How to build a scalable White Label Marketplace

Did you know that goods and services worth $8.7 trillion will be sold on multivendor marketplaces by 2025?

Imagine tapping into this potential by building your own white label marketplace.

If there was ever a right time to build an enterprise marketplace, it’s NOW!

Building a branded, scalable marketplace website is not just a good idea, it’s an amazingly lucrative one in the current ecommerce environment. 

With a scalable marketplace, you can harness the power of technology and ecommerce boom to unlock new opportunities for your business, 

But how exactly? 

Let us take you through some recent trends reshaping the marketplace ecosystem, and help you seize your brand’s place in the ecommerce universe.

Why your brand should have its own Scalable White Label Marketplace

From showing an upward growth potential to catering to the idiosyncrasies of the buyers, a marketplace website can catapult your business to new heights of success. 

Building your white label marketplace not only gives you a better footing in the ecommerce landscape but also positions your brand as a customer-centric buying hub with a plethora of options.  

Let us sample some stats that underline why this is the right time to build your white label marketplace:

• $8.7 trillion is the expected sales on multi vendor marketplaces by 2025
• 62% of global online retail sales come through online marketplaces
• 48% of buyers prefer going straight to a marketplace website when shopping online
• 75% of frequent online buyers wish their favorite retailers had marketplaces 
• 94% of B2B buyers use online marketplaces to source products/services
• 250% increase in mobile channel B2B orders from 2020 to 2024
• 56% of online retailers prefer to sell on marketplace platforms

Source: Statista, Digital Commerce 360

As you plan to build an enterprise marketplace, make sure to go with a scalable platform that helps you expand your reach and solidify your brand presence. Wonder why?

Well the trends speak it all.

Your buyers as well as sellers love branded marketplace websites that keep tweaking the UI?UX and offerings as per their demands. Also, buyers love variety and this means you will have to keep adding more products, more sellers and more geographies. And unless you have a flexible and scalable white label marketplace at your disposal, you cannot meet the demands of the rapidly changing ecommerce market.

How to build a scalable white label marketplace

Careful planning, strategic decision-making, and access to appropriate technologies.

It is all you need to craft the secret recipe to a successful and scalable white label marketplace. Wonder how? Here's a step-by-step guide to help you get started:

Market research and planning

Building a scalable white label marketplace is no mean task. Market research and planning should be the first step toward building your market presence. You are better positioned to create a customer-centric marketplace as you recognize your target audience and understand their needs. Once you have defined your audience, you need to identify your competition and analyze them to identify gaps and opportunities. Go on to define your unique selling proposition (USP) that will help you position your brand better in the ecommerce world. You need a foolproof business plan outlining your objectives, target market, revenue model, and growth strategy. 

The way forward? Choose a scalable infrastructure that is self-hosted and managed. StoreHippo enterprise marketplace platform is an inherently scalable cloud infrastructure that ensures the growth of your marketplace as you grow your product list, customer base, or expand your business to global markets. 

StoreHippo offers peak-load tolerance with consistent high-performance sites that can handle increasing traffic and data volume without having to worry about ecommerce replatforming. StoreHippo also provides robust multi-layer security with an SSL certificate. As you build a white label marketplace with StoreHippo, you get a free SSL certificate directly from the StoreHippo admin. You can seamlessly implement robust security measures to protect user data, payment transactions, and other sensitive information of your customers.

Platform selection

The platform you choose to build an enterprise marketplace can make or break your business. Since white label solutions are designed for easy customizations and quick branding, choose a platform that is scalable and builds a custom solution. It then becomes easy to create tailored solutions by tweaking the front end and the backend. Ensure that the platform supports white-labeling features such as customizable branding, domain mapping, and multi-tenancy. 

StoreHippo is a 360-degree ecommerce platform built on MACH architecture that helps enterprise brands build innovative and scalable white label marketplace. Powered by the next-gen MEAN stack, you can build cutting-edge ecommerce solutions with StoreHippo. The decoupled headless architecture helps you implement multi-level customizations on your marketplace platform by tweaking it inside out. You can build solutions for various locations, audiences, categories, customize shipping solutions, and digital payments, create personalized pricing, implement multiple store designs, etc with StoreHippo white label ecommerce solutions.

Design and branding

When you build an enterprise marketplace, you must give careful attention to developing a clean, intuitive, and responsive user interface (UI) that reflects your brand’s identity. Why? Well, a visually appealing marketplace that maintains its branding on all platforms enhances customer trust. Right from the logos and colors to website themes, you need customization options to engage with your customers across all touchpoints. Your focus should be on prioritizing design, branding, and user experience on your marketplace that makes navigation easy and intuitive for both administrators and end-users. 

StoreHippo enterprise marketplace platform has a rich design theme library to help you play around with the design elements. You can seamlessly implement quick design changes in your white label website with StoreHippo’s intuitive design tools. You can tweak the color and themes of your website to maintain branding, implement various strategic marketing plans, or engage in A/B testing. 

StoreHippo’s rich design theme library creates professional-looking store designs with its easy-to-use drag-and-drop tool. You can seamlessly overhaul the website design within minutes without any coding. The scalable white label marketplace solution from StoreHippo also offers easy navigation and fast loading page speed to offer an engaging shopping experience to your customers across all channels.    

Vendor onboarding and management

Building a scalable marketplace involves building a robust vendor management system that helps you streamline the onboarding process for the white-label partners. It can be a challenging task to onboard and manage multiple vendors on the marketplace while also ensuring smooth day-to-day business operations. Make sure to also provide tools for the vendors to help them upload their products, set pricing, manage their inventory, track sales etc seamlessly. When you build an enterprise marketplace, do implement features for commission management, order processing, and craft a smooth communication channel between vendors and administrators. 

StoreHippo comes with a comprehensive and easy-to-use vendor management system that offers full control to the admin over the vendors, their products, orders etc. Each product listed by the vendors goes through the admin scrutiny and is displayed on the marketplace for the customers only once it's admin-approved. The comprehensive admin dashboard from StoreHippo also helps the admin overview the very fine details like vendor-specific sales, revenue, best-selling products, vendor performance, etc. in just a few clicks. StoreHippo enterprise marketplace platform creates a separate vendor dashboard for each seller to help them handle their business seamlessly. StoreHippo offers easy product and order management, shipping management, commissions and payouts as well as an adaptive payment solution to handle multi-seller orders’ payments. 

Build mobile presence and go omnichannel

Wonder if it is important for you to create a mobile presence for your enterprise business? Well, it requires no contemplating. An online shopping journey is incomplete unless you offer ease of shopping on mobile devices. Customers love to interact with their favourite brands on at least 4-5 channels before making a purchase. Yes, building a scalable white label marketplace includes creating an omnichannel presence brand presence. Also as mobile phones have become a major part of all of our lives, you would not want to create a marketplace that is not accessible on mobile devices right?

StoreHippo ecommerce solutions are built on a mobile-first approach that comes with a mobile app builder helping you create Android and iOS mobile apps right from your admin dashboard at zero additional costs and without the need for coding. StoreHippo also creates PWA stores that look, feel, and work like mobile apps even on entry level devices. You can also handle your scalable white label marketplace on the go with StoreHippo’s built-in apps for delivery boys, vendors and admins. StoreHippo also offers ready-to-use omnichannel solutions to help you create new customer touchpoints using the same backend logic and APIs. You can also centrally control all your sales channels, improve your sales efficiency, and get access to rich customer insights with StoreHippo.     

Explore cross-border options

Do you have global expansion on your charts at the moment? Well, building a scalable marketplace is all about expansions and possibilities of capturing wider markets, right? As your business grows, you might want to explore global markets, and what happens then? Without the support for global expansion, you end up with ecommerce replatforming which is a tiresome journey. Solution? Build an enterprise marketplace using solutions that offer seamless cross-border expansion. With built-in features and tools that support global markets, you can effortlessly expand your business in the global ecommerce landscape.

StoreHippo ecommerce solutions offer a gamut of global solutions to help you carve a niche even in global markets. StoreHippo offers 100+ languages, including right-to-left languages like Hebrew and Arabic to engage with your customers in their native language. You can seamlessly translate your website and create a global marketplace for your business. With the 60+ domestic and international payment gateways from the StoreHippo enterprise marketplace platform, you can also enable your customers to pay in their local currency. StoreHippo helps your brand reach global markets with its host of features like multi-currency invoicing, a built-in tax engine, international shipping partners, location-based pricing, etc.

Marketing and customer acquisition

You need a marketing strategy to run and grow your enterprise brand. Yes, with a solid marketing plan, you can not only acquire customers but also attract partners for your white label marketplace. Yourscalable white label marketplace solution enables you to implement different marketing plans like real-time interactions, offers, discounts, quick deliveries, etc. which not only ensure more repeat orders but also attract new buyers. All this is easily attainable as you utilize digital marketing channels such as SEO, SEM, social media, email marketing, and content marketing. You can also adapt different marketing strategies like offering incentives, referral programs, and promotional discounts to encourage user acquisition and retention, etc.

StoreHippo enterprise ecommerce solutions come with a host of marketing tools to help you analyze your audience and create the best-in-class marketing strategies. With the built-in discount engine, you can offer multi-level discounts to your customers and create personalized coupons. Built on a decoupled headless architecture, the StoreHippo enterprise marketplace platform also helps you implement hyper-personalization, acquire customers, and recover abandoned carts by sending our real-time personalized notifications. You can also seamlessly customize your shipping solutions, payment processes, product pricing, design, etc to attract, engage and convert your customers. You can also place your scalable white label marketplace higher on SERPs and gain organic traffic using the built-in SEO tools from StoreHippo.

Analytics and optimization

Analytics and data are the backbone of any business. To grow your business and succeed in the modern-day ecommerce landscape, you need the magic of data-driven strategies. You can integrate analytics tools to track key performance metrics like user behavior, and sales performances. These data insights help you optimize the marketplace, improve conversion rates, and enhance user experience at a large scale. With detailed insights into your audience you can pitch the right product and offer undistracted attention to your buyers. A scalable white label marketplace also helps you continuously iterate and improve your performance based on user feedback, market trends, and performance data.

StoreHippo comes with advanced reporting and analytical tools to help you understand your buyer personas and draft strategic marketing plans for the unrestrained growth of your business. You can seamlessly integrate with best-in-class analytical tools like Google Analytics, Zoho, etc. to gain rich customer data. StoreHippo also helps you create dynamic landing pages and forms to capture customer feedback and insights from various stages of their shopping journey.

Multi channel customer support 

As you build an enterprise marketplace for your customers, make sure to also be available for them on multiple platforms and even when the purchase is done. Your customers would love a brand that is available 24*7 for them, listens to their grievances, and offers them unrestrained support even post-sales. As you succeed in keeping your customers happy and satisfied, you thrive manifold. Yes, make sure to provide excellent customer support through multiple channels such as live chat, email, and phone. You can also build a community around your marketplace through forums, social media groups, and events. You can also encourage your customers to create user-generated content, reviews, and testimonials to foster trust and credibility on your scalable white label marketplace. 

StoreHippo helps you build a marketplace that offers smooth integrations and automated tools to connect with your customers on multiple channels. With features like live chat, abandoned cart follow-ups, SMS, Push notifications, social media integrations etc, you can stay on top of your customer grievances and resolve them at the earliest. StoreHippo also helps you integrate your marketplace with social media platforms to offer multi-channel customer support. StoreHippo also comes with 300+ API endpoints helping you integrate with multiple customer service software of your choice. 

Continuous improvement and innovation

As the market trends change constantly, you need a scalable white label marketplace solution that makes it easy to stay updated with market trends, emerging technologies, and customer preferences. You need to regularly innovate and introduce new features, products, and services in your marketplace to stay ahead of the competition and keep your customers visiting you. Foster a culture of continuous improvement and adaptability within your organization. 

StoreHippo is a fully hosted and managed white label SaaS marketplace solution that comes with continuous automated upgrades as per industry trends. With its comprehensive enterprise-grade features, StoreHippo helps adapt to the fast-changing ecommerce landscape. The battle-tested ecommerce solutions from StoreHippo enterprise marketplace platform help create hybrid business models or pivot to different business models like B2B, B2C, B2B2C, D2C, quick commerce etc, in record time. The inherently scalable platform helps manage complex business processes and seamlessly scale the business in new markets. 

Conclusion

Well, building a scalable white label marketplace not only meets the demands of today’s customers but also helps adapt and thrive in the future digital landscape. It can however be challenging to build a marketplace that helps brands capture the ecommerce market. A futuristic  SaaS-based 360-degree marketplace platform like StoreHippo helps enterprise brands go to the market in record time and helps them carve a niche in the digital world.

StoreHippo is a robust enterprise marketplace platform that helps high-volume businesses like yours to seamlessly keep the customers hooked to their brand. With its 300+ built-in features, StoreHippo helps brands reduce costs and improve efficiency. The white label solution helps cope with the changing market dynamics and future-proof the marketplace. 

Are you all set to build an enterprise marketplace with StoreHippo? Explore the wide range of features from StoreHippo by starting your 14-day free trial now.