Marketplace eCommerce

Inboxes for Marketplace eCommerce: A Complete Guide

September 19, 2022, 2022  |  4 min read
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Inboxes for Marketplace eCommerce

Inboxes for a marketplace eCommerce platform are an important part of your customers' and employees' experiences, though they are often treated as an afterthought. Many companies simply use the messaging system as it comes out of the box and try to change their business workflows to accommodate for something that doesn't cater to their needs. They force themselves, and their customers, to work around any failing the messaging system might have.

However, a marketplace eCommerce inbox that can adapt to your customers' and employees needs make interactions much easier. This is vital when people's inboxes are often flooded with dozens of messages a day from disparate sources. That's why having an inbox system that caters to your needs can be the difference between success and failure in this endeavor.

Let's look at what a smart inbox looks like on a marketplace eCommerce platform, including the adaptability it delivers to accommodate the needs of any business model.

How Rigid Inboxes Hurt Marketplace eCommerce Businesses

Making do with a rigid, out-of-the-box inbox is one way to implement a messaging center for your marketplace eCommerce platform, but your operations will suffer for it—you'd be less efficient than you would be with an inbox system that can be modified to your needs. Here are some of the issues people run into with rigid and less-advanced communications channels.

Overwhelmed Marketplace Inboxes

Your employee’s traditional inbox can get overwhelmed by internal emails, customer emails, personal emails, and spam. Rather than deal with overwhelm and trouble finding what's important, a robust marketplace eCommerce inbox system is the go-to message center for all things customer-related, doing away with the other distracting messages.

Lack of Alerts

You can’t rely on a customer coming back to your site in order to get an update from their inbox. Customers should get to choose the way that they’re contacted, whether that’s via email, chat, or text.

inbox alerts
inbox channels

Too Many Channels

A messaging center that’s too simple makes customers bounce back and forth between messaging systems. For instance, a customer might get a quote from your salesperson, then go back to their own email system to get the quote approved. Once that quote is approved, the process is reversed, which means one more step at which messages can get lost. Keeping all messages in one spot makes the process much smoother.

For Your Customers

  • Intuitive Use – Customers have come to expect certain user-friendly elements no matter what kind of inbox they’re dealing with. Inboxes are designed to be intuitive while allowing for customizations, including your company branding.
  • Preferred Alerts – Customers might not think to return to your site for updates unless they receive alerts. You can offer, and your customer can choose from, a variety of methods for alerting the user that they have something in their inbox. They can opt for texts, emails, or on your eCommerce platform.
  • Chosen Frequency – Customers can decide not only how they’re contacted with offers but also how often. Pinging them too often could lead to them becoming annoyed.
  • Unmissable Icons – Whenever a customer returns to your site and goes to their inbox, icons will draw their eye to the messages that they haven’t read yet. They must be obvious without being intrusive.
  • Messaging and Notifications – Messaging (direct communication) and notifications (automated communication) can be broken out for better organization.
  • Multiple Messages, One Inbox – Customers may start messages from any page (asking about a particular product from the product page, starting a return request) but the inbox will become the centralized location where their questions get answered.
  • Messages to Their Coworkers – Customers can send messages to other people in their organization that also have an inbox on your platform. Common examples would be, “Hey, I ordered that box of widgets for you, it should be at your office by Friday,” or “I loaded up the cart on our joint account, could you approve it and hit the order button?”
  • Marketplace Messages – You don’t have to be involved in every message. If your eCommerce framework is a marketplace that hosts sellers, the buyer and seller can message each other without you being a part of the conversation. You can also set up smart alerts to inform you if the buyer and the seller on the marketplace are trying to take their business offline and cut you out.
inbox for employees

For Your Employees

  • Message Hub – Different notification types can be broken out, such as direct messages, RFQs, spam, flagged, etc. Employees can create their own folders to accommodate personnel workflow preferences.
  • Workflows Trigger Notifications – Workflows within your CMR or ERP and the marketplace eCommerce platform can send out notifications to employees regarding their next tasks. It can also auto-send messages to customers.
  • Product Assist – When a customer asks a question about the product, details about the product are automatically called up so that the CSA doesn’t have to spend time looking up and researching the product. 

Working With Clarity

At first, marketplace eCommerce inboxes might not sound like a very important or dynamic part of your business. But when you take advantage of their customizability to get them to work with your workflow, you can see just how advantageous they can be.

Clarity has tailored these inboxes for many clients to make them work perfectly with line-of-business software. We’d love to take a look at your business model to see how a customizable inbox could make your job easier, so we’re offering a free discovery process to help you find out. We’ll not only bring technical analysts to the table, but also a business analyst with suggestions on how you make the most of your entire eCommerce platform.

Give us a call or click the demo button below.

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Author
 
Written by Stephen Beer
Stephen Beer is a Content Writer at Clarity Ventures and has written about various tech industries for nearly a decade. He is determined to demystify HIPAA, integration, and eCommerce with easy-to-read, easy-to-understand articles to help businesses make the best decisions.

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