eMarket Success with Vendor Portals

Steps to Get Started

These marketplace platforms allow the vendor, seller, and manufacturer to self-service and register. One thing that Clarity offers is a very streamlined onboarding process with steps and simple guiding that is gamified so that as the vendor gets started, they understand the key aspects of the community and the governance of the community. These steps and guidelines are based on your business rules and requirements within your marketplaces and industry.

It helps to be instructive and opinionated about how vendors should go about providing their content and setting everything up and describing their offering. Then, when users are on the site, they are getting a consistent and positive experience. This is the main point of the vendor portal and registration process. We want the end user, or the buyer, to have a positive experience so that the vendor can find great customers that continue to purchase products or services—it’s a win-win scenario. That’s the ethos or appeal of this vendor portal.

In accordance with providing a great user experience, the registration process can also include verification steps. Verification of vendors builds trust from the buyer’s point of view, and lets you know that vendor is legitimate. Things like identity, background, credit, address, and domain for a business are all useful things to verify. Once we’ve done that, we want to make it a smooth transition for them to bring their content into the site.

One of the most powerful aspects of a marketplace—and why people create a marketplace in the first place—is how it can take advantage of SEO, or search engine optimization. This enables the marketplace to easily promote items for these vendors, so vendors can access the components and widgets that they need in their promotions; it gives them a vehicle to sell their items. So, the vendors should be able to easily upload all their content so we can take advantage of the organic SEO to give them a platform to promote from.

Provide a Seamless Transition

Therefore, the first thing we want to offer is programmatic importing of their data, which we talk about in our marketplace eCommerce integration and data import article, linked here. We also provide a bulk import process where vendors can download a template and then bulk import their products and other items that make sense for your community and marketplace. This would also include the products’ associated categories and subcategories, pricing, inventory, description, meta-information, custom attributes, search filters, etc. All of this data needs to be easily importable, using an excel file or google sheet, etc. Another option would be for the vendor to input single items and clone those items, and perhaps make a few changes, save it, clone it again, and so on. They’d have the ability to use these different mechanisms that range from very robust bulk integrations to individual product entry and manipulation.

Within the product management, it's also important to be able to go in and make updates and edits in real time. The vendor will have access via their mobile, tablet, and desktop devices so they can go in and authenticate, update, and manage their products that are currently active. They can also modify and manage the pricing, such as setting customer-specific pricing and shipping fees. Vendors can also set inventory information and have multi-warehouse capability. These capabilities enable the vendor to offer a robust set of business rules that they can enforce through the vendor portal for fulfilling, showing pricing, and inventory data.

Vendors can also have quantity price breaks as well as unlimited custom fields, though depending on how your marketplace governance is set up, we can intelligently limit the custom fields based on what’s going to make a consistent product presentation for the end user and the marketplace.

We can also enable a workflow where there’s an approval process and validation before a product gets an update and goes live. This approval process can be community audited through the marketplace itself and based on a number of flags when a vendor might have to go through a more manual process. For example, they may need to get approvals on a certain number of products before they are automatically approved for updates. Then if they get a certain number of flags, their automatic approval gets revoked, and they would need to do have a manual approval for a certain number of updates again before they can be reinstated.

These are all processes that are common within a marketplace, where you have these external inputs into the system and different levels of trust based on past experience working with these vendors. Other important aspects to consider are SEO, imagery, categories, and inventory, which are all controllable through the vendor portal.

We also enable order management so that the vendors can see their orders. They can see a vendor dashboard where they're looking at their orders, and the status of orders. If there are any that need to be fulfilled, that are behind schedule, or that have a return request, question, or issue, the vendor can see a heads-up display to know this is an urgent item or request. For example, it might something that needs to be fulfilled today, or they might miss the shipping deadline.

The order management also ties in with the vendor contacts, who would also receive notifications when orders are placed. The vendor might receive multiple different emails about different product types. Based on the role, we can split those product types into different email distribution lists, or different warehouses that get different emails. Vendors will have certain contacts who will get this data.

Additionally for order management, Clarity offers an API feed that is specific to the vendor, so the vendor can integrate to their ERP or line of business application, warehouse management, fulfillment, etc. In other words, with Clarity eCommerce Framework™, vendors can integrate their specific feed to output the data from the marketplace and bring it in dynamically to their internal fulfillment system and process. So, if that's a desire that's definitely doable; and the vendor outputs are available in different API formats: REST, SOAP, EDI, flat file, cXML, Punch-Out Catalog, etc. There’s more about order management, and vendor portals, in our key marketplace article linked here.

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
• Distributor Portals
• PunchOut Catalog Solution
• eMarket Line of Business Integrations – Vendor Portals
• eCommerce Inventory Management – Vendor Portals