How to Optimize a Multi-Vendor Marketplace Platform for B2C

What Is a B2C Multi-Vendor Marketplace Platform?

Business-to-consumer or B2C eCommerce is a common marketplace model, and marketplaces are commonly multi-vendor.

A multi-vendor marketplace website is where multiple vendors or sellers use the eCommerce platform as a medium for selling and promoting their products to potential buyers. Consumers go onto the website hoping to find something they want to buy, and when they review different products, those products may be offered by different sellers.

In a B2C business model, the sellers are businesses and the buyers are consumers. Here are some pro-tips to optimize your multi-vendor B2C marketplace platform to a B2C market.

Key Takeaways

• When you create a multi-vendor website, make sure to set up your back-office system such that vendors can standardize the data they import into the platform.
• It's imperative that your eCommerce marketplace software can automatically map the vendor's data into your platform for a seamless integration experience. A headless solution might be best depending on your current platform.
• To facilitate sales on the platform, the multi-vendor software needs to be able to adapt to different product categories or industries. You can set up customized displays for categories and subcategories.
• Have back-office integration that automatically pulls in any new or updated data so that vendors can aptly promote their products on the site.
• Provide multiple shipping options on your multi-vendor marketplace platform to improve logistics and fulfillment.

Make Data Integration Seamless for a Better Customer Experience

When you build a multi-vendor marketplace, there are ways that you can make things easier for both the sellers and the buyers. One has to do with how vendors integrate their product data into your systems. With the right B2C eCommerce software, vendors can seamlessly bring over data from their business systems into your platform. This also makes it more convenient for buyers because this allows them to compare and contrast items from different sellers.

Standardize Data to Make Searching Easier

Before you even create an online marketplace, one of the most important things for a B2C multi-vendor marketplace is having a consistent way to search for different products throughout the website, even though different vendors may start out with different data schemas.

To get a consistent search function that works with all the vendors selling with a B2C marketplace business model, the back-office system needs to give vendors a way to standardize their data as they put it into the platform.

Even images associated with products need to be put into a standardized format, as does the category information for how products are organized and naming conventions for features and accessories.

Auto-Map the Business's Data

It's important to consider a business's past experience with selling to consumers. For example, if a business is migrating from a B2B to B2C business models, they're used to selling to other businesses, which has different requirements than selling to consumers.

With B2B marketplace software, they may not have needed as much marketing, or as many images or product details that a consumer would expect. They may not have needed related products tagged for display so the buyer knows about them.

But with B2C, rich images, comprehensive product details, related products, category architecture, attributes, etc., are all vital to the buyer experience.

If these things are nonstandard for their industry or previous selling experience, it's imperative that the marketplace can match and auto-map the business's information properly so that buyers can find it on the site and easily compare products between different sellers.

Adapt the Presentation to Your Audience

Multi-vendor marketplaces need to cater to what consumers are looking for in that particular market or niche. If your multi-store eCommerce platform offers different categories of products, the relevant industries will have specific presentation styles that match that market.

Especially with a large marketplace, businesses can and should cater their offering to best fit that audience. In other words, the marketplace platform needs to be highly configurable and have a robust request-for-quote workflow. For certain types of products, buyers may be interested in spec sheets or an interactive presentation. The multi-store eCommerce software needs to be able to adapt and incorporate these aspects into the product details page and wherever else is needed on the website.

Examples of Industry-Specific Presentations

One way to go about this is to look at how companies in different industries set up their websites, such as Apple (a technology or electronics company) vs Alibaba (a B2B, B2C, and C2C eCommerce company).

Technology Industry Displays

Apple's website has an immersive presentation; their landing page design covers the entire screen, and they have large, high-quality images. The first thing you see on apple.com is a big and bold display for the latest iPhone. As you scroll down, you see a few more displays for their other latest products.

ECommerce Industry Displays

Alibaba, on the other hand, takes you right to the product catalog, which on the top of the page has categories you can select on the left, a featured products carousel in the middle, and promotions on the right. Below that are smaller images and prices of various products, including some for New Arrivals, Top-Ranking, and Personal Protective Equipment. Then there's a couple larger displays for Customizable Products and Ready-to-Ship Products. From the middle to the end of the page are more product images divided by categories like Consumer Electronics, Apparel, and Vehicle Parts & Accessories.

Comparison

The technology-focused company (Apple) is more concerned with making sleek, modern, and immersive displays to let consumers know about their latest products. This is typical for the tech industry because technology is always advancing; so the device or software you were using ten years ago isn't relevant today. Plus, for brands that focus on developing products in a particular area, the most recent development is usually what they want to promote; since when people go to buy a new phone, they're looking to upgrade.

Meanwhile, Alibaba wants you to see all the different types of products you can get, not just the most recent development in a single sector. For them, variety and having more products is the name of the game, as are other factors like shipping and delivery time. They display the most popular products at the top or with larger displays—there's a reason the Customizable Products and Ready-to-Ship Products have larger presentations than New Arrivals and Top Ranking, but there's also a reason why the latter two are further up the page.

The bottom line is that someone looking to buy a new phone is expecting different things from a website than someone looking to buy a replacement part for a car. Both will want technical specifications, but the potential phone-buyer needs to be sold on the idea first, whereas the car-part-buyer already knows what they need and wants the product specifications upfront.

These necessary presentation differences are vital to making a sale. When you create a multi-vendor website, the platform needs to offer different presentation styles for different categories or industries for products within the marketplace.

Promote Well-Performing Vendors

Another key feature for a B2C multi-vendor marketplace is having robust back-office integration that can pull inventory and pricing information to update and add new products.

Within the B2C marketplace space, there are a lot of rapid changes happening to stay competitive, especially around holidays or special sales. It really can be a matter of getting items updated at the appropriate time and being able to schedule sales and promotions.

The multi-vendor eCommerce platform should enable sellers to promote their products and services to the marketplace users. Vendors should be able to promote or sponsor themselves within the marketplace based on their credibility, service, support, ratings, and reviews. The multi-vendor software can help by automating and standardizing certain aspects of this.

Improve Logistics and Order Fulfillment

Another common aspect of multi-vendor marketplaces is dealing with logistics and shipping, as well as taxes and possibly customs and duties, currency conversion, and multiple languages.

When businesses are trying to sell items internationally and expand their reach, the marketplace can support the business by enabling aspects the business doesn’t have, often via a vendor dashboard. For example, the business may not have the resources to properly translate everything, such as currencies and languages, or deal with the customs, duties, taxes, and shipping logistics. The marketplace platform can enable this for the business instead.

With this offering from the marketplace, there are options that allow the seller to simply get the item to a certain distribution center, and then everything is handled from there, including the paperwork on the taxes, customs, and duties, etc. This helps businesses expand their reach and helps the marketplace grow as well.

Work with Clarity

If you have more questions about how to create a marketplace website for B2C, we'd love to talk to you. Clarity offers a complimentary discovery process, so get in touch today!