Strategic, Preplanned Platform Governance Process
In some cases, issues will occur despite these preventative measures. The best way to handle issues that do occur is to have preplanned workflows or governance process. Then, if there is a return request, the seller and buyer will need to go through certain processes that they’ve agreed to in advance.
Many of our marketplace eCommerce clients will provide an onboarding process for sellers, that they must complete before becoming a seller on the platform. This onboarding process would cover topics like how they are expected to provide returns and refunds, and what the standards are within the marketplace community.
A common situation that might happen is that a seller doesn’t get a product delivered on time as promised. For example, let’s say there’s a buyer who needed a part for a machine that’s down, and they got the impression from the seller that they’d have the part two days ago, but it didn’t arrive. So the buyer purchased the part from another seller, and now they need to return the item because it didn’t get there when promised.
For a situation like this, and similar scenarios, there needs to be a policy in place so there’s a standard procedure to operate under. When the seller, for whatever reason, didn’t get the item to the buyer on time as promised, there needs to be a full refund there.
However, it may not make sense for your marketplace to guarantee delivery times. If that is the case for your marketplace, then we need to clearly show the buyer that this is not a guaranteed delivery date when they are making their purchase.
These things make a difference if a seller continues to have issues where they get a lot of return requests or negative reviews. It’s important for you to be able to look at all of the transactions and interactions, and for the marketplace administration team to be able to have the data to analyze what’s going on with the seller.
If a seller doesn’t abide by the rules or isn’t customer-service oriented, there needs to be a path to be able to escalate within your marketplace platform, both for the buyers as well as the marketplace administrators. We recommend having a flagging system, where upon certain events occurring, sellers get moved into different tiers of caution. There could be a first or minor warning, and a strong warning, and then a high priority escalation where something needs to be done beyond administering the warning.
Depending on how much volume a seller has and what’s occurring, different actions will need to be taken. Did someone provide a lower than average review, or a very low review? Request a return and refund?
If these occur within a certain time period, like a month, then this might be when you want to put them into a caution state, and provide a workflow with emails or notifications to remind them that, “hey, you got some reviews below your average, here are some effective ways to deliver high quality services.” You can also recommend that they try getting in touch with those reviewers and making it right. Maybe they can turn four start reviews into five star reviews by providing great customer service.
If a seller continues to have major issues and isn’t reconciling them, then it does make sense to have an automated escalation path, where internal team members receive a notification so they can potentially take action. They may need to temporarily pause receiving or processing orders for that seller. It usually makes sense to remind the seller of the platform governance, and giving them a message along the lines of, “If you’re found to not support these terms and policies you agreed to, then we can at any time pause or terminate your membership as a seller in the marketplace.”
Typically, it works well to provide them with a notification, and an automated notification is usually helpful, that might say, “Hey, we received this report that claims you are violating the terms of this part of the agreement. Here are the details of the terms. Please let us know what your responses are to this and what your plans are to reconcile the issue.”
Many times it will make sense to have direct interaction with them, especially if they are a large seller. There may be confusion or misunderstanding in many cases that’s driving the issue.