boys also get mobile admin apps to manage business from anywhere. You can also create multiple frontends for your buyers using the same backend logic and APIs , providing a seamless shopping experience for customers regardless of the device or touchpoint they use.
Easy Vendor Onboarding
With a simplified vendor onboarding process, StoreHippo makes it easy for admins to onboard new sellers on the multi vendor ecommerce website. From registration, to listing products, and starting selling quickly, StoreHippo ensures the best experience for your vendors.
Multiple Payment and Shipping Options
StoreHippo offers 30+ pre-integrated shipping partners along with 60+ pre-integrated payment solutions to make selling supports secure payment gateways, enabling smooth and secure transactions between buyers and sellers on your platform.
With multiple shipping partners at their disposal, vendors on your multi vendor ecommerce website can optimize their shipping costs and also ensure smoother and faster fulfillment.
Built-in Marketing Tools
StoreHippo offers an SEO-friendly platform and comes with a gamut of built-in marketing tools like a discount engine, abandoned cart follow-up, unified notifications, blog engine etc. to help your enterprise marketplace build a strong brand proposition and hack growth. You can also integrate with the best-in-class marketing tools
Reports and Analytics
No business can thrive unless it has tools and reports that give detailed business insight and help in making strategic decisions. StoreHippo multi vendor website builder comes with built-in reports and analytics to help enterprises get a variety of insights for making critical business decisions. You can also integrate with Google Analytics or any other preferred analytics tools to make data-backed, informed business decisions for your marketplace brand.
Cost-Effective Solutions
StoreHippo offers fully hosted and managed multi vendor marketplace solutions out of the box. Enterprise brands do not need to buy additional apps, plugins or extensions to run their end-to-end business. Also, StoreHippo offers competitive pricing plans with no hidden fees, enabling brands to choose different subscription plans based on their current needs. This makes StoreHippo is a cost-effective solution for businesses of all sizes looking to launch and grow their multi vendor marketplace rapidly.
Post-Sales Support
StoreHippo offers reliable customer support via email, call and chat to assist you at every step of the way. We also provide a help center with complete documentation and help videos to understand and use various StoreHippo features while building your enterprise multi vendor marketplace.
Conclusion
Choosing the right ecommerce software has to be the foremost priority for your online business. And we are not talking only about checking just the technology advancements here but rather the inherent features of the multi vendor website builder in question.
While having a well rounded multi vendor solution is a must, the platform should be able to deliver a complete ecommerce solution to run your B2B or B2C multi-vendor business along with having scope for business diversification to other hybrid business models.
The easy-to-use platform offered by StoreHippo offers all the aforementioned features to attract vendors to your online marketplace and is well-built on a mobile-first approach. Along with this, the integrated shipping solution and payment gateways automates everything you need to process maximum online orders.
Check the variety of marketplace models built by StoreHippo. Don’t wait anymore to explore the state-of-the-art multi-vendor features offered by StoreHippo. Start your 14-day free trial now.
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