Online businesses are flourishing with each passing day and the reason is quite simple, anyone with minimal investment can set up a business that is globally accessible. Even the experts have predicted that eCommerce will surpass the milestone of $2 Trillion by the end of 2017.
But just knowing that online businesses works is not enough. For a successful eCommerce venture, you need to know what is the demand of the market and where do people go to get the supply of the same. Well, the need of the customers can be ever changing, but according to a survey, nearly half (48%) of online buyers first turn to a mass commerce marketplace to seek the product they need.
So, once you figure out what people need, setup a marketplace that can become a preferred shopping destination for your target audience. But, becoming a people’s choice is not that easy. You need to incorporate such features that are user centric and that generates a goodwill amongst the people due to its captivating user experience. Now, the question is how can you decide which features fit the best for your marketplace? The answer to that question is using the following features of nopCommerce Multi-Store and Multi-vendor marketplaces along with their business implications:
Features of Multi-Store Marketplace
The multi-store marketplace is like the brick and mortar product exclusive stores. Instead of stuffing the website with numerous products from irrelevant categories, an entrepreneur can create multiple stores with exclusive domains and then manage all of them from one administration panel. Below are the features of nopCommerce that works the best for the majority of marketplace administrators:
One for All and All for One:
Multi-store functionality allows the administrator to create niche and micro-niche stores to target specific segment of potential customers. It empowers the administrator to focus on a specific market with an exclusive target audience and capitalize on the market gap with a high conversion rate.
Prioritize and Monetize:
The administrator can create multiple stores for different categories or for different geographic locations to incorporate second and third level price discrimination strategy. The additional benefit of creating stores based on geographical locations is that it allows the administration to use the store personalization by introducing regional languages and can also allow customers to pay in their local currency. This also allows the administrator to implement customized marketing plans for each store.
Administrator’s Sidekick:
nopCommerce authorize the administrator to provide a restricted or controlled access to the vendor. The admin can apply common rules or can execute individual store level access rights. They can also publish store wise content like Blogs, Templates, News etc.
Features of Multi-Vendor Marketplace
Multi-vendor is like a wholesale market where vendors upload their products to an eCommerce portal along with other similar products and they try to make money based on competitive pricing policies. Below are the most preferred Multi-Vendor features:
Administrator’s Trump Card:
Multi-vendor not only enables the vendors to sell the products on the eCommerce platform but also prompts them to market their products along with your portal. Thus, an administrator can kill two birds with one stone.
Product Ownership:
A nopCommerce administrator can add ‘n’ number of vendors to the portal, he can also associate the vendor to the product.
Vendors Can Sell and Sail Their Products:
The administrator can enable the Drop Shipping feature for the multi-vendor marketplace and should worry only about the payment and after sales services. Drop shipping directly assigns each product with their vendors and every time an order is placed, the vendor directly gets the mail regarding the order placed with details like quantity, shipping address etc.
This delegation is a win-win situation for both vendors as well as administrators. The administrator does not have to act as a mediator for the orders placed by the customers. And the vendors also don’t have to fall prey to the human errors as they have direct access to the orders placed by the customers.
Above are the most preferred features of the nopCommerce Platform and many marketplaces who chose these features are running successfully. But, it is obvious not all the businesses may settle for the same. Thus, nopCommerce also provides its users with the freedom of customization. Designers can build a marketplace as they see fit using the cross features of both Multi-store and Multi-vendor.
In this world, all you need is a vision and a will of steel to succeed. Building a marketplace in today’s digital world is not a challenge. But, to make it strong and unique enough to break the thick wall of competition takes a lot of effort. Make wise use of these features to make them work as a pedal to the metal for your dream of getting a piece of the $2 Trillion worth Cake.
Author Bio
Bhoomi Mehta is a techno-commercial leader with 20+ years of cross functional expertise across Consulting, Operations, Marketing & Sales, Application Portfolio, Web Content Management, Product Engineering & Lifecycle Services at Cygnet Infotech.
Having worn several hats over the years including Consulting, Mentoring, Training, Project Management, Quality Assurance, Marketing & Sales, Bhoomi actively shares insights on latest and important issues related to nopCommerce and leading technology platforms.