Marketplace eCommerce

Best Buyer Dashboard Features for Online Marketplaces in 2024

Updated  |  6 min read

The buyer dashboard is an important component of a marketplace eCommerce platform. It needs to have certain capabilities, and it's essential for dealing with common occurrences within the online marketplace buying experience.

Buyer dashboard.

Basic Buyer Dashboard Capabilities

Here are the basic buyer dashboard capabilities that you need for a successful marketplace buyer experience:

Self-Service

Buyer dashboards give customers the convenience of self-service within the marketplace website. This self-serve and repeat buying capability reduces overhead for the marketplace business and improves customer satisfaction.

Real-Time Updates

How the marketplace is able to deliver to the end users depends largely on the logistics, since in many cases you're dealing with groups of fulfillment and distribution centers that function differently.

The buyer dashboard, though, allows buyers to remain informed throughout the process, and even get their questions answered beforehand.

The goal is to keep them apprised and empower them to interact with the vendors who fulfill their items or with customer service from the marketplace itself.

Automated Status Information

A well-implemented buyer dashboard allows you to meet buyers' needs, from providing information about their orders, allowing them to review payment receipts, and more.

Ideally, processes will be automated as much as possible so things stay up-to-date. Buyers should be able to see the status of their order as soon as they place it.

That's why Clarity's buyer dashboard immediately makes the order status information available to users, even if your marketplace has split shipping, split ordering, or split payments.

How to Deal With Shipment Delays

When it comes to shipment delays, a buyer dashboard is essential to mitigating frustration and solving problems.

Let Buyers Know What's Up

It’s not uncommon for ordered items to have issues or shipments to be delayed. Buyers tend to be pretty forgiving as long as they can understand and see the status of things and there's at least some reasonable effort to address or resolve any issues that occur.

In addition to the dashboard, it's also helpful to send automated transactional emails wherever possible so that the buyer has a unified set of messaging that occurs both in their email and in their dashboard.

Many negative user experiences occur when they aren’t consistently seeing the status, tracking information, or other information related to their orders.

Automatic Workflows for Scheduled Deliveries

Typically, orders with a specific scheduled delivery date are a bit more complicated, so there needs to be an automated mechanism to coordinate that scheduled delivery.

This is key for allowing buyers to self-serve as much as possible on the marketplace website, meaning they don't need to call someone in customer service for assistance.

A Place to Update Addresses

Another situation that may result in shipment delays if the buyer needs to update their address information. It could be for that particular order or across the board for their account. They may even have multiple locations they need shipments to go to.

The buyer dashboard is where they can add different addresses, specify whether those are billing or shipping addresses, and give the address locations nicknames so they are easier to identify when selecting at checkout.

Editing information on a buyer dashboard.

Shopping Habits & Account Information

The buyer dashboard is useful for keeping track of what items the buyer has searched for, added to a list, purchased, and more. They can also manage their account information.

Managing Roles within an Organization

Managing account information in the buyer dashboard is useful not only for consumers, but also for organizations that need sub-account capability where they can invite users and give them different roles.

Those roles have different access levels to the dashboard itself. They may only be able to manage addresses, shipping, and purchasing information, while another higher-level account may be able to manage more. You can assign rights to users to login as finance users, as buyers, or as an approver of purchases, etc.

Having the ability to manage the account itself based on each role within the company is key. For instance, in finance, they might have the need to update and manage the payment information on account.

Managing Payment Information

A buyer may want to manage and add different credit card details for different locations or just have different credit cards available in general. They may want to manage an ongoing subscription. If they have a subscription, they may want to manage how often they will be billed or change their subscription status.

This is all possible through the buyer dashboard. Consider what capabilities you need within your buyer dashboard: Are you going to have subscriptions? Are you going to have a wallet for users to store their information? Will buyers have a capability to pay on account? That's a credit-oriented payment on the credit rating of the company. This will allow them to send POIs and process orders with special agreements with the vendor, your marketplace, and on how they're going to pay.

Saving Items to Specified Lists

Users may want to save information they shared with other users within their account, or save items to a wish list or shopping list. (The distinction being that a wish list would be consumed whenever someone adds the item to the cart from the wish list, while a shopping list would be a consistent list that can be reused over and over.)

There's a lot of capability for things like shopping lists for large organizations as well—they can build a template for common items that need to be purchased repeatedly, like office supplies or restaurant equipment.

Depending on your marketplace, this capability may not be necessary right out of the gate, but it will certainly become important down the road as the marketplace scales and as you need to provide for your users.

Buyer dashboard shopping list.

Breaking Down Barriers Between You & Customers

There are several ways you can enable a seamless experience on your marketplace platform.

Buyer & Seller Interaction

Depending on your marketplace model, the buyer dashboard may need to have not just orders but also quotes. There may be some custom quoting involved that would allow the vendor and the buyer to go back and forth and even have a live chat.

Does your marketplace enable the robust, rich, and immediate interaction between buyers and sellers that is necessary to provide a seamless experience? That's where a lot of opportunity lies for many marketplaces to be competitive and grow.

Easy Checkout & Resolution Processes

You can also compete and scale by reducing barriers to transactions in making the process as automated and easy as possible, and by making content on the site user friendly and available to all users.

In addition, there may be quality issues and challenges with a delivery with a set of items or item within an order. As such, it's important for customer service to have an automated request-for-refund and an intelligent routing of how that request-for-refund process is completed.

Provide a Reliable Experience

It’s such a great accomplishment to scale up a marketplace. However, it can bring with it some challenges that logistically can be very damaging to a marketplace brand.

If the marketplace is able to deliver customer service for users or able to respond quickly in an automated, intelligent fashion then a user’s satisfaction with the marketplace will increase greatly. Needless to say, these are just a few of the facets of a buyer dashboard.

The ultimate goal is to deliver enough value to the buyer by providing them a feature-rich, seamless, and reliable experience with your marketplace. Even if they engage with competitors, you want them to keep coming back to your marketplace website, and gravitate towards using yours over theirs. For partners, you want them to be able to evaluate your marketplace among others and choose to work with yours. For that to happen, your marketplace needs to be superior in the ways that count.

Think about it: when making a purchase online, many end users will pay more in order to have a trustworthy and reliable interaction with a trusted or familiar brand; and your marketplace will ideally be a trusted brand in its particular segment.

It’s good to keep in mind that it's not just all about the cost and value of the goods being sold, though that is a large part of it. It's also about the marketplace brand and its integrity to stand behind the logistical execution of getting items to the end user. It's about delivering quality service and support in the hopefully rare event that there are any issues.

Buyer dashboard reliability.

How eCommerce Development Experts Can Help

Working with eCommerce marketplace experts like the team at Clarity Ventures can mean the difference between the success and failure of a marketplace business. We've developed dozens of customized marketplace dashboard implementations that make the most of buyer and vendor dashboard capabilities.

We truly enjoy getting to interact with potential marketplace clients—and we offer a free, no-obligation discovery session to help you evaluate the different features you may need in your buyer dashboard. Click the button below to set up your request and learn what we can do for you.

Web development team.

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Author
 
Autumn Spriggle is a Content Writer at Clarity Ventures who stays up to date on the latest trends in eCommerce, software development, and related topics to provide readers with the latest and greatest. She strives to help people like you realize the full potential for their business.