Key Platform Features to Enhance Market Development

Developing a marketplace business can be a significant amount of work, although it may not be necessarily complicated in its nature. There are a lot of logistics and nuances and details that require high standards of execution at every level in order for the marketplace to be valuable to the buyers and sellers. As a result, it's really important to select a marketplace eCommerce platform that can really deliver off-the-shelf capabilities and deep partnerships with trusted vendors and trusted capabilities from a technical perspective, logistics perspective, and from the perspective of overall decisions that have already been made and proven to be successful, that you can really turnkey whenever you integrate and work with a marketplace eCommerce platform company.

Some of these aspects that are really important are dealing with sourcing the product and standardizing the product/category data, basically the schema and meta-information about the products and the categories. As it turns out, this is one of the most logistically challenging aspects of any marketplace, because it’s a huge logistical challenge getting standard images of a certain quality, and getting standard attributes and detailed specifications for each product and category that accurately reflect different sellers and product offerings that can be standardized across different sellers and manufacturers who have different ways of stating their products' capabilities. It's crucial that the marketplace development team and software provider have capabilities to help you run a workflow or a process or an approval or an automated, very intelligent logic for new data from vendors that are uploading or adjusting, enhancing, etc., data within the marketplace.

This can include things like being able to take data that is there and accept it, and then enable intelligent selection of better data. So whenever a vendor uploads information, if they have data that would be considered a regression or a lower standard set of data, we don't want to incorporate that into the marketplace, we don't want it to override existing data that's better. We also want to incorporate data that's going to be more complete than data that's already on the marketplace.

You really have to work with a marketplace implementation partner who understands the different concepts for how to implement the workflows, the approval process, and the business decision making, on having a primary source or master set of data and how to manage that data with different vendors and different sources of truth, the guidance and the opinionated-ness of the marketplace, and how strongly we’re guiding a certain type of behavior within the marketplace. Although this may not be materially critical in certain areas, it absolutely can be a make or break, and certain aspects of the marketplace is governance, or the rules and of the guidelines that vendors, sellers, and buyers interact within.

It only takes one bad experience out of dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of positive experiences for buyer to decide not to work with the marketplace anymore. So it’s absolutely paramount that the governance of the platform really takes into account a very high standard of experience for the buyers.

Issue Resolution & Credibility

Another really key aspect of the governance would be how we're messaging around lead time and how we're messaging around any issue resolution and what expectations we’re setting within the marketplace for issue resolution between the buyer and seller. This is really fundamentally where most of the make-or-break experience is going to be for buyers and sellers within the marketplace. Once there is enough good content that is generating traffic and their transaction is going through the system, the transactions in the marketplace need to be reliable and there needs to be an integrity and a credibility that is going to be based significantly or completely on the governance and the rules that you determine the marketplace is going to adhere to.

So having a marketplace eCommerce team who understands some of the different options of governance for issue resolution, returns, dealing with damaged items, dealing with fraudulent items, incorrect items, etc., or maybe a buyer who has actually received a valid item but they’re refusing to accept it. These are all areas that we need to be able to resolve and have standards for because manually resolving issues and doing that at scale is simply not going to work. The level of customer support and service that would be necessary could bankrupt the operation. So fundamentally, governance is an absolutely critical cornerstone, and being able to understand and explore some of these different nuances is critical for market development from a business perspective.

Execute on Transactions

Finally, as a closing note on key aspects for developing a marketplace and helpful components for this, is that it’s really key to be able to actually execute on the transactions. There are a lot of really detailed steps that need to occur to properly execute on the logistics and some of what we would refer to as the back-office steps to be able to complete large scale amounts of transactions within a marketplace.

Deliver Orders Correctly

For example, depending on the regions and locations and shipping and fulfillment, there may need to be a lot of work to automate and integrate with drop shipping and being able to send orders to the right fulfillment centers, make sure that includes all the necessary information that those orders are sent immediately or at the right time so that the fulfillment occurs properly. There may need to be robust integration with standard API protocols like EDI or CXML or punchout catalog, rest endpoints, etc. to enable the different fulfillment centers, distribution centers, and warehouses of the different vendors and sellers drop-ship locations to be able to fulfill items.

Verification Steps

There may need to be capabilities around verifying the items and verifying the sellers’ capabilities, by doing kind of test runs, etc., before a seller is brought into the marketplace. Verification steps essentially may be an inspection of their manufacturing or warehouse facility. Some marketplaces can really benefit from having a visual inspection or verification step, etc.

Functional Integrations

So whenever you're working with a marketplace eCommerce software development team, we recommend that you work with a software development team who has integrations with different shipping tax, custom duty, etc. weaved into or integrated into their core platform. This is true as well for payment providers and payment processing as well as ERP and CRM integrations. Then whenever the payments are processed, and orders are synced to accounting and back-office systems, this can be done seamlessly and there are no hiccups with dealing with receiving the order or filling the order, dealing with all of the back-office pieces with taxes and customs and duties, and shipping logistics, payments, etc.