What is the best online marketplace?

There are a lot of big and successful marketplaces. Alibaba.com, eBay.com, Amazon.com, goAfrica.com, Etsy.com, Craigslist.com are just a few of the most popular. There are very few platforms that can scale to what’s needed for an implementation like those. Clarity eCommerce is used for goAfrica.com, and we have clients with well over 1 million SKUs in their marketplace. Many of the ones listed above aren’t a “purchased platform” but a custom-built, in-house platform that costed them well over $10 Million to build. They’ve even written books about how they architected and built their platforms. Clarity has launched marketplaces for their clients for $50k to $500k, so much cheaper than building your own marketplace.

What is marketplace business model?

Marketplace business model is often referred to as C2C or consumer to consumer. eBay was mostly C2C, but then many businesses started selling on eBay as well, so it’s now both B2C, as well as C2C. Craigslist and Etsy are really the only mainly C2C marketplaces left, while businesses have all jumped into the marketplaces now. The model allows Sellers to upload and sell their own products to consumers through the marketplace. This allows them to get their products in front of many potential consumers, and usually means giving up a % of each transaction for the privilege of both exposure and using their marketplace platform.

Clarity's International Marketplace Platform

Q: How do you build a successful marketplace?

Strategic infrastructure (selecting the right platform and hosting infrastructure) ranks as the single most important criterion in successfully building a global marketplace platform. It’s not as simple as allowing others to display products on the company’s website or offering to ship products internationally. There are language and cultural barriers, tax codes and compliance issues, possible price wars on marketplace platforms among vendors and other issues.

Expanding Your Clientbase Globally

Understanding What Your Clients Need Contextually

The global marketplace increasingly favors specialty platforms for B2B eCommerce sales, and companies can now design their own international marketplaces or sell on multiple platforms to extend their marketing reach. It’s valuable to leverage these sales, marketing, lead-generating and commission-generating opportunities, but success depends on how well a business handles the challenges of marketplace sales. Specifically, successful companies speak contextually to an audience of varying interests, nationalities and purchasing habits.

It’s critical to manage complex inventory issues, content marketing, multiple languages, Web store connectors and other automatic processes to boost loyalty, build trust and facilitate conversions.

International Industry Cost Analysis

A Forrester Consulting Study Listed the Following:

It’s easier to generate commission revenue without the costs of storing, shipping and manufacturing additional product lines
Companies can offer small-run and niche products
Marketplace sales provide multiple product lines and associated services on one website
Companies can build deeper relationships with existing customers and leverage new clients from different areas

Jump to Marketplace FAQs

You Need an International ecommerce Platform

Best Practices for Building a Global Marketplace

Strategic infrastructure ranks as the single most important criterion in successfully building a global marketplace platform. It’s not as simple as allowing others to display products on the company’s website or offering to ship products internationally. There are language and cultural barriers, tax codes and compliance issues, possible price wars on marketplace platforms among vendors and other issues. This is why you really need to look at a true international eCommerce platform, instead of a SaaS-based off-the-shelf eCommerce product. The top tips for successfully building and managing a better eCommerce solution include the following ideas:

Multilingual Support

A recent report about building better customer experiences found that maintaining customer engagement was one of the most important priorities for contact centers and, logically, marketplace platforms. [2] Multilanguage support is critical, and this requires a supportive software infrastructure. Content generation, website copy, whitepapers, product descriptions, instructions, icons and directional arrows need to comply with local languages and display practices to engage customers. Simply translating existing copy isn’t enough; it’s vital to create appealing copy based on local tastes, social media trends and content requirements of the targeted buyer profile. This is made possible through a multilingual integrate online store or multilingual eCommerce integration.

Multicurrency Shopping Carts

Customers want to pay in their own currency without needing to make complex conversion calculations. That’s why using a multi-currency integrated eCommerce solution is so important, because it enables companies to include a multicurrency module to integrate live exchange rates, automatic displays of price in the appropriate currency and real-time updates that display the right price at all times. It's difficult for users to view your product in another currency. Instead of making a decision on the size or color, they're trying to figure out if it's a good deal and converting the price in their head. You've always heard that you should "Remove all barriers of entry" if you want to increase conversions? Well, currency conversions are a barrier and there's no reason that you can't remove that barrier.

Local Competition

It’s critical to offer customers something more than a better price to convince those in foreign jurisdictions to buy products when acceptable local products are available. That’s why website infrastructure is so critical because it can provide a superior experience for researching products, finding specialty items, providing shipping options and delivering seamless self-service ordering experiences. It’s important to research each aspect of providing products in different jurisdictions including whether to use local suppliers, how to tweak products for local tastes, etc.

Multiple Payment Options

Payment options should include several payment methods through the use of a multi-currency eCommerce integration, but it’s even more critical to research each country and choose the most popular payment method. One payment provider study determined that choosing a popular local provider can increase conversions by 10 percent. [3] Partnering with a payment-gateway company with multiple connections also makes sense because it increases the options of rerouting payments through multiple gateways.

Region-specific Content

There are multiple options for providing region-specific content when the company’s platform has a robust API layer and integrated software. Possible approaches include designing several proprietary designs for each store. Designers can add banners to target buyers from key jurisdictions, and complex coding can provide solutions that adjust everything including images, text, layout and left-to-right or right-to-left placement depending on whether the copy targets one of the seven languages using right-to-left displays.

Adding Foreign Domains

The best proactive strategy for protecting sales and key terms used in website searches is registering international domains. It’s important to register popular, top-level domains such as those using “.com” and other locations. Country-specific domains--such as “co.uk,” ”.fr” and .ca also provide a better eCommerce solution for SEO ranking and optimization of keywords for each locale.

Regulatory Issues

Regulatory requirements are constantly evolving, and when companies market products in many jurisdictions, the problems of compliance increase exponentially. That’s why automated monitoring and real-time updates are so important when operating a marketplace platform. For example, it might be required that each customer reads policy information, or compliance issues could be more challenging such as meeting HIPAA guidelines for health-monitoring products.

In Their Language

Building a World-class Marketplace Operation

Regardless of whether a B2B company sells on multiple marketplace channels, designs a platform where other companies sell industry-specific goods or does both, it’s important to partner with seasoned experts who can develop and integrate software solutions that are customized for your business. The complex challenges of the international marketplace include:

Overseeing internal price-competition issues
Ensuring quality assurance across vendors
Embedding multiple payment solutions
Determining options for shipping
Troubleshooting accountability issues
Creating multilingual marketing and content-creation strategies
Automating content and Web displays based on geolocation, language and regionalisms

A telling example of the effectiveness of providing native-language content is shown by a recent study that found 42 percent of online Europeans won’t purchase products unless the website is in their own language. [4] The right software--fully integrated into the platform--can make handling these challenges easy and efficient.

Over 350 Years of Marketplace Development

Choosing Your Partner

In today’s competitive marketplace marketing, it’s important to develop, upgrade and integrate your software continuously. New decisions are constantly needed, and ongoing monitoring and adjusting just comes with the territory. That’s why you need a team of experienced engineers who can collaborate effectively with to ensure platform security, consistency, scalability and maintainability. Cultivate a long-term relationship with a vendor you can trust to build and manage your marketplace platform or platforms, minimize costs and optimize your sales and marketing, as well as delivering a multilingual website that is both user friendly, accessible, and supports multi-currency product pricing and shopping cart checkout. With over a decade of building custom B2B ecommerce marketplaces, Clarity can be that partner for you. Reach out and let’s discuss how we may be able to help you with your international marketplace.

International Marketplace Integrated with your ERP-CRM