Key Factors for eCommerce Marketplace

The Basics

An eCommerce marketplace can include buying groups, franchises, auctions, and more, so it needs an overall platform where sellers and buyers can buy and sell from each other and list their own items. For the owner of the marketplace or the operator of the website, it’s really important to be able to deliver at scale.

Governance

In order to do that, there needs to be an opinionated governance in place within the application for the marketplace. The governance dictates how things will flow and function and the right ways to handle interactions in different situations.

For example, the governance, or guidelines and rules for the marketplace platform, determine where it is necessary and where it makes sense to have audits and validation checks.

API & ERP Integrations

Another key aspect is system integrations for fulfillment, back-office inventory, delivery, customer support, and service interactions. Those all need to be automated and streamlined as much as possible. If these pieces are not automated, and if there isn’t the ability to fulfill and enable scaled interaction with the data in the marketplace, then none of the most optimal and perfect governance within the marketplace and incredible value of the marketplace can come to fruition.

Specifically, in this article we’ll discuss API integration, especially in regard to robust access to ERP integration, line of business application immigration, CRM, customer support, business intelligence, and generally the concept of being able to integrate the marketplace software into your back-office systems.

Data Integration to an eMarketplace

With any integration to an eMarketplace, we're typically offering external parties the ability to pull and push their data into the system. This includes marketing content associated with the products and categories.

So, we have base level information about products and categories which would include SKUs, attributes, and characteristic information of the products and categories. With that, we’d be able to standardize this across all of the different vendors that are offering their products and services in the marketplace.

For example, we need to be able to standardize the naming convention for some of the fields that are used and the custom attributes across the category. If the marketplace is specialized for very high-end computer hardware, or maybe even server hardware more specifically, it’s possible that the actual server hardware that’s offered might include 10 different vendors, and each might have a different way of categorizing their RAM, their hard drives.

As a result, the data can be a huge challenge to standardize within the marketplace. You can easily run into a situation where, if different vendors are uploading their content manually, or in bulk fashion via the APIs, it can be challenging to preserve the recategorization or normalization that goes into the marketplace itself.

So, what we need to do is set up some intelligent mapping so that they have to select the name of the custom field in their data set that ties to a standard field in the eMarketplace platform whenever they are uploading their content.

Therefore, whenever we’re integrating with the back-office system of multiple line of business applications, we’re going to be working with your team to identify and map the workflows such that the master source of record for these standard fields, by product, category, and subcategory, are preserved and delineated to the market. Then, the vendors and buyers can see standards within a subcategory level and within a hierarchical schema of all this meta-information. It can also include fields for tagging and managing other meta-information, like synonyms and detailed technical terms for spec specifications. There would also be a way to compare technical aspects across multiple products from different sellers, manufacturers, and vendors.

Specific Mappings of Data to Standardized Categories

As mentioned before, there needs to be an intelligent way to relate the vendor’s own naming conventions in their data to the standard naming conventions of the marketplace and map those properly. Even though this is generally a challenge, it’s made relatively simple as long as the governance is there. This is a marriage between governance and integration to enable the software to determine what the custom fields are for particular vendors or manufacturers, and basically be able to have individualized, by vendor or manufacturer, mapping between their data fields and then the standards within the marketplace.

Many marketplaces simply require that the manufacturers, the vendors, the sellers just adjust and map on their own and then pump their data in appropriately into the API for the marketplace. That’s fine, we can certainly do that, but it is also possible to enable vendor- and manufacturer-specific mappings, with even a visual mapper of their fields and data set to the standard fields and data set within the system, and to preserve that set of mapping for that particular vendor.

This is helpful especially at scale, because this allows the vendors to pump their data into the system without having to do a lot of changing and modifying of their original data sources.

Better User Experience

Having a standard set of fields and field names across your entire marketplace allows the end user to have a much better experience with finding things and being able to compare and really get out the data that they need to make good decisions.

Enhance Scalability & Accuracy

Finally, it’s also extremely helpful from a scalability perspective, because if you have standard sets of fields and data types that we're comparing and using on the subcategory, category, and product level, this really helps the enterprise to be able to manage as the operation of scaling.

For example, a lot of marketplaces will need to put in custom marketing content within categories, subcategories, and certain products. Keep in mind that one of the things about marketplace or buying group, an auction system, etc., is that there may be multiple sellers of the same product. There may be multiple sellers that have different data sets for the same fields within a category/subcategory. And we have to determine what's going to be the source of truth of that data.

Therefore, there needs to be a workflow where we can propagate up and preserve the highest accuracy, beneficial content that represents the category, subcategory, and product detail accurately, and provides the most value to the buyers and those who are browsing this information in the marketplace.

That makes it really important to have these standards as well for the internal systems as well as this overall workflow and governance model of determining what content is going to win and what content is going to be used to present to users in the marketplace, because the marketplace is competing against other marketplaces. And we need to be able to make sure that we can provide really compelling calls to action, very valuable resources, and again, accurate information that isn't just spam coming from one of the sellers that is overriding content that's really valuable from another seller.

And maybe there are some categories and products that the sellers and vendors just don't have all the complete information for and so the marketplace team themselves may need to actually go in and complete this information. We don't want that information overwritten because the workflow isn't intelligent enough to preserve it when new data comes in from another vendor that just isn't complete.

Therefore, it needs to be an approval process and a preservation of the data that's meant to be the source data for each of these entities, in each of the fields, on a particular subcategory, category, or product detail level. It's really granular, but as you get to scale you will see that if you don't do this you end up having a major data issue with any integration, and you end up having duplication of the products and spam that gets incorporate into the marketplace.

These are all major challenges that, at scale, will cause the value of the marketplace to go down significantly. This marriage of governance with robust workflows and data integration is a very valuable solution to be able to automate and manage the product and category data at scale.

Additional Resources for e-Marketplace

• Key Marketplace Considerations
• Filtering and Categorization of Products
• Content Sourcing Practices & Workflows
• Best Buyer Dashboard Features
• Best Cart Features & Workflows
• Best Checkout Workflows & Payment Methods
• Establishing an eMarket - Vendor Portals
• eMarket Success - Vendor Portals
• ERP Marketplace Integration
• eMarket Line of Business Integrations – Vendor Portals
• eCommerce Inventory Management – Vendor Portals
• Marketplace Advertising Best Practices – Vendor Portals
• Key Aspects of Split Shipment for eCommerce Marketplace Management
• Split Payment Utility in Marketplace Software
• Considerations for RMAs in eCommerce Marketplace
• eMarket Integrations: Products, Categories, & Marketing Content