Top 5 world-famous International Multi-Location Multi-Vendor Ecommerce Websites (and their success tips)

Despite the steep growth trajectory of your multi vendor marketplace, you will inevitably come to a critical juncture- Growth Plateau. 

Reaching this point is a natural part of business evolution, but overcoming it is essential to sustain your competitive edge and unlock the next level of success. 

How about adopting a powerful strategy that's known to give results?

Yes, we are talking about taking your business cross-border!

Your enterprise brand has nailed the multi-vendor game already, so why not leverage this expertise globally?

The market is just right to build a multi-store marketplace website for international buyers.

Wonder why we say so?

Let’s dig into the current market dynamics and understand.

Cross-Border Ecommerce And Growth of Multi Vendor Marketplaces

Cross-border e-commerce has seen a significant surge in recent years, driven by increased internet penetration and a growing middle class in emerging markets. 

Sample the data on the growth of cross border ecommerce and how the multi-store multi vendor marketplace model is emerging as a key differentiator for enterprise brands :

Cross Border Ecommerce Growth

• 10X+ growth in global cross border ecommerce from 2021 to 2030
• $7.93 trillion is the expected value of the cross-border B2C e-commerce market by 2030

Multi Vendor Marketplaces- Buyer’s Favourite 

• 62% of global online retail sales come through online marketplaces
• 48% of shoppers begin their purchase journey directly on a marketplace website
• 37% of e-shoppers prefer to make a repeat purchase on online marketplaces

Muti-Store The Winning Strategy

• 32% of ecommerce businesses operate more than one online store
• 28% of online businesses plan to expand internationally with a multi-store set-up
• 38% higher revenue for enterprises with multi-store set up Vs single store

Source: Statista, McKinsey, Forbes  

By setting up multi vendor websites with location-based sub-stores for different countries, enterprises can implement localisation and internationalization strategies to their advantage.

Successful brands foraying into rapidly developing ecommerce markets like Mexico, India, The Middle East etc. have witnessed significant traction and growth by implementing the location-based store network for their business.

5 Successful Cross Border Multi Vendor Marketplaces With Multi Store Set up

The success of popular global multi vendor stores dealing in cross border ecommerce highlights the growing ease of ordering and the increasing love for diverse international products. 

Let us evaluate the top 5 multi-vendor ecommerce websites with a global presence:

1. eBay

eBay is a well-known multi vendor marketplace with localized sub-stores for different countries. A global ecommerce leader, eBay onboards individuals and businesses as sellers and offers a vast array of goods and services to buyers across 190 countries.

By connecting millions of buyers and sellers around the world through its multi-store marketplace network eBay enables seamless cross-border transactions.  

2. Alibaba

Alibaba, the renowned multi-vendor ecommerce website caters to B2B, B2C, and C2C markets globally.  It offers one of the largest multi-seller ecommerce platforms that comes with a complete suite of services which include fulfillment, payments and more. 

Alibaba has a strong presence in Asia, Europe, and North America. Alibaba's extensive network of vendors from different countries and geographies helps in building a strong brand presence for the parent marketplace brand.

3. Amazon

Amazon is the name that comes to mind when looking for a real word sample to build a multi-store marketplace website. Known for its vast product selection, competitive pricing, and efficient delivery services amazon has a robust multi-geography presence and operates location-specific marketplace sub-stores for different countries. 

Available in over 180 countries, Amazon also supports cross-border selling for its vendors and enables them to sell their products to global buyers easily.

4. Rakuten

The Japanese ecommerce marketplace Rakuten offers a marketplace platform with a multi-geography presence. With a presence in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, Rakuten enables sellers to sell to a wider audience base and enables buyers to order products from sellers from different countries. 

Rakuten cross-border commerce is powered by multiple localised multi vendor ecommerce websites designed for easy and immersive buying experiences. 

5. Etsy

Etsy is a global marketplace for handmade, vintage, and unique goods, connecting creative entrepreneurs with buyers worldwide. It emphasizes unique, artisanal products.

Operating in nearly every country, Etsy supports cross-border sales, allowing small businesses and individual artisans to reach a broad international audience.

These marketplaces exemplify the successful integration of multi-vendor and multi-store setups, providing robust platforms for cross-border ecommerce.

10 Key Takeaways from Top Cross-Border Multi-Store Marketplace Websites

The marketplace brands that have ruled global markets have a few things in common. They have built a name for their brand by prioritizing customer experiences, adapting to changing markets and implementing data-driven strategies for continuous growth. 

Image title: 10 Things to Learn from Successful Cross-Border Multi-Store Marketplace Websites

Here are the 10 amazing strategies of successful international multi store ecommerce marketplace websites to incorporate into your business:

1. Invest in Technology and Infrastructure

To build a successful international marketplace brand and stand out among competitors your business needs you to be powered with the best ecommerce platform with cutting-edge technologies. 

In the rapidly changing battleground of e-commerce, superior technology can help you offer outstanding buyer experiences and differentiate your brand from competitors. To achieve this, look out for a platform that offers the following: 

• Power your multi-vendor ecommerce website with next-gen technologies that enable you to stay ahead of competition.
• Choose a scalable ecommerce platform that can accommodate your expansion to diverse locations, products, vendors , buyers etc. 
• Build tailored ecosystems by integrating with the best-in breed ERP, CRM, accounting, payment, logistics etc for each location-based marketplace of your multi store ecommerce set-up
• Implement multi-level security to protect buyers’ and sellers’ sensitive information and build trust. 
• Enhance user experiences with advanced AI-powered search, conversion-oriented site design and advanced filters that make buying quick and easy.

How StoreHippo Helps

StoreHippo not only builds your international multi store marketplace but also backs your brand with MACH architecture, inherent scalability and a decoupled architecture that gives you creative control to build out-of-the-box solutions. 

With 300+ API endpoints, you can easily integrate with your preferred software and service providers and create your unique ecommerce system by integrating ERP, marketing, payments, logistics, marketing, accounting and other providers of your choice. 

With built-in theme-designer, advanced search and support for multilingual themes, Storehippo enables your multi vendor marketplace brand to build a resounding global presence.

2. Build An Omnichannel Presence

Modern buyers interact with their favorite brands across 4-6 touchpoints. Going omnichannel can boost year-on-year buyer retention by 91% and annual revenue by 9.5%.

An omnichannel presence for your global multi vendor marketplace increases accessibility and convenience for your buyers which in turn drives higher customer satisfaction and loyalty. With the omnichannel approach, your brand can boost its visibility while engaging and retaining buyers across touchpoints.  

Here is what you should do to go omnichannel:

• Build a multi-store marketplace website with multiple touchpoints to connect with your buyers across channels
• Provide consistent experiences across all touchpoints to boost engagement and retention.
• Get a central dashboard and unified inventory system to sync and manage orders, inventory and fulfillment across all channels.
• Experiment with market-channel-product mixes to identify best-selling mixes that boost revenue 
• Implement segmented and personalized marketing across channels and markets to boost international multi vendor marketplace orders 

How StoreHippo Helps

Built on the decoupled headless architecture, StoreHippo the best ecommerce platform enables marketplace brands to build multiple touchpoints for their international marketplace. You can use the same backend logic and built-in multi store feature to create location based sub stores for your marketplace and various commerce-enabled touchpoints. With a central dashboard to manage all channels and sub-stores your admins can easily be on top and manage the entire operations of your global multi store ecommerce marketplace.

3. Make M-commerce Your Primary Sales Channel

Global mobile commerce sales will reach $3.35 trillion by 2028, a whopping 62% growth from $2.07 trillion in 2024. With internet and mobile penetration increasing rapidly across the world, mobile has become the primary sales channel for international marketplace brands.

To make your business your buyers' favorite your global multi-vendor ecommerce website should have a strong mobile presence. This is what you need to do to grow your business through m-commerce:

• Build a strong m-commerce presence with PWA multi vendor marketplace and marketplace apps.
• Create conversion-oriented and device-optimized mobile apps designed to boost orders.
• Create marketplace apps for location-based marketplace sub-stores.
• Make navigation, search, product zoom etc. easy for mobiles to help buyers make an informed decision.
• Offer a buyer admin panel to make it easy for buyers to manage, track, reorder or raise support tickets directly through a mobile app.

How StoreHippo Helps

StoreHippo enterprise ecommerce platform is built on mobile-first principle. With a built-in mobile apps builder marketplace businesses can build multiple Android and iOS apps for different location-based marketplace stores at no additional cost. Also, all marketplaces powered by StoreHippo are PWAs which look, feel and work like apps when opened in a browser.

StoreHippo also offers a mobile admin dashboard for admins, vendors and delivery boys to take the complete business mobile and offer ease of buying and selling to different parties.

4. Localize Your Multi Vendor Marketplace

The most loved marketplace websites are those that connect with the buyers in their native language and are designed for local tastes.

Sample the stats:

Multilingual Impact On Ecommerce Purchase

• 70% increase in conversion rate for businesses with multilingual websites
• 77% of global internet users can be targeted by a multilingual website having the 10 most popular languages 
• 22%-30% higher sales lead on average for ecommerce brands offering multilingual content to their buyers

Source: Designingit, Statista

With such promising stats you certainly need to localize your multi vendor marketplace stores across geographies by implementing a multilingual approach and further bolstering your presence with localisation strategies.

Here is what you should be doing to stand out from competition:

• Build a multi-store marketplace with multilingual feature to connect with buyers in their native language
• Offer payments in multiple currencies to avoid additional currency conversion charges. 
• Design your marketplace website according to local cultural events and preferences.
• Use local shipping solutions to ensure faster last-mile deliveries. 
• Ensure compliance with local regulations, taxation and other mandatory rules of the land.

How StoreHippo Helps

StoreHippo offers you the best ecommerce platform that comes with multilingual, multi-currency and a powerful tax engine to help you effortlessly cater to audiences across geographies. With built-in design-tools you can even change themes and have multilingual themes ( even in RTL languages).

With the advanced tax-engine and multi currency payments you can make it easier for your buyers to comply with local norms and pay in their preferred currency without paying for conversion rates.

5. Quickly Adapt to Global and Local Trends

The ecommerce landscape is evolving at a breakneck speed and new strategies are being adopted by brands to engage, convert and retain buyers. To stay ahead of your competitors’ strategies, it’s crucial to stay agile and responsive to the evolving needs of your multi store ecommerce marketplace buyers across different geolocations. To embrace this approach you need to be on top of buyer expectations and offer them experiences driven not just by products and pricing but also through personalized interactions, seamless user journeys, and innovative solutions that resonate with their unique preferences and needs.

Here’s how you can leverage this strategy effectively:

• Be agile in implementing new features and solutions to make buying easier for your customers
• Leverage analytics to adjust strategies as per buyer demands and preferences across different markets
• Maximize ROI by adapting successful trends from one marketplace substore to sub stores in different geolocations.
• Personalize buyer interactions across multiple channels to make each customer feel valued and unique.
• Gather inputs from local vendors to understand market nuances and tweak your multi store ecommerce marketplace according to the market requirements

How StoreHippo Helps

StoreHippo’s best ecommerce platform comes with 300+ built-in features to make it easy for brands to experiment with new hybrid models. The inherent flexibility of the platform allows businesses to offer out-of-box solutions to buyers by tweaking the platform at both the front end and the backend. With extensible entities of the backend enable your marketplace brand to build tailored solutions that engage and retain buyers. The decoupled headless architecture and microservices make it possible to easily and quickly add or replace individual components thus offering greater flexibility and scalability in adapting to evolving business needs and market conditions. 

6. Make Selling Easy For Vendors

Every successful multi vendor marketplace owes its growth and popularity to its vendors who not only provide diverse products but also ensure quality, streamlined deliveries and keep adapting to the evolving buyer demands. To help your vendors give their best towards making your international marketplace a success you need to empower them with the right tools and solutions, support systems and streamlined processes that make it easy for them to sell.

Here is what your marketplace brand needs to offer its vendors to help them popularize your brand and make it a market leader:

• Offer easy solutions to onboard, sell and ship orders to your vendors on your multi store ecommerce marketplace
• Provide a  user-friendly  vendor dashboard to each vendor to help them manage their orders and shipping independently
• Offer tools to make order and inventory management effortless on your multi-vendor ecommerce website
• Enable bulk uploads and add provisions for SEO elements in the product listing to help vendors with organic product discoverability
• Provide analytics about best selling products, regions, frequent buyers etc. to help vendors 

How StoreHippo Helps

When you build a multi-store marketplace website with StoreHippo you get a comprehensive vendor management solution. From onboarding your vendors to managing their products, commissions and payouts you have complete visibility and control over the processes. At the same time, your vendors get an intuitive vendor dashboard to manage their end to end business. What’s more, you can even offer unique seller pages to your vendors on your marketplace website to give them undivided buyer attention. 

7. Simplify Payments For Buyers

The best of the marketplaces cannot become successful without having a pain-free payment solution for their customers. Studies suggest, offering multiple payment options to your international multi vendor marketplace buyers can increase conversion rates by up to 30% and reduce cart abandonment by as much as 20%. Businesses that fail to provide buyers’ preferred payment channels report losing 10% of their international revenue. Additionally, businesses that provide diverse payment methods often get higher average order values. Frictionless payments make it easier for customers to complete purchases and boost your overall sales.

• 30% increase in conversion with multiple payment options 
• 20% decline in abandoned carts with multiple payment options
• 10% international revenue loss if preferred payment channels not provided 

Source: BlueSnap  

• Offer multiple secure payment options for hassle-free checkouts.
• Provide local payment methods for global customers.
• Enable multi-seller checkouts in a single cart.
• Collaborate with payment providers for additional discounts or cashback.
• Ensure transparent and straightforward payment processes that involve minimal steps.

How StoreHippo Helps

StoreHippo comes pre-integrated with 60+ domestic and international payment gateways that enable you to offer multiple payment options to your customers across geolocations. With support for store wallet, digital wallets and UPI you can further enhance your payment offering and make payments seamless for your buyers. You can add multiple payment gateways in checkout, customize checkouts with different payment gateways for different sub stores of your multi store ecommerce marketplace and also implement adaptive payments to send payments to different sellers from payment gateway level.

8. Personalize Marketing To Hack Growth

We are living in the era of hyper-personalisation. According to a Forbes study;

Personalization Impact on Online Sales

• 62% of ecommerce businesses report better conversions after offering personalisation 
• 60% of ecommerce buyers want personalized offers in real-time 
• 80% of buyers prefer to purchase from brands offering personalized experiences

The data underlines how important it is to offer personalized buying experiences to your international multi vendor marketplace buyers. Personalizing interactions and recommendations go a long way in enhancing user engagement, driving repeat purchases and fostering brand loyalty. 

Here is how you can leverage personalization strategies to boost your multi store ecommerce marketplace’s orders:

• Tailor marketing messages, discounts and promotions based on buyer behavior insights.
• Implement personalized email campaigns and real-time push notifications.
• Build a multi-store marketplace website with personalized landing pages for different buyer segments.
• Follow up with abandoned cart users to convert them.
• Leverage dynamic forms to capture additional user inputs and insights for tailored marketing strategies.

How StoreHippo Helps

StoreHippo makes it easy for enterprise brands to personalize their marketing strategies. With built-in marketing tools like the discount engine, unified notifications ( email, SMS, push), abandoned cart auto follow up and more, StoreHippo makes it easy for you to offer personalized marketing on the different location-based sub-stores of your international multi vendor marketplace. You can also create dynamic landing pages for different buyer groups in no time and use the built-in forms to capture inputs or contact details for further personalizing your marketing and building your mailing lists.

9. Streamline Fulfillment To Win Customers

Streamlined fulfillment is the foundation of a successful ecommerce business. Effective, timely and damage-free fulfillment is the key to ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty. A well-optimized fulfillment process has multi-pronged benefits for the vendors, business owners and customers. By prioritizing seamless fulfillment for your international multi vendor marketplace brand you can enhance your reputation, boost repeat purchases and drive overall growth.

Here is how you can streamline the logistics of your international marketplace and its location-based sub-stores:

• Integrate with multiple shipping providers to streamline fulfillment
• Leverage your multi vendor marketplace’s vendors’ delivery agents or local delivery partners to optimize fulfillment
• Implement partial fulfillment to send parcels using multiple shipping partners
• Offer tracking and keep customers informed at various steps of the order process from placement to shipping to fulfillment. 
• Implement efficient returns and exchange processes to minimize grievances and keep customers happy.

How StoreHippo Helps

StoreHippo comes pre-integrated with 30+ logistics providers that deliver to 27000+ domestic pin codes and 200+ international locations. You can also leverage the API endpoints to integrate local delivery partners of your vendors for better fulfillment. StoreHippo also offers built-in delivery boy solutions to enable the vendors on your multi-store ecommerce marketplace to manage their fleet of delivery agents. 

10. Offer Unparalleled Support

What differentiates your marketplace brand from competitors is the experiences you provide to your customers. 48% of customers start their product search on a marketplace because they know that they will find the desired product and have the backing of the parent brand to safeguard their money and interests. 

Here is how you can offer a wow customer experience to your multi vendor marketplace buyers:

• Offer multi channel customer support to keep your customers engaged and happy
• Ensure quick resolution of issues and queries.
• Provide as much detail as possible regarding products with FAQ and guides.
• Implement rating and reviews to help your customers make informed decisions
• Offer dedicated support to your vendors and other partners to ensure they are aligned towards customer satisfaction. 

How StoreHippo Helps

StoreHippo makes it easy to integrate your preferred CRM and other support tools like chatbots, live chat etc. You can also add a detailed FAQ on each product page to help answer the queries of your buyers. StoreHippo comes with a built-in rating and review feature that allows buyers to add their genuine comments which helps other buyers make informed purchases. Reviews also act as a reality check for vendors and help your multi vendor marketplace brand to identify areas for improvement, ensuring that customer expectations and product quality are consistently met. 

Conclusion

Global eCommerce is on the rise, and enterprises that build a multi-store marketplace website early have the advantage of capturing market share and establishing a strong brand presence. By entering the global market ahead of competitors, businesses can tap into new emerging markets and build a loyal customer base before the competition becomes cut-throat.

To go to market in record time enterprises need the best ecommerce platform like Storehippo that comes with next-gen technology, plug-and-play solutions and comprehensive customisation options for diverse geolocations. With support for diverse business models like B2C, B2B, D2C, B2B2C, hyperlocal commerce and more, StoreHippo enables enterprises to build disruptive multi store ecommerce marketplace solutions.

Ready to begin your international multi vendor marketplace? Begin your journey on a firm footing, start your StoreHippo 14-day free trial now.