C2C Buyer Experience with Omnichannel eCommerce

Improve Customer Experience with Omnichannel eCommerce

For buyers, what are some of the customer experience improvements and ways to boost sales by having a mobile C2C app and a general omnichannel experience?

Overall, easier use and access of the C2C marketplace will improve and increase their usage and interaction with the platform. This can be done through having a C2C mobile app and omnichannel experience. With more use of the marketplace via the app, they will create more purchasing power and draw more sellers into the marketplace. This becomes an upward spiral of usage and reinforcement with more products and better quality offerings, which in turn drives more usage, and so on.

In order to get more usability, you can enable a basic mobile application that extends the marketplace eCommerce website. This makes it easier for buyers to make spontaneous purchases in interacting with other people who they might be talking with about making a purchase.

They can show them the items discussed and decide to buy it or look it up on your C2C marketplace through your mobile application. They might see a great deal and decide to purchase it on the spot.

They can evaluate things like what shipping lead time would be, what the ratings of the seller are by looking at reviews and ratings. These things help the buyers make a determination about whether to get the item and have it shipped to them.

Then, the buyer needs to be able to track the order. The app also needs to be able to deal with any returns, cancellations, refund requests, etc.

Omnichannel eCommerce Helps Set Expectations

Furthermore, it's really important that the seller and the buyer be able to interact if there are any issues. So by having a mobile application and generally omnichannel eCommerce experience, we can help the buyer and seller interact amicably as opposed to having long delays, potentially dealing with lots of frustration just from not knowing what's going to happen.

It’s also helpful to let the buyer understand what to expect. By having a really robust mobile experience and tablet experience for the buyer, we can advise them,

"Hey, this is a C2C marketplace, so you're actually purchasing from somebody who is just like you, and they don't necessarily have all of the expertise and skill of a massive logistics provider. They're going to ship this with care and love, and they're going to follow the guide and the process that we've provided.

The seller selected Option Two where they do a lot of fulfillment from their sales location, but they're not a massive logistics provider or they don't have partnership with a large logistics provider.

There are going to be three main steps that occur, but seller is going to confirm the order was received and begin processing. That's where you are right now.

The second step is they're going to ship the item, and you're going to get the tracking number and that's when your card payment, that we've preauthorized via payment portal, is going to be captured and it's going to be put into an escrow account.

Step three is you’re going to receive the item and determine if it was properly fulfilled or not and if it was, you're going to market as properly fulfilled and then the seller will receive their payment out of us grow."

This method will, of course, vary depending on your marketplace model. This is just an example of what we can provide to the buyer so they can see where they are in the process, where their information is, and then what they can do if they haven’t heard back from the seller or haven’t seen their order progress through the stages in a reasonable timeframe. We can provide an expected time frame such as:

"Usually within two to four days the item moves from step one to step two, and you should receive a tracking number. If you haven't received a tracking number within two to four business days, we’ll create a ticket in our system and have one of our service specialists follow up with you."

These steps can change the dynamic of the marketplace if the buyers know that they can trust the marketplace regardless of some of the different sellers and how they interact with the buyers. That can take a marketplace from being at a plateaued state of growth to a constant never-ending growth that's self-fulfilling because the integrity of those interactions is absolutely critical.

As a C2C marketplace, your buyers are going to be really dependent on the marketplace itself to enforce this governance and this integrity level within the interactions with the sellers.

Through the marketplace and infrastructure we can create this model where the sellers are incentivized to do the right thing. Maybe we're promoting them within some of the different search results based on their fulfillment and how focused they are on customer ratings and reviews. We can have dynamic adjusting of the search results that is intelligent and promotes folks that provide higher quality.

This is a better value for the buyers, and these are the things that help buyers have more trust in the marketplace and marketplace quality. The buyer has more trust if they see more buyers on the site, and if they hear more about your marketplace from others. You’ll see more word of mouth and a lot more growth with the C2C marketplace versus a linear or a plateauing growth model.

Related Articles to Explore

• The C2C Business Model: Become the Middleman
• Headless eCommerce and Omnichannel Functionality
• What C2C Apps Do for Sellers
• Intro to eMarketplace Platform
• How Does a Mobile App Help a B2B Marketplace?
• Building an International Marketplace Business Model