Best Favorites & Wish List Solutions

Improving Customer Engagement & Team Collaboration
The Key Concepts Behind Favorites & Wish Lists

The Importance of a Wish List

Today we will be taking a look at seller wish lists, favorites, and custom alerts. These are a really key component for engaging users and enabling them to have a seamless experience in the marketplace.

Generally, when someone's navigating through the marketplace, they're going to be looking at possibly purchasing products from different sellers with a sense of credibility. Overtime building a relationship by interacting with them, developing a strong sense of trust. Once a buyer finds a particular seller, they enjoy doing business with, they don't want to have to go through all of the steps of navigating through the site in order to find that particular seller or manufacture again.

This becomes even more cumbersome when they have a set of products from different manufacturers or different types of products they are trying to reorder. This is where a wish list or favorites list comes in handy. They can go re-purchase the items that never leave the list unless they manually delete them, or the wish list could be more of a list of items that once an item is added to the cart it gets removed from the wish list. Another possibility would be a “review list”, where internal folks can discuss and proceed through a requisition approval process. This sort of list is where someone adds items to the list but then it has to be approved before purchasing.

Increasing Customer Engagement

Notifications and Alerts

In addition to that custom alerts and notifications have the capability of allowing both sellers and buyers but typically buyers be able to see when a seller adds a new item to their store. They might be really interested in items from that seller and they just want to watch for new items that come out. Maybe it's a category of items from that seller or a special designer that makes the best necklaces according to this buyer and so they want to see right away when the price drops right into their range.

It's also quite possible to build based on the tracking analytics within the application itself. These can be dynamically created based on what folks are looking at, what are they interested in, and what kind of periodic transactional notification can we send to them to help remind them know that there are other items they might be interested.

Highly Robust & Customizable

The Different Types of Lists

So, talking about these capabilities one of the simplest concepts is being able to save a sellers list. Basically, just a favorite or a list of sellers that someone as a buyer are interested in. That's a pretty simple functionality but it's certainly important to be available. It's really important that anywhere the seller’s information is available, a possible buyer is able to easily favorite and save that seller to their list.

Next in function in the list is the concept of a wish list. This type of list is one that can be named, can be made public, private, or shared with just a small group of folks. It can be possible for the wish list to essentially allow folks to purchase items on the wish list and then the items get removed from the list. It's also possible to do some really detailed things where instead of having it be a wish list. it can be more of a shopping list where someone has different scenarios that they want to build a shopping list for that they can reuse.

So, they may have a store opening shopping list where every time they open a new location, they want to purchase all of these items and they might modify the list over time but generally they want to be able to buy all the items put them in their cart. It could be a really powerful tool to leverage whenever someone is doing some consistent shopping behaviors on the site.

You could also set up a subscription that automatically renews at a set interval. When all of those items would renew there could be discounts for that type of behavior where it's a consistent expected order. There might be an automated discount of 5% if it meets a threshold of $50 or a 6%, if it meets a threshold of $100, and of course depending on the industry that that may not be enough in the amount may have to be a $10,000 order but the concept applies and essentially the shopping list can be a very powerful addition to the wish list.

You can have different roles within the marketplace that are effectively adding items to a requisition list for approval. Upon approval they're going to have an automated email go out and then those in the approvals list would have the opportunity to review and write a note. This creates a conversation between the requisition team members and the approver. This can be a multi-step process or a single step process, but as you can imagine with very large orders the ability to validate and have an approval process before someone makes a purchase. This can even involve things where the manufacturer, the seller, gets involved and could offer different quotes.

Accomplishing any Business Goals

Customizable Features & Capabilities

The other big component for this piece is the ability to set up a custom notification or an alert. The number one thing is to be able to clearly share with the user that it's possible to create alerts and lists that they can receive notifications on. Friendly icons that help the user interpret very quickly that it's possible to set up an alert and clear descriptive roll over text. This can help to standardize their experience with being able to turn on a watchlist and set up a notification whenever something triggers a watchlist.

Now in addition to that, the system that you're using for your marketplace ideally will have the ability to set up any kind of watchlist or set of notifications. The ideal scenario is to be able to allow the end user to modify the criteria under which those notifications come to them and modify the filters for those watchlists.

An example of potential notifications that someone may be interested in could be based on a new item getting added by a seller, possibly a specific seller that this buyer wants to follow. They have an item that falls into a particular category where they might want to see if there's either a new model, stock is refilled, or maybe a discount is available.

Those are all concepts that would make sense for a notification or an alert to be triggered. In addition, it could be possible that the seller wants to receive a notification or alert whenever they're receiving a lot of traffic and purchases. This would especially be the case if their inventory is getting low on a particular set of items. An item they may also want to see if they're getting a lot of traffic to but they're not getting purchases that match their typical number of purchases. Maybe they're getting folks looking at their items but they're not actually converting, maybe a competitor is lower than their price in the marketplace and maybe there's something wrong with their item comparatively.

Be Prepared For Every Customer

Advanced Notification Scenarios

So, these are all scenarios where the marketplace itself ideally would be able to notify the end user, be it a buyer or seller and give them a transactional email that’s specific to them. That allows them to see this information quickly and efficiently. It's very common whenever someone does have an item that's out of stock that they might want to see when the item comes available again.

It would also be possible to set up notifications to inform group members at a particular organization or just who are willing and interested in approving for purchases. Typically, this would be an organization that is looking to set up an approval process and the approvers would need a notification or an alert whenever they need to go in and approve something. An email, text, or even an automated phone call could be sent out if they wanted. Although that isn’t a typical scenario it certainly is in the realm of possibilities.

One could also modify the settings for how often notifications are sent out. The user may want them to only come out once a week for certain items, or they might want a notification immediately for certain items. They might want to be more of a pervasive notification, so not just an email but maybe they want the notification to show up in their dashboard on the site as well as receiving a text message. It really depends on the market place in a specific scenario, but these are all capabilities within the marketplace platform.

How Can Clarity Help

Clarity Marketplace Experts

We certainly welcome you to reach out to us in the event that we could be of help. Below we have preferred resources that go into additional marketplace features and capabilities. We are happy to review with you around your upcoming project that may have very specific needs for notifications or wish list favorites and alerts within your marketplace platform. Thanks!

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