Digital Interactive Services
Six ways to manage multiple marketplaces effectively
Online multi-vendor marketplaces are increasingly becoming popular and, thus, competitive. According to a study, 97% of customers purchase online, with 50% of e-commerce sales happening over multi-vendor marketplaces.
But what is a multi-vendor marketplace?
In simple terms, it is an online shop where multiple vendors come together to sell their products and services. With huge shifts in customer preferences, it makes sense to invest in managing your presence on a multi-vendor e-commerce website effectively.*
Essential tasks of a vendor listed on a marketplace
Listing the products on a multi-vendor marketplace is easier said than done. A successful business on a multi-vendor market goes through these daily activities.
Managing inventory during the initial days is easy, but it becomes challenging as the selling avenues grow. Investing in tools for inventory management makes the job easy and even allows sellers to add more products to the marketplace.
Shipping the right product to the correct address at the right time is no easy task. You could let the marketplace manage the shipping or have your own logistics vendor pick orders from sellers and deliver them to the customers.
While making payments in the online marketplace, you must factor in the cost of convenience and commissions. Automated commission management lets you know the most profitable products and those that are not performing well.
Online content marketing and branding build trust with the customers. For example, marketplaces run contests and loyalty programs. Vendors need to work with the marketplace to align their products and services with contests and loyalty programs.
Challenges in a multi-vendor marketplace
While brands selling on multi-vendor marketplaces have broader avenues to sell their products and subsequently increased sources of revenue, a few challenges crop up as businesses continue to grow and orders constantly flow in. While facing these challenges, business owners must adapt and change processes quickly. Here are a few challenges they should be prepared for.
Manual listing and updates take a considerable amount of time and make the whole system prone to errors. It is not possible to manually update the product details and prices when you have thousands or millions of products on the marketplace.
The biggest challenge is to keep the product information constant on all the platforms. If you do not have a single system in place that connects to all the platforms and marketplaces, you may eventually begin overselling.
Order receiving, processing, packing, labelling, and dispatching do not happen with a few clicks. You have to spend time organising the orders. When the number of orders is large, the team could go on an autopilot mode and commit mistakes.
Without real-time updates on the inventory, you could sell the product when it is not in the stock. This hampers customer satisfaction and results in poor experience. According to a study, 1 in every 3 customers leave their favourite marketplaces after just one bad experience.
Sending a product twice is as bad as not sending it at all. The company loses out on the time and money spent on printing, collecting, packaging, and delivering the product. If the customer returns the product, you must also factor in the cost of receiving it back.
Six ways to managing multiple marketplaces effectively
Brands that sell their products on multiple marketplaces stand to benefit from the following tips.
Have a different seller account for each region you want to sell your products in. However, make sure the marketplace has a strong presence in that region.
If you operate in different geographical locations, set different market prices and tailor your offerings according to the needs of the customers in that area.
Create multiple seller accounts if you deal with different product niches. You can also do so if you sell new as well as used products.
Having multiple seller accounts result in multiple monthly payments and reinvestment in the new ones. However, these also result in increased sources of revenue. The initial return may be small, but it benefits in the long run.
Having an account on a single platform carries the risk of losing your business entirely if the account is suspended or banned for reasons such as customer complaints, low reviews, or policy violations. Additionally, it may take a while to resolve these issues. However, you do not have to depend on a single sales avenue. By listing yourself on multiple marketplaces and managing them well, you can reduce the risk of losing business.
Not every product is meant to be sold online. Optimise the products and sell the right ones on the marketplace.
How can Infosys BPM help?
Infosys BPM helps businesses enhance their brand identity on multiple marketplaces. Companies can optimise their marketplace performance and expand to newer platforms quickly. The value-driven e-commerce marketplace management services include:
- Brand governance
- Catalogue management
- Marketing operations
- Customer/back-office support
- Reporting and analytics
View the marketplace management services by Infosys BPM.
*For organisations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organisational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organisations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organisations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.
