How eCommerce Platforms Support Market Development Managers

Why Is It Important that the Marketplace Platform Supports the Market Development Team?

Operating Internal and External Processes

Enterprise eCommerce marketplaces can dramatically scale within a niche, market, or industry and across multiple industries. However, it’s challenging to successfully stay at scale and continue delivering more and more value if the marketplace platform can’t handle the needs of the market development manager and related team that manage the execution of the marketplace.

Within a marketplace platform, there are two processes going on. One is the internal management of the marketplace itself, which includes the governance of the platform. The governance includes the rules configured into the platform, community guidelines, operational guidelines, and standards the vendors must adhere to. The second is the how the vendors, sellers, and purchasers interact and what standard they operate at.

This needs to be controlled to a certain extent and guided and influenced by the market development manager within the marketplace eCommerce team. In order to do this, especially at scale, it’s critical that the market development manager, content team, branding team, and logistics team have powerful tools, resources, analytics, reporting, and overall control of the marketplace. With the right resources, they can quickly gather data and make updates and changes as needed, and manage efficiently within the community for sellers and buyers within the marketplace.

Read our Key Marketplace Considerations article

A starting point is to analyze and review data in an intelligent way. This can include several different options. Reports and overall data are fundamental because as an organization scales, they won’t be able to get at the granular level with every piece of data, with every transaction, vendor, seller, and buyer. But it is possible to aggregate data and identify anomalies or outliers. Those indicate a need for further investigation for marketplace development.

Identify Ranges within the Analysis

In addition, with the appropriate reporting, the market development management team can identify what range should considered normal for a particular area, and what range should be considered outliers to be investigated further.

Decide What Is Best for Your eMarketplace

This can apply to many areas within the marketplace, such as a better understanding of the vendor approval process that must occur before vendors can provide items within the marketplace. You can ask yourself:

Does it make sense to approve this vendor to bulk upload items once they’ve successfully completed at least ten 5-star transactions? Or at least fifty reviews that were 4 stars or greater? What will work out better in the long run? Does there need to be a manual approval process for anyone to do bulk uploads of their data? If we don’t ever allow bulk uploads, will that cause the marketplace to be unsuccessful? Or should we have everyone be approved from the start, and then have a workflow to audit and review before items are published to the site, and apply reporting and logic to the data they’re uploading?

The reporting and analytics tools in the marketplace eCommerce platform will help you reach the right answers. You can look for certain patterns or words that appear to be typos or spelling errors. If there’s a certain level of typo or spelling errors within the product uploads, then you can focus on that particular vendor and have a manual approval process for their products.

Deal with Fraudulent Activity

Fraudulent activity within the site, such as buyers who make fraudulent purchases, is detrimental to your marketplace. The seller might send multiple items, possibly expedited, and then a week or two later after the item was fulfilled and received, the payment card company determines there was fraudulent activity, so the funds aren’t distributed as expected.

With reporting and logic within the marketplace eCommerce platform, we can see the behavioral patterns with different purchasers and identify those who might be fraudulent. This goes a long way towards minimizing that problem.

With constant monitoring and tracking, you can also see if you need to adjust the tuning or settings on the fraudulent activity APIs that you’re integrating with. At an increased level of detail, you might reject orders incorrectly, so you might reduce the level of detail or the stringency of the particular logic that’s being applied.

Predict Inventory Needs

Reporting is also critical for predicting inventory management needs and understanding what affects this. There may be specific products that have increased demand during certain times of the year. Newly released items often have a surge in purchases. There may also be decreasing traffic for particular items, and you need to understand how a new competitor marketplace is siphoning off traffic for that part of the marketplace.

It’s helpful to look at aggregated data to do comparisons on different segments, categories, meta information, and product types across time frames, with their major surges or decreases. Also, you’ll want to automate the reporting data, because most of the market development managers and team members will be busy conducting several aspects of the marketplace eCommerce business, and they need the platform to provide automated reports and status updates.

This also includes information needed for sales data, transactions, new customers, fulfillments, etc. Market development managers need this information in an automated fashion so they can have it in their preview at all times, and the team members within a distribution list can receive and review this information as well.

Enhance Capabilities & Access with Robust Tools

Additionally, it’s powerful to provide market development managers access to robust tools within the application itself. This allows for bulk product management, category management, community details and marketplace standards, meta information, approval workflows, auditing processes, and automated management of content updates, inventory, pricing updates that come from sellers.

But tools are also helpful for managers to deal with specific settings and configurations that give access to capabilities that development team members traditionally possess. We enable a more traditional access, but also a sandbox environment for the client team to work with in their eCommerce marketplace environment. The market development manager can also experiment and validate changes in the sandbox environment before things get pushed to production.

Review Before Pushing to Production

We can also enable export and import of items, so the team can make modifications in a sandbox area and review internally before pushing to a production environment. It’s useful to enable the internal team to iterate, update, and modify rapidly without having to worry about breaking things in production. After everything looks good, and passes by the reviewers—it could even go by several customers and sellers as a select sample group—the marketplace can deploy the changes. The changes can be for product data, configurations, settings, and workflows, to optimize those operations.

Best Practices for the Industry

Clarity’s Platform with Robust Tools

Needless to say, all these abilities of tuning, reporting bulk content management, approvals and audit workflows, and robust sandbox access to configurations and settings, are included in the Clarity eCommerce marketplace platform. It’s robust set of tools allow for marketplace platform managers to execute on their role and expand their capabilities.

You can also aggregate data across our services and client base, where we’ve anonymized data to discover best practices and industry standards that our client teams will benefit from significantly. And this is without having to directly learn over time—instead, they can benefit from our experience in the marketplace eCommerce field, as well as be able to increase their value in the market without having to expend lots of time and resources to get at some of these decisions.

What we mean by this is that whenever we see something that works for one client, we can anonymize that and standardize it into an industry best practice, and possibly experiment with it selectively with one or two other clients in a separate industry and non-competing space. We can then understand the fundamentals and deliver this as a value-add to all our clients as a best practice.

For example, a lot of clients who have marketplace eCommerce platforms don’t necessarily take advantage of transactional emails enough. Transactional emails are technically free, and with the right business logic and implementation, they can be a powerful value-add to the end users.

Also, a lot of marketplaces don’t enable the “find it for me” feature, or notify the user when items are in stock, or when they are at a certain price. These are things that end users find particularly valuable, especially in niche markets.

We find a lot of clients in different spaces have similar strategies for executing on marketing, and they may need to fine tune those strategies to meet the best practices within their particular industry. An example of this is that many of our clients that run eCommerce marketplace platforms want to leverage long tail organic SEO. But they are competing against other sites in their space that have a dominant position with long tail organic SEO. Therefore, we help them with strategizing to be more competitive.

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
• eMarket Line of Business Integrations – Vendor Portals
• eCommerce Inventory Management – Vendor Portals
• Marketplace Advertising Best Practices – Vendor Portals
• B2C Marketplace Platform
• Key Aspects of Split Shipment for eCommerce Marketplace Management
• Split Payment Utility in Marketplace Software
• Considerations for RMAs in eCommerce Marketplace
• How Multistore Platforms Support Global Marketplace
• Design Your Multivendor Marketplace for C2C
• How Is Multi-Vendor Marketplace Software Adapted for B2C?
• Market Development Strategies: B2B, C2C, D2C Cases
• How eCommerce Platforms Support Market Development Managers

• eMarket Integrations: Products, Categories, & Marketing Content
• eMarket Integrations: Customer Specific Pricing Rules
• eMarket Integrations: Warehousing & Inventory Strategy
• eMarket Integrations: Region-Specific Shipping Process
• Enhance Marketplace eCommerce Checkout Flow
• SSO Benefits for Your e-Marketplace Platform
• e-Marketplace Benefits of Single Sign-On: Case Study
• Benefits of Multi-Factor Authentication in Electronic Marketplaces
• Marketplace Examples: Country-Specific Vendor Portals
• e-Marketplace Platform Example for Buying Groups
• Marketplace Capabilities for Expanding Buying Groups
• Multi-Store & Multi-Vendor Marketplace Management
• Multi-Store eCommerce Platform
• Advantages of Multi-Store and Multi-Vendor Platforms
• Challenges for Multi-Store and Multi-Vendor eCommerce
• How Headless CMS Enhances Multi-Vendor eCommerce
• How Can Multi-Vendor eMarketplace Tailor to D2C?
• Key Platform Features to Enhance Market Development
• Ways a Marketplace Platform Improves Market Research