Use Marketplace Analysis to Enhance User Experience

Why Every Platform Needs Marketplace Analysis

Marketplace analysis assesses platform data to learn what factors influence customer purchasing decisions and other behavior. This enables the platform to dynamically serve users in an optimal way.

Without analytic functionality, the marketplace will be less effective at executing on what the buyers and sellers truly need, and you’ll lose out to competitors.

Ultimately, the point of the marketplace platform is to serve the market and provide value that is adaptive to that marketplace.

This means adapting the presentation, styling, and the workflow or layout of the marketplace platform so that it matches what’s optimal for the buyers and sellers. It also means providing guidance and clear delineation of what’s reasonable and how they should operate.

It’s especially important to have this guidance for sellers so they know how to interact with the buyers and the marketplace runs smoothly.

Provide Recommendations with Marketplace Platform Analysis

Marketplace analysis is necessary to provide recommendations for related or popular products in a particular category to buyers. This is critical for the ease of use of the platform for buyers and sellers.

Therefore, you want your platform to provide intelligent recommendations by learning to predict what people will search for next and what they’ll tend to benefit from the most.

Recommend Necessary Items & Next Steps

It’s critical that the marketplace platform allows self-service as much as possible and adapts to their needs. Based on this, each individual user needs to have an optimized experience.

And at the very least, that optimized experience is based on each user’s browsing history and their experience on the site.

The eCommerce marketplace can directly influence not only the ease and use and how much users come back to the marketplace repeatedly and utilize it fully, but it can also influence purchasing decisions and areas that they’re researching.

The recommendations that marketplace analysis provide can be extremely helpful to buyers. Sometimes buyers forget that they need to purchase something else that’s related to this, such as batteries for this item to work.

Another example would be if there’s someone buying a machine part, and they don’t realize they need to purchase a sealant for the part. But then they see the list of recommended products, possibly called the “People who bought this also bought this” list, and the sealant they need is there.

This may lead to them purchasing both of the items they need, rather than only purchasing one and then finding out later it wouldn’t work without the sealant. The former situation leads to higher satisfaction with their purchase and trust in the marketplace for providing the information they needed.

This is just an example, but it shows how vital marketplace analysis is to the success of the platform.

In addition, buyers may write reviews that the machine part doesn’t include the sealant, and they may even give a lower rating because that information wasn’t clear.

In situations like these, it’s important to tell the seller to document that information in their product listing so the buyer is aware of that going in.

Then we can have automated suggestions for what would go with that machine part, or we could give the seller the opportunity to make recommendations.

Have a Dynamic, Refined UI/UX

With marketplace analysis, we can even see that when somebody searches for this particular keyword phrase, then they tend to order a particular item, even though that item isn't showing on the first page of the search results.

Therefore, search results should dynamically adjust based on what people are ordering and clicking on. There should essentially be a feedback loop into the search results with recommended and popular products in that category as well as for that particular user.

Using data to adapt and adjust means that each visitor gets a truly dynamic, intelligent experience that matches their behavior and similar personas in each category they’re looking at. This is critical for user experience.

It’s also best to be selective and decisive with the user interface. By delivering on these decisions that remove noise and enable concise, clear interaction with the site, we can greatly influence the decisions and behavior of buyers and sellers.

It can help to emphasize certain characteristics or certain behavior, and this can be a significant opportunity for differentiation.

It’s also important to note that a lot of times, although the customer appreciates the information, it can be overwhelming to have too much information presented all at once.

Therefore, there ought to be the ability to drill down and present specific, relevant information. And generally speaking, keeping things reasonably simple and presenting the important details is what’s going to win the day when it comes to providing the most value for the buyer.

Inform Sellers About What Data They Need

It’s also critical to be able to help the sellers get this valuable information that is necessary in their particular space, and let them know if they are missing information.

For example, when sellers list computers, they need to provide hardware specs about the processor, RAM, storage space, etc. For clothing items, a size chart might need to be shown for the different sizes. For most products, shipping information needs to be provided.

It’s essential to let sellers know what information is necessary for their product type. Complete product information allows buyers to properly compare products from various sellers in the marketplace.

In addition, to be able to adjust based on consumer purchasing decisions, we need to look at it from a data perspective.

In each particular category or subcategory, what is the minimum amount and quality of data buyers need to make a purchase and take that risk?

If this is actually much smaller than expected, then we can tune in the marketplace and what we’re recommending that the sellers complete.

Oftentimes, the seller won’t have as much information and won’t want to expend the resources to get it unless it’s necessary.

So when it is necessary, it’s the responsibility of the marketplace operator to communicate this to the seller so they understand that this data is important, and will possibly make or break how much volume they get or whether a buyer will trust the offering.

Discover and Reward the Best Sellers on Your Platform

Another thing we can do is use marketplace analysis to find and reward the better performing and higher satisfaction solutions.

So if there are certain products that deliver higher satisfaction for the end user, or certain products that are clearly winners when it comes to being high value and maybe relatively low cost considering that value, these are things we want to promote.

Because again, the purpose of the marketplace is providing value to the buyers and sellers. It’s beneficial to both buyers and sellers to promote the sellers who are performing well, taking care of customers, and who can handle the order volume and deliver.

Rewarding sellers who take care of customer satisfaction is something you almost can’t do too much of, though we don't want it to be unhealthy where it's unreasonable and where buyers can take advantage of that focus.

Sellers should receive notable and reasonable promotion based on their reviews and ratings and timeliness with responding, within reasonable parameters.

This should be part of the DNA and algorithms of the marketplace itself, with presenting search results, promoting certain sellers, and place-weighting how much it costs for a seller to do internal paid advertising within the market.

It should cost dramatically less to promote themselves if they are well rated and reviewed by the buyers. There could be almost an exponential decrease in their cost to promote if they are top performers with customer satisfaction.

This is a way to build into the marketplace this dynamic and strongly encouraging focus around customer satisfaction.

Provide a Better Customer Experience

At the end of the day, if a marketplace platform doesn’t absolutely focus on high customer satisfaction, customers will go to the platform where customer satisfaction is treated as the number one priority, because then they can trust the marketplace.

The marketplace is basically a credibility broker where it’s vetting the sellers and ensuring the sellers meet a certain standard.

This is critical to the buyers, because if they know they can trust the marketplace—whether it's a B2B, C2C, or B2C marketplace— then they will be able to purchase from different sellers without concern for their legitimacy.

It ultimately goes both ways—credibility garners a better customer experience, and at the same time, a better customer experience fosters trust in the marketplace.

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