Challenges for Multi-Store and Multi-Vendor eCommerce

Multi-Store and Multi-Vendor Marketplace Systems Are Complex

If a hammer will do to get a nail into the wall, it doesn’t mean you can’t use a more complicated contraption to get a nail into the wall. One of biggest challenges of multi-store eCommerce and multivendor platform configuration is how complex it can be. In particular, when it comes to setting everything up and configuring it, it’s going to require more time to make decisions within the business and that can cause internal delays. These include key decisions about how things will be differentiated, what markets to focus on, how much power each selller has with their vendor dashboard, and this can be risky for the business to make some of these choices that may or may not work.

Marketplace Governance Can Be Difficult to Get Right

From a functionality perspective, having multiple different sites and vendors can present challenges when dealing with logistics and governance. Ultimately, if you don’t configure the multi-store and multi-vendor marketplace eCommerce properly, it can be a logistical nightmare. Therefore, it’s imperative that the governance of the site is very robust.

By governance, we mean the specific guidelines and built-in self-service of the site for adding or updating products, how accurate and valuable that process is, and how well it encourages vendors to offer a high quality and consistent presentation of their products along with all the other vendors, as well as how the uniqueness of their data is enforced.

Data Uniformity Determines Marketplace Quality for Users

Uniqueness of data along with consistency is important because technically, vendors could use the same SKU and product name, even with completely different products, or different descriptors for products in the same category. They also might associate different attributes, categories, sub-categories, or schema data to their products. So with computer hardware like RAM for example, they might choose different names or spellings of the attributes of the RAM.

So when somebody is going to filter and look for RAM, if you have vendors on your site that have all uploaded different types of RAM that they sell and they have different spellings and category schema, then you could end up with a situation (without the right governance) where the end user has a really low-quality experience because they can’t compare or filter seamlessly in a unified way. So needing to unify the data can be one of the major disadvantages of a multi-vendor offering.

Image Quality Impacts Customers’ Impressions of the Platform

One of the most basic things is pictures, as a lot of vendors don’t have high quality imagery for their products, or they might have a single high-quality picture that’s in a format that doesn’t work for your marketplace site. In many cases, the picture or image formats are completely different between vendors. Some might have very high resolution images, another might not have any at all, one may have just a wire frame drawing, another might have a strong background that’s not going to be acceptable for the marketplace website, etc.

These are the things logistically that are necessary to resolve and get the governance and guidelines in place for. The business is going to need to make decisions about how to handle this with all of the disparate data.

In a similar fashion with multiple sites, there have to be decisions about what sites to set up and what data to select for each of the sites. Fundamentally, setting up a significant number of additional sites and operating these, without the right governance, will become a major logistical challenge.