What Are the Advantages of Multi-Store and Multi-Vendor Marketplace Platforms?
Provide Custom Experiences
One of the major advantages of a multi-store platform is that we can really cater the offering and marketing and simplify the delivery to a specific niche, industry, category, or even individual customer or customer group by making a store for each of these.
While one of the biggest challenges with a multi-store eCommerce and multi-vendor eCommerce is dealing with the logistics, whenever there is a central database and a central repository master source of record, this enables the whole thing to work seamlessly.
Have a Central Database
This is another major advantage of a multistore scenario and multivendor scenario, is that we can leverage a single database, a single set of persistence of information and then use the actual stores and vendor views to be able to filter respectively based on the situation.
Coordinate Multiple Stores and Distribution Centers
To give a few examples here, there may be an overarching company that that wants to offer products online so folks can order and have the items shipped to them, but they also have physical stores.
In this situation, the multi-store platform would line up so that it would be representative of physical stores, brick-and-mortar locations that are represented online by an eCommerce multi-store experience.
Each of those stores have their own inventory and products that they carry in the store, but the user ought to be able to order things online as well. So the user can go to a particular store and they can also do a search from the main marketplace website to find a particular location.
Or from the main site or multi-store platform, they can order something from to be drop shipped or shipped from a distribution center or shipped from another store that has it in stock if it's not in stock at their selected store.
This is an example of where you get some major advantages from having a multi-store marketplace platform. If you only have a single store marketplace for each of the locations, they would not be able to share data and dop ship, and it would be logistically challenging to coordinate shipping between stores or distribution centers.
Buying Groups Can Have Specialized B2B and B2C Platforms
When buying groups sell to B2B organizations, they often also want to sell items to consumers in a B2C model marketplace.
With multi-vendor group buying platforms, they can have their full set of data and full offering in this central database that serves up all the different buying group members and gives them custom pricing and quantity discounts and rewards and any other nuances that apply.
The buying group can also use this same centralized set of data and scope it down to what would be offered to consumers.
Furthermore, they can have a completely separate B2C domain with completely separate branding from their platform for B2B purchasers. The buying group can even focus on multiple consumer focus areas, so one could be on providing resources for toys for retail locations, and they want to sell these toys to consumers.
The toys can be put into sections, such as one for Disney toys and another for wooden toys and another that’s for Nerf guns.
Each one can have different branding and presentations, and all of this data is coming from the same central database, but the contents of the site are based on the focus of that platform. Users can use the central database to filter and search for vendors, categories, aspects of the content, etc.
This is really powerful from a marketing and overall enterprise level, to be able to focus on these niches and facets and be able to optimize around them using the same core dataset.