Best Buyer Dashboard Features

The Buyer Dashboard Capabilities

The buyer dashboard capability within a marketplace is an important component to enable. The customer self-service side and repeat buying reduces the overhead of the business while improving customer satisfaction. In any marketplace the buyer is treated in the typical “customer is always right” type of way. This is one of the challenges with the marketplace because you're dealing with, in many cases, groups of fulfillment and distribution centers that function differently. There’s a logistical foundation on how the business is able to deliver from its marketplace to its end users and to its buyers. The buyer dashboard is a key to enabling those buyers to stay well informed and to possibly answer questions in advance. The goal is to keep them appraised, but also to empower them, so that they can interact with their vendors, who are fulfilling their items or interact with customer service.

With a well implemented buyer dashboard your company can allow them to get information while meeting their needs. Automate the process as much as possible so the number one questions that a buyer has are related to the status of their order. The buyer dashboard immediately makes the order status information available to users. It's important that if a marketplace has split shipping split ordering, split payment methods, etc. that a buyer can get information and the status on each of those shipments or orders.

How to Deal With Shipment Delays

It’s not uncommon for ordered items to have issues or shipments to be delayed. Buyers tend to be pretty forgiving as long as they can understand and see the status of things and there's at least some reasonable effort to address or resolve any issues that occur. In addition to the dashboard, it's also helpful to send automated transactional emails wherever possible so that the buyer has a unified set of messaging that occurs both in their email and in their dashboard.

Many negative user experiences occur when they aren’t consistently seeing the status of their orders, tracking information for their orders, or other information related to their order. You know it's a complicated order when there needs to be an actual scheduled delivery. Situations like these are all too common within the marketplace segment. There needs to be an automated mechanism to coordinate that scheduled delivery. Anything that can be key to enabling buyers to self-service as much as possible. In addition, the buyer may need to update their information and provide correct shipping information not just for a particular order, but possibly across the board for their account. They may have multiple locations and need a place to add different addresses and specify whether those are billing or shipping addresses and give them nicknames, etc.

Breaking Down Barriers Between You & Customers

In addition, it's common within the dashboard to have, not just have orders, but also quotes depending on the marketplace model. There may be some custom quoting involved that would allow the vendor and the buyer to go back and forth and even have a live chat. Does your marketplace enable the kind of robust, rich and immediate interaction between buyers and sellers that is necessary to compete and provide a seamless experience? That's really where all the growth opportunities for many marketplaces lie.

By reducing the barriers to transactions in making the process is automated and seamless as possible. Enabling interaction between buyers and sellers where possible, making content and information user friendly and available to all users is key. In addition, there may be quality issues and challenges with a delivery with a set of items or item within an order. As such, It's important for customer service to have an automated request for refund and an intelligent routing of how that request for a refund process is completed.

It’s such a great accomplishment to scale up a marketplace, however, it can bring with it some challenges that logistically can be very damaging to a marketplace brand. If the marketplace is able to deliver customer service for users or able to respond quickly in an automated, intelligent fashion then a user’s satisfaction with the marketplace will decrease greatly. Needless to say, these are just a few of the facets of a buyer dashboard.

That delivery of value for the buyer and allowing them to have a seamless and reliable experience with your marketplace as they engage with other competitors then evaluate which ones they are going to work with and, ultimately, choose. Think about it: what are your considerations? Whenever you're making a purchase online many end users will pay more in order to have a trustworthy and reliable interaction with a trusted brand, and, in this case, your marketplace will ideally be a trusted brand in its particular segment. Keep in mind that it's not just about the cost and value of the goods. It's also about the brand and its integrity to stand behind the logistical execution of getting the items to the end user and being able to deliver quality service and support in the hopefully rare event when there are any issues.

How Clarity Can Help

We welcome you to reach out to our team of experts who have focused on dozens of customized catered marketplace dashboard implementations. We truly enjoy getting to interact with potential marketplace clients in order to help them understand and evaluate the different scenarios and capabilities of the buyer dashboard. In addition, we've provided links below to resources that you might find helpful within this topic area as well as pages within our site that can go into more detail. We look forward to talking with you further.

Additional Marketplace Features & Resources

• Marketplace Overview
• Storefront Setup Feature Considerations
• Sourcing Content Practices & Workflows
• The Search, Filtering, & Catalog of Products
• Essential Buyer Dashboard Features
• Essential Vendor Dashboard Features
• Checkout Workflows & Accepted Payment Methods
• Cart Features & Workflows
• Order Fulfillment
• User Roles & Permissions
• Multilingual Best Practices