eMarket Line of Business Integrations – Vendor Portals

A key aspect of vendor portals for marketplace eCommerce is integrating with line of business applications, such as CRM and ERP software, that manage customer service and supply chain factors, respectively. These integrations are absolutely critical when it comes to vendor-specific credentials with our APIs that can offer the best standard industry protocols and bulk exporting, or dumping the data to another order, file, or file format.

These integrations also allow vendors to update the status of the orders either via the API, bulk upload, or manually input each order individually via the seller or vendor admin, so they can update buyers on the status of the items. The products could be in the process of fulfillment, for example, and it could have tracking and other information. For instance, perhaps there’s a split order with several items, and one of the items is on back order. It’s absolutely critical from a customer’s perspective to be able to keep all of that information up to date. So, it’s essential that the vendor can easily update that information.

Sometimes in the order management process when a buyer is ordering something, they like to interact with the seller. Specifically, interaction occurs when quotes are necessary, but sometimes with the order itself as well. Therefore, we also have a chat feature that’s native to the platform, which enables this robust, immersive interaction between the buyer and seller, and it can be configured with different options depending on the situation. There may be HIPAA compliance needs, security, GDPR, and other requirements for devices such as smartphones and tablets, and this chat can function with each of those necessities.

We can also incorporate functionality so that the seller can send things easily from their vendor dashboard, like a button to change the product or the buyer could provide information if they received an item, and it appears to be the wrong item. They can send a picture and let the seller see that it’s the wrong color or material, item, etc.

These aspects make the chat a really important aspect of the customer’s experience and enabling the vendor or seller to resolve any issues before there’s too much frustration from the buyer. There’s this immediate access to the seller without having to go through a lot of hoops, like picking up the phone and calling—chat is just a much lower barrier for most people. It’s less intimidating and more self-service in general. It can be really powerful to improve customer satisfaction.

Furthermore, we can also enable an email while away so that the seller or buyer still receives notifications even if they’re not online to interact with the chat in real time. They can still go back and forth, essentially through a pseudo chat-email format where they received a notification that there was a message sent in the chat, or the actual details of the chat itself, depending on the configuration for the marketplace via email. The email might show a summary or a notification with hidden details if there’s a security requirement to now show the contents of the chat in the email.

In addition to order management and being able to mark the status and adjust the information, provide additional updates, shipping information tracking, etc., we also enable quotes. Typically, with quotes, there's some form of workflow by the nature of the quote, so this can include a set of configuration options that the buyer would be selecting to give the seller an idea of what the buyer is looking for to try to narrow the criteria.

Usually, when there's a quoted item, this is because the actual price might fluctuate. There might be freight and shipping that's going to vary significantly, that simply doesn't have APIs for some of the complex intermodal logistics that have to happen in order to fill the item. There could be just varying costs that are part of the build process that are changing too often, etc.

All of these are factors that could cause the seller to want to opt for quote process to give an accurate number and specify a time limit on how long that quote is good for. Whenever a buyer receives the quote response, they would typically interact with the seller to answer and ask questions and be in a position to decide on whether or not they want to move ahead with the quote.

In which case, that quote would be converted over to either a sales order or an invoice, depending on the workflow that we want to leverage. Then that sales order or invoice would be payable digitally through the through the marketplace platform. And this could utilize the standard payment methods. This is this is not just credit card payments, but we can also process ACH and other forms of electronic payment, such as crypto currency if they would like being able to actually put in a PO for an account with a credit amount and enable a workflow.

Many clients have accounts that have funds on hand, so they'll purchase funds or resources to have on hand, and then they can enable different roles within their organization to make purchases from different locations. They can also put limits on how much each location can purchase during a given time period. If the account runs low or gets beyond its credit limit, then that particular account would receive a notification—"hey, you can't purchase this on credit. This is how much credit is left. If you want, you can complete the purchase with a credit card or an ACH transaction or some other method.”

We also have a lot of accounts to do purchase orders where they literally just enter the purchase order information, and the order doesn't actually get fulfilled until that payment arrives. It just depends on the workflow that you would want in place for the marketplace.

And in many cases, whenever it's actually paying the sellers, and the sellers are not part of the marketplace organization’s company, it makes a lot of sense to use digital payments. We do a lot of work with payment processors that have escrow accounts so the purchaser can actually make a deposit for the payment via this escrow model. Any of these payment methods would be incorporated into the vendor portal and the vendor can specify in their portal what options they want they want available and which options they wouldn't be willing to accept. Based on your marketplace and the settings that you want to enable, we would determine what options are then available to the vendor within their portal.

For example, if as a community decision or governance rule with how you're looking to operate the marketplace, you don't want the marketplace to have purchase orders that could delay the transactions, then you could simply say that you only accept credit card payments, and maybe it's purchasing via ACH in advance. Another common thing to do is to set up an earnest money or a deposit, and then that depositary or earnest money becomes forfeit if the payment is not received within a certain timeline. This is common for large auctions or other large purchases, because it enables you to have a hold on the purchase and forfeit that amount if the full payment isn’t received timely.

Additional Resources for e-Marketplace

• Key Marketplace Considerations
• Filtering and Categorization of Products
• Content Sourcing Practices & Workflows
• Best Buyer Dashboard Features
• Best Cart Features & Workflows
• Best Checkout Workflows & Payment Methods
• Establishing an eMarket - Vendor Portals
• eMarket Success - Vendor Portals
• eMarket Line of Business Integrations – Vendor Portals
• eCommerce Inventory Management – Vendor Portals