The Best Vendor Dashboard Features & Capabilities

Best Vendor Dashboard Features & Functions

A vendor dashboard includes several vital features and functions to give your vendors and buyers the best experience on your marketplace platform. Let's explore each one and why it's important for your marketplace vendors.

Intelligent Data Incorporation

Ideally, if the vendors in your marketplace are selling items that overlap with the same underlying SKU, the platform would be able to intelligently incorporate the more accurate and/or detailed information from different vendors and reject inaccurate or missing information. It should also have a validation system for new information, which can be verified on the vendor dashboard.

Without intelligent data incorporation, there will be inconsistent product or category information between vendors selling the same item. This will make it difficult for customers to compare products.

It's worth specifying here that standardizing the data doesn't make all the product specifications the same; rather, it keeps a product within the correct categories and attributes on the platform, even if multiples of the same product are sold by different vendors. This allows customers to filter and search for items in an intuitive manner.

Data standardization through intelligent data incorporation also ensures information formats are the same through a category on the platform. For example, electronics will need to have certain specifications within the product details page that will differ from the specifications of clothing items.

Order Management on Vendor Dashboards

A key part of fulfillment and great customer support is enabling vendors to see their orders and order details within the vendor dashboard. They need to be able to manage their orders and see information about who made the order, what and how many items were ordered, and the delivery method selected.

Vendors also need to be able to interact with those orders from their vendor dashboard, such as setting the status, updating shipment tracking information, and other details.

Without their vendor dashboards presenting this crucial information, it's impossible to keep track of orders within the marketplace platform—this is something that could drive vendors off your site to deal with customers directly, without using your marketplace site as liaison. This deprives you of revenue and your vendors and buyers the added safety and convenience your platform offers.

Beyond just showing the order details from buyers, vendor dashboards need to present the information in a clean, digestible way. Don't clutter the home page with unnecessary items; use modern web design for each element, and let vendors choose what's shown on the dashboard and where. Customizable vendor dashboards offer the best user experience because they can make it all their own.

Dashboard Payments View

Financials are also important to include in a vendor dashboard. Vendors should be able to easily see when and how much they received in payments and how much of a cut the marketplace took (if applicable to your marketplace revenue model).

If you have a different way of paying your vendors, the model of compensation should be clear, as should the reporting for their payments.

Vendor Dashboard Live Chat

For the best experience for your buyers, you'll want to set up a live chat for buyers and vendors to communicate and other customer support mechanisms. Chat messages should also be accessible from the vendor dashboard, so vendors can easily view and reply to customer inquiries.

A chat or messaging function makes it easy to contact the vendor and/or customer service on the platform if there are any problems or questions, which is a key part of getting issues resolved quickly and without too much frustration on the customer's part.

It also enables vendors to understand why a customer might want a refund or where a problem is occurring in their supply chain, and gives them an opportunity to resolve the issue.

Also, if a customer puts in a request for a quote, the customer may want to interact with the vendor or specify certain things about the order via chat. Vendors may also want customers to contact them before or after requesting a quote so they can get any further specifications or clarifications.

In summary, a live chat on the vendor dashboard:

• Makes it easier for the customer and vendor to contact one another, which is key to mitigating any customer frustration.
• Allows the customer and vendor to work through any issues or questions about the order or request-for-quote.
• Gives vendors valuable information about where problems may lie in their operations (e.g., if deliveries are consistently late but the product is shipped on time, there may be a problem with the shipping provider or the form where buyers enter their address information).

Bulk Import with System Integration

Vendor dashboards are also a handy place to let vendors integrate with internal systems so they can bulk import product details from their internal ERP into the marketplace platform.

The ability to bulk import items from the vendor's business applications into your site can make or break a vendor's experience on your platform; they won't want to import items manually or one-by-one, and requiring that can seem out of date or like you don't have the software to support them.

A vendor's first impression of your marketplace influences whether they think they'll be able to continue working with you or not—so make that first transition a smooth one with easy system connection and item import through a user-friendly vendor dashboard. Then, make sure to enable all the core fields vendors need so they can manage that content themselves.

Content Validation & Approval

Vendors also want to see their product listing status on the vendor dashboard, such as if it's a draft, submitted for review, in review, approved, or live on the marketplace website.

Depending on your marketplace, you may need an approval process that requires someone from the internal marketplace team to confirm and validate that the vendor is a valid vendor, and possibly a confirmation process for the content pending to go onto the live website.

A worthwhile solution could be a flagging system, which is effective for flagging suspicious items. You could also allow end users to flag items if they think something's wrong. AI with machine learning can also reject orders that don't pass certain criteria.

Reviewing and approving products before they get onto the marketplace platform is important for keeping your marketplace at a certain standard; you want product listings to meet a certain minimum criterion before passing to the site, and you want to make sure that products are assigned to the proper categories to fit the standardization of your marketplace.

Some criteria may be that product images need to meet certain specifications for size and quality, and descriptions and organic SEO information need to be present and follow certain guidelines.

The standards, guidelines, and rules of a marketplace platform are commonly referred to as platform governance. Platform governance is important to enforce to ensure consistent readability, reliability, and usability for users.

In summary, content validation and approval:

• Means that you must have certain standards that product listings need to meet before going up on the marketplace website.
• Needs an effective and swift process (automated, manual, or both) to ensure only high-quality and accurate products are listed on the marketplace platform.
• Should show on the vendor dashboard as a status on the vendor's listings.
• Could include a flagging system to make you and/or the vendor aware of suspicious items or trigger a certain workflow within the marketplace.

Rating and Review System

Adopting a rating and review system can be useful for you and your users. Customers would be able to rate and provide a review for their experience with a vendor and the qualities of the product. Vendors would then be able to view that rating on their vendor dashboard and potentially respond.

If the vendor received a negative rating, they could respond with an apology or an offer to resolve the issue. This helps vendors maintain their credibility and solve problems.

If they received a positive rating, the vendor may want to thank the customer for their feedback. Showing appreciation for a customer's willingness to review and happiness that the product is working out well for them leaves them with an even better impression of the vendor.

There could also be a rating and review system for the vendor to rate their experience with the customer. This is more common with a services marketplace, where the vendor-customer interaction is paramount to the marketplace's success.

Ratings and reviews benefit your marketplace as well because you can promote vendors who have especially good reviews and interact well with customers. The more customers that work with great vendors, the more sales there will be and the revenue your marketplace will make.

Analytics and Reporting

Last but not least, vendor dashboards should include relevant analytics and reports that the vendor can review. Analytic or data reports should include the following:

• Sales data, including real-time sales, total sales, sales revenue, performance, and number of transactions.
• Inventory levels, to help vendors manage inventory and plan ahead.
• Customer behavior data, so vendors can identify trends.
• Performance metrics, such as conversion rates, customer retention, average order value, and other key performance indicators.

Scaling Up Your Marketplace

If all of this seems like a bit much at first, don't worry. You don't necessarily have to have all these features right off the bat. You can make a plan for how you'll scale your marketplace platform and add more features as you go along.

Some of the fundamental features you ought to have for your marketplace vendor dashboard from the onset include the ability to bulk import or connect the vendor's back-office systems with your own, so that uploading product listings is easy for them.

It's common for vendors to employ an ERP system, an accounting back-office system, a warehouse management system, or inventory system. They'll most likely want to automate the process by integrating their systems to push products, categories, and images, and then pull orders and customer data.

You'll also want to have some rudimentary validation and approval system, but that can get more sophisticated as you go along. You can enable rules and governance for your marketplace right out of the gate or plan to implement some of it further down the road.

If you're looking to map things out, these are really common capabilities that are required as you scale up your marketplace. Ideally, the above features would be available from the start, but if not, they can be made available in the long term for your vendors to meet their needs.

Maintaining Marketplace Quality

The marketplace team is responsible for providing a high-caliber vendor group that's inputting items into the marketplace and governing that marketplace, even if an automated way, to establish a certain level of quality, service, and support.

If customer feedback drives the visibility of a vendor in the catalog search results and their ratings and reviews are transparent, then vendors will be motivated to respond and address issues quickly.

Allowing communication between the vendor and the customer can also help boost customer satisfaction while lessening the burden on your internal customer support, especially if the vendor is the one manufacturing and shipping the items from their own warehouse.

In circumstances where the marketplace is shipping the item, or if you have warehouses for vendors to store products and ship from, then customers may need to interact with both you and the vendor. Having systems in place for effective communication goes a long way toward making your marketplace successful and scalable.

Working with Marketplace Experts

Building out a marketplace vendor management dashboard can be fairly complex, especially as your marketplace scales. For the best results, you'll want to collaborate with an experienced eCommerce developer who can help you plan and execute on your vendor dashboard within the marketplace as a whole.

The team at Clarity Ventures would be happy to help—and we offer a discovery session with our experts—for free! That's where we'll go over your business's needs with you and form a plan that will help you get the most out of your marketplace. No obligation attached—just sign up and get valuable, expert advice specific to your marketplace eCommerce.