What Is Multi Vendor Ecommerce Website
A multi vendor ecommerce website is an online portal or an app that allows multiple vendors, sellers, distributors and manufacturers to come together on a single platform to sell their products or services. Some well-known examples of ecommerce marketplaces are Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, Flipkart etc.
The Structure Of An Ecommerce Marketplace
The online marketplace platform owners provide the technical framework in form of the website and the backend. They are also responsible for maintaining the storefront, marketing and traffic generation. However, they do not directly sell their products or services. They can offer shipping services.
The vendors register on the platform and get their own separate login to manage their products, inventory and orders. They don’t incur the set-up cost and don’t spend on brand-building efforts. Also, they don’t have to manage a technical or support team. They just have to keep track of their products, orders and shipping orders timely.
The multi vendor ecommerce website model has gained huge popularity among customers thanks to the vast range of products, competitive pricing, ease of shopping and the brand guarantee it offers.
Top Benefits Of Starting A Multi Vendor Ecommerce Website
Building an online marketplace is a smarter business move than building a regular online store. Business owners can leverage this unique business model to gain the following advantages:
- Cost-effective: If you use the best marketplace builder you can build your marketplace at the same time and money as needed to build an online store.
- Less Investment: The business owner does not need to invest in inventory, which saves the resources needed to build and manage inventory.
- Multiple Revenue Streams: Allows the business owner to explore and experiment with multiple revenue streams like commissions, onboarding fees, prime positioning charges, lead generation fees and charges for additional services like shipping, customer care etc.
- Easy Scalability: A multi vendor ecommerce website makes it easy to scale up the business in terms of products or vendors just by inviting sellers from different product verticals.
- Customer Engagement: Online marketplaces are more popular among customers and they drive more traffic to your business.
- Automation And Growth: The best online marketplace platforms offer a well thought and automated software that makes it very easy to manage the business and grow to new markets.
- Better Business Insights: Gives better business insight and freedom to experiment with bestselling products, categories etc. for targetted marketing and improved sales.
StoreHippo readymade ecommerce marketplace solution offers a well-rounded solution to build and launch a variety of use-cases of this model, namely, horizontal, vertical, service aggregator or out-of-box marketplace websites.
How Do I Create A Multi Vendor Ecommerce Website
A decade ago, business owners had to build their marketplace from scratch. However, the advent of turnkey solutions has made the process much easier. Following are the most popular ways of building an online marketplace:
- Software Built From Scratch: This requires time and money and an experienced team of developers to write the code from scratch.
- Turnkey Solution+Plugins: In this format, you use readymade ecommerce marketplace solution along with a variety of paid plugins.
- Readymade Solution With Paid Hosting: You get the readymade ecommerce marketplace builder but you need to buy server space for hosting and developers to manage the setup.
- Fully Hosted And Managed: This type of multi vendor ecommerce website builder like StoreHippo offers your end-to-end marketplace solution.
StoreHippo best marketplace platform has an inbuilt multi-vendor solution that does not require additional plugins to manage the complex set up. The easy to use admin dashboard is intuitive and offers a smooth learning curve. We have powered a variety of B2B and B2C businesses across the globe.
Why Choose StoreHippo Multi Vendor Ecommerce Website Builder
StoreHippo’s ecommerce marketplace builder offers next-generation solution to build future-ready multi-vendor online stores. Our aim is to offer an affordable and transparent solution for businesses of every size and scale.
The SaaS-based platform is suitable for medium to large as well as high volume enterprise businesses of B2B and B2C model. With the expertise and experience of powering businesses across the globe, we help you build a feature-rich ecommerce marketplace solution for your business.
Here are the key benefits of choosing StoreHippo to build your multi-vendor ecommerce website:
- An off-the-shelf inbuilt solution that helps you manage the complex multi-vendor set up easily
- Extensively customizable that allows tweaking the frontend and backend as well
- Build the best marketplace platform that is PWA and works like hybrid apps across devices. Create mobile apps at no additional cost.
- Get readymade, customizable themes along with inbuilt drag and drop tools
- Seamless integrations to make business processes easier and efficient
- Multi-storefront capability managed with a common central admin
- Easier brand building with inbuild CMS(content management system), blog engine and SEO friendly multi-vendor ecommerce website builder
- Multiple payment options, wallet support, net banking support and 50+ integrated payment gateways
- Integrated and discounted shipping partners along with automated shipping module
- Tools for international business expansion like multilingual support, multicurrency payments and invoicing, multi-level tax engine
StoreHippo also offers complete B2B solutions to enable enterprise businesses to build an effective ecommerce marketplace solution. The inbuilt marketing tools help in promoting the business and building brand recognition. With the right business idea, marketing strategies and the best vendor partners on your multi vendor ecommerce website you can be the next Amazon or Alibaba.
Ready to launch the best marketplace platform?Check the various Multi-Vendor Use Cases powered by StoreHippo the trusted ecommerce marketplace solution and explore our platform by starting your 14-day free trial now!
