Delivering Quality Support
Internal Team Collaboration
Those are all things that ideally would be off-the-shelf with your marketplace platform. If they aren’t available out of the gate, they certainly will be available in the long term for those vendors. These things allow the actual platform to scale and meet the needs vendors will have long term. In addition, it's common for the vendor to need to interact with the internal team within the marketplace and or with the end customer. A lot of times you'll see quotes within the marketplace, so it’s possible that somebody might want to interact with the vendor making the vendor need a way to respond and follow up via messaging or via chat. One condition that isn’t extremely common, nor ideal for vendors, would be the need to provide a refund or resolve an issue with the shipment etc. There needs to be some form of messaging in the vendor dashboard so they can resolve issues around the order.
Ideally, they'll also be able to see a rating that the end customer provided and be able to potentially offer responses if they receive a negative rating or negative review, allowing them to manage their credibility within the marketplace and solve problems. It’s the responsibility of the marketplace to provide a high caliber vendor group that's providing items into the marketplace and police and govern that marketplace, even if in an automated way, to establish a certain level of quality, service, and support. If customer feedback drives the visibility of a vendor in the catalog search results and if their ratings and reviews are transparent, then vendors are going to be motivated to respond and address issues quickly.