Establishing an eMarket — Vendor Portals

How Do eMarket Vendors Create Value?

Governance

An eCommerce marketplace is a digital universe where buyers and sellers can meet. Generally, the system needs governance. This is a fundamental cornerstone of the marketplace ecosystem. The value that the marketplace brings to the buyers and sellers is strong governance and enough volume to make it interesting and valuable for the buyers and sellers when they meet.

Volume

Volume is important because, for example, if you went to a store and there was only one type of milk, one type of eggs, and they only had three of every week, then that wouldn't be interesting or appealing. Instead, we need a myriad of options from various sellers, and different buyers who are interested in those options to keep business flowing.

One of the key concepts of this is which comes first, the sellers or the buyers? But it's really an incremental process, based on the value of the governance and the eMarketplace platform. We can see this incremental, upward-spiral trend of bringing in various types of buyers and sellers. The sellers might be able to offer steeper discounts or have bigger offerings. The same concept applies to different niches as well. The key tactual pieces of bringing this value into a marketplace lowers the bar for the sellers to be able to provide the products that buyers would be interested in.

There's a fundamental concept with marketplace eCommerce that, if it's easy enough, and doesn't require high upfront costs for vendors to get started interacting and selling in a eMarketplace, then they'll probably do it.

Interaction with the eMarket

So, what causes there to be a major upfront cost? Well, typically this is having to comply with a really unique scenario for the sellers, such as importing and exporting their content into the marketplace. Therefore, whenever a potential vendor is looking at their options within the marketplace, they are trying to determine if they can interact with it. One of the first things a potential vendor might consider is whether there is an EDI or cXML, or some other traditional format that they can utilize to export their content. Many vendors already export their content in cXML, EDI, or similar, standard endpoints, so it's easy to share that export with another marketplace.

This is the sweet spot for marketplaces to grow. In the eMarket spaces, many of the different vendors become big enough, or grow fast enough, that they don't always have to follow standards anymore. They then need the marketplace to adapt to them in order to gather their content.

This then becomes thousands of products that are changing all the time. Their pricing is changing, the data sheets, the spec docs, the inventory, read time, when an item is purchased, etc. All of these pieces of data are changing constantly for thousands of products.

At Clarity, we have worked with many clients who have hundreds of thousands of items that are getting updated almost daily from these different vendors. When you add multiple vendors, you can get to the millions of products that are constantly changing and updating mechanically. They might have different formats, but the marketplace needs to be able to adapt.

How Does the Software Handle the Required Functionalities for Vendor Portals?

Importing Data

In economies of scale, there’s an attractiveness based on the breadth and depth of the marketing, the marketplace’s offered products, and the quality of the vendors behind those products. These are all key components that determine the character of the marketplace and how valuable it is.

That’s why the Clarity eCommerce marketplace offering has the ability to integrate with EDI in eCommerce, cXML, a punchout catalog, and the ability to work with other standard formats. These certainly include REST and SOAP, and we also offer a connection and integration platform as a service, connector, and integrator, that allows us to bring in additional data sources quickly in a secure and persistent queue-based way. We can then report back on these integrations with the various different vendors and adapt to their data formats.

We're making the endpoints that they have already, and they may dictate what format they’ll offer based on their scale. Therefore, we're going to need to adapt on your behalf to make sure that your marketplace has access to this data, so do we, and that's one of the key things that we recommend whenever you're looking at a marketplace software provider: Can they provide this ability to import data from vendors and vendor dashboards?

Exporting Data

The same thing is true for exporting, whenever it comes time to export the order information back to a vendor or provide the data to a vendor about a purchase that was made, and they may need to dropship that item or items. There may be a need to update the inventory information on their end and they'll go through all the fulfillments, maybe interact with them around RMA processes.

In many cases, with a marketplace is there's also a need to deal with the reality of the fact that there might be RMAs and quoting process. There may be more interaction happening with the vendor than just simply ordering and then fulfilling. So, the other important question to ask is—how is data export handled by the marketplace software provider?

Experience Is Key to eMarket Success

Handling Different Data Formats

The other thing that's often a default assumption is that the vendors are all going to have similar data. Once you've done several of these projects, you realize that's simply not true. This can be a really common pitfall for new marketplaces, as they’re assessing landscape and looking at the cost of getting up to speed, etc., a lot of the meta information, images, category data tagging and other forms of annotating the schema on product—it's not consistent at all between the different vendors.

Logistically, this can be a huge challenge if not handled properly, because whenever you're leveraging a marketplace, you want to have this very consistent presentation throughout the data on the marketplace. Therefore, if somebody goes to look for a certain category and subcategory in a sub-subcategory, or do a search, look at a certain filter, etc.—just think about all of the different attributes that products have based on different types of products. Well, those have to be normalized and standardized across the different inputs on the vendor dashboard.

So again, this is one of those scenarios where it's important that we are able to work with the vendors and deal with these data feeds and technically do some form of data transformation and mapping, so that whenever the data is in a specific format from this other vendor, we have the mechanism and the business workflow capability to dynamically map that into a normalized and standardized set of attributes and categories and subcategories.

These are all real problems that happen at scale, but they can also happen really quickly with just a few different vendors, a few different distributors, even from whom we’re bringing in data.

The other thing that we occasionally see is that sometimes, vendors, manufacturers, and distributors are providing items in the marketplace, but they may not have an actual programmatic or API type of access or standardized data source to access their information. They may say, look, you're welcome to pull the data from our website, or take this giant PDF catalog that we have and OCR it (scan the text out of this document and put that on your website)—and here’s the legal document saying we give you permission and waive copyright, etc.—please sell our products.

But that’s all they’re able to do. So, if you want to sell their products, you have to extract the data and put it on your site. Therefore, we at Clarity have put together some pretty sophisticated means for going in and setting up a scraping tool that automatically scrapes data on a certain schedule and cleans and normalizes that data into the marketplace.

It's also really important that there be permission for copyright purposes. We also have done a lot of work with OCR (object character recognition) and being able to scan documents and then parse out the data and even set up visual mappers for folks to go in and help make sure that OCR is high quality.

Tailored Marketplace eCommerce Software

There’s a lot we can do, and that's one of the benefits of having a full source code offering like Clarity eCommerce Framework™ is. We literally can get down into the bare metal of the exact precise area that you need specialized for your marketplace. We can deliver a very focused, specialized offering that doesn't corrupt the overarching commoditized offering that we bring to the table.

At Clarity, we have this very robust off-the-shelf offering that has the capability to modularly override and extend code to make it optimal for you without impacting the base code. That way, the base code will stay fully a high integrity, with no changes to the base code, so we can always update and upgrade as we progress. When you want to create a marketplace website, get in touch.

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
• How to Build a Multi-Vendor Marketplace
• eMarket Line of Business Integrations – Vendor Portals
• eCommerce Inventory Management – Vendor Portals