Ways a Marketplace Platform Improves Market Research

Start Market Research with Behavioral Analytics

Enterprise eCommerce marketplaces have really diverse sets of users that will come to them. In many cases, how visitors find the site is through organic SEO and references, which helps the marketplace grow in different niches and becomes more well-known within those. With this and the different facets of a possibly splintered market, you can investigate and understand the different aspects of niche portions of a particular industry that people are coming to the site to look for certain things.

One of the best ways to take advantage of a marketplace platform to be able to do market research and understand some of these different issues is by turning on really advanced analytics and understanding the users’ behavior within the platform. This includes not just purchasing behavior and transactional behavior, which is certainly fundamentally very critical, but also browsing behavior and browsing intent, even looking at things like dwell time on certain pages, search, and then which items the user actually goes to and how long they dwell.

What behavior occurs after they complete a search? What items are actually added to the cart? Being able to look at the aggregation of data with machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms so that we can identify trends within a particular industry is really valuable. So this can be things like movement away from a particular product to a new product by a different manufacturer, and maybe there's a feature improvement. Or there might be a paradigm shift in the offering for the product for the new manufacturer or seller.

Find Where the Value Is within the Marketplace

Analytic data can be aggregated and rolled up based on categories, subcategories, or based on an industry within the marketplace’s offering.

For example, if the marketplace is selling commercial kitchen equipment, there may be a particular set of knives that have a material that is really selling well and getting a lot of interest in search, a lot of people dwelling on the knives and looking at them.

And then all of the sudden, a new seller offers a new type of knife that the marketplace doesn’t even offer yet, but you can see that there are search results where someone is searching for something and they’re not finding the exact item. Since there’s not a good match for their searches, they’re bouncing from the marketplace.

Looking at these aspects is a great way to do market research because what will commonly happen is, if a vendor isn’t available, if their new products aren’t available, then the marketplace is less valuable for the buyer. So really, it's not only possible to do the market research through the marketplace platform, but it's also absolutely critical to do it, because if an item isn't available in one marketplace, then the value shifts to a marketplace where they can purchase from.

Even if they can only purchase directly from the manufacturer, it's really important, where possible, to offer the maximum convenience and value within the marketplace. So this would be an opportunity for a product team to be able to reach out and try to build a relationship with the vendor, who might want to offer their items within the marketplace.

In addition, another really key aspect of market research that we can do is setting up categories and setting up niche focus areas that may not be completely fulfilled through the marketplace itself, but this can be a low-cost way of testing everything, especially testing the market’s intent for a particular category or subcategory.

So it might make sense to set up a partnership with a drop shipping vendor in the short term, even though the intent in the long term might be to have a direct manufacturing supplier, where the manufacturer will directly supply items to the marketplace. But in the short term they’ll drop ship, and once the volume becomes large enough then the marketplace could take on manufacturing and distributing these items based on validation of the market.

You can see it as the ability to ramp up into different niches and have lower risk by taking advantage of the marketplace, whereas if it was a traditional eCommerce site, this may not be as easy to do, to offer items from different vendors and instead of having to, as in a traditional eCommerce site, directly ship and fulfill items themselves.

Give Recommendations Based on Data

Another way that we can enhance the opportunities for market research is we can actually inject into the transactional workflow and within the marketplace steps where we’re getting information and feedback about different vendors, about what other items someone might purchase. So we could say something like— "Hey, you bought a knife for your commercial kitchen. What are some other areas that you might be interested in the future?” Then we could take this information as the marketplace and share it with vendors and say— “Look, we have a really serious audience that's purchasing expensive stuff and they want your stuff too. Do you want to put your items into this marketplace that we’ve built?” It could be for high-end commercial kitchen equipment, for example.

It’s also common to anonymize data, and you can think of it as data-as-a-service. We can anonymize data within the marketplace itself and have information about the particular industry and the vendors. We can also aggregate data and anonymize it on behalf of the sellers in the marketplace. It's really interesting whenever we do this data-as-a-service offering, as we can enable the different vendors to see how they're performing relative to their peers within the marketplace.

So we might say— “You're selling items in these three categories based on the commercial kitchen equipment category. You're selling a lot of high-end colanders that can handle really high temperatures and a large volume of items going through them. Well, as it turns out, your calendars are 50% lower priced than everyone else in this space that's selling these really high-end calendars. And your volume is significantly lower as well.”

The vendor can then decide what to do with that information, and they may wonder what they’re doing wrong. We can show them average dwell time on product details versus average dwell time on their product details page.

We might tell them— “You’re not getting the average dwell time on your product details. You have a highly rated product, but people just aren’t able to relate to it or understand that it’s really valuable because you haven’t done a good job of marketing it.” Then, they could see that they need to work with their marketing team to update the content for these products, to make them more compelling.

Another thing that can be interesting is— “You all are offering things in these three categories, and it's very common for sellers/vendors within the marketplace to offer these type of items too. Do you have these items that you would be interested in and sharing within the marketplace? Or would you want to consider looking at this as well, based on what you’re selling successfully?”

Customer Responses Inform Improvement

Finally, it's also extremely valuable to do surveys and interviews with the buyers, and interact with them. We can provide promotional benefits like coupon codes or discounts for participating in surveys and questionnaires. These surveys help establish what else would be valuable within the marketplace, what would be valuable logistical services, and how we could reduce any concerns they have and increase the number of transactions.

This could result in buyers discovering a rewards program, or letting the marketplace team know why they didn’t participate in the rewards program before. They may let you know in a survey that— Well, if I can get a bigger discount by purchasing more items at once, then I would plan to purchase more. But you didn’t show that, so I didn’t know that you had quantity-based discounts.

Things like this can come out of general surveys and discussions. A marketplace eCommerce platform can be a powerful platform from which to gather detailed tracking analytics and extrapolate from that a lot of different facets of getting market research data.