Why Your Business Needs a Multi-Vendor E-Commerce Marketplace

Companies like Flipkart and Amazon, among others, operate thriving e-commerce marketplaces, that have interested many people to the operating business model — in most of the cases, it is multi-vendor e-commerce marketplace. Its massive success and efficiency are ascribed to the fact that it boosts sales for vendors by giving them a digital platform from where they can sell all their products. Since marketplaces make use of the same software, all third-party vendors to share their portfolio of offerings on a unified platform.

Another benefit of multi-vendor e-commerce solutions is that they help third-party vendors enhance their production. How? Well, this business model involves vendors selling their products straight to the customers instead of retailing them through a franchise. As a result, they are not required to hold stock of the product(s). Did we mention that one also gets the opportunity to expand their reach beyond national borders and sell their products to a global customer base, thanks to international multi-vendor e-commerce marketplaces?

So, you know, there are tons and tons of benefits of utilizing multi-vendor e-commerce solutions. However, before you take the plunge, it is essential to ensure you select the right platform for your business. Here are some tips that you can keep in mind.

1. Pick a niche: While you may be tempted to sell everything, it is a bad idea to jump straight to that step. Take Etsy’s example — it set the ball rolling in the e-commerce space by selling arts and crafts supplies directly and then went on to become a highly recognized and famous brand in the area. We could go on with examples, but you get our drift, yes? Aim at a niche that comes most comfortably to you, at least initially.

2. Type of platform: There are two categories of platforms to choose from — Cloud/Hosted and Self-Hosted. The first, i.e., cloud/hosted platforms, are out-of-the-box platforms that allow you to launch the marketplace at nominal costs swiftly. Whereas self-hosted platforms are more complex and take more time to be configured, but they do serve as a great way to put together a highly-scalable and well-performing marketplace. So, choose the hosting carefully as well.

3. Payment management: This is one of the most crucial considerations since this is where the business’ revenue comes from. The current crop of multi-vendor marketplaces makes use of a plethora of payment options besides the conventional cash on delivery, including debit card, credit card, UPI, and net banking. They also offer several payment gateways options for added convenience. Oh, and don’t forget that either the seller or the marketplace admin should also have the ability to revert payments if a customer puts in a return request for a product they bought off the platform.

We understand that choosing a multi-vendor marketplace platform is a challenging process, but you know as well as everyone else in the e-commerce industry that things, in the context of your business and the results you can achieve, only get better from here.