Chris Reddick (President and CEO of Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing) begin a series of webinars detailing a 9-point checklist when creating a marketplace platform.

Part 1 of an 8-part series

RON: Morning, Chris, how are you today? 
 
CHRIS: Hi, Ron, doing great. 
 
RON: So let's talk about the steps for planning a marketplace website. We've put a miniature checklist together that lists out the important things that you need to think through, things that you should make decisions about. We'll be answering what is a marketplace, and I'll go ahead and start. The first one is a checklist, right? Find and build your checklist.

what is hipaa

RON: At Clarity here, we've manufactured quite a few white papers. We've put together some checklists. I just finished one a couple of weeks ago for an auction eCommerce marketplace. We've done them for integrated eCommerce marketplaces. And so what you want to do is find a good checklist, put your checklist together. Some of these items here that we're going to go through, I'm just going to mention it and then explain what it is, and then I'm going to let Chris dive in technically and talk about how that really is affected, and what the technology that you're going to be looking or selecting needs to be able to do in order to handle that. 
 
So the first thing on the checklist is about the vendors, right? Because the main thing about most marketplaces is you're allowing vendors and/or sellers—whatever you want to call them, sellers and vendors—to come in and list their wares and sell them on your eCommerce marketplace. So there's a whole bunch of different things about vendors, right?

what is hipaa

RON: There's registration, and how are you going to handle dropshipping and we have to split the order. What happens if somebody comes in and places an order in my marketplace for three items, and all three items are with different vendors. Well, there's three separate orders that I need to send out from the platform now to all three vendors so they can each fulfill their part of the order. And then those vendors have to send the tracking status back so the person can track all three separate orders. 

 
Then there's commissions. Do they do their own commission? How do we integrate? Is it all just EDI? Is there API? There's a whole bunch of stuff, so I'm going to turn it over to you now so you can dive in a little bit more to the vendor and seller portion of the marketplace. 

CHRIS: Thanks. And I think that was a great overview, because this is really detailed depending on your business workflow. And each of the different businesses that we work with tends to cater to different aspects of this marketplace opportunity and marketplace eCommerce platform offering. Some of our clients leverage a buying group or group purchasing type of scenario. And in that state, it makes a lot of sense to be able to have complex workflows that can handle and self-service, make it self-service for the user [in a] situation where they may be purchasing as a group purchase and dealing with things like containers and really understanding the nuances of the lead time on dropshipping, etc, whether it's group buying or not.

The other thing is, as a general marketplace use, one of the big things that we see is whenever a vendor is registering, we're going to need them to potentially provide some form of verification of their company as a edification within the marketplace. Now, we've done some pretty interesting things here, Ron, and this can be a much more simple version to get users into the marketplace, and that's typically going to be the trend. 

what is hipaa

CHRIS: But if you go on the spectrum to the more complicated scenarios, we've done those too. And that can include things like doing a background check that's automated and fully integrated. It can include having a legally enforceable document that they have to sign because they're asserting and attesting to certain things and they have to actually sign it. And then we can verify that signature in an automatic fashion, and through workflows where that gets persisted into a CRM or an ERP system. So we have that for legal, accounting, etc.  

So now we've done a background check, we've done this attestation and legal requirement signatures, maybe even other things that we're verifying, like information about their business. Maybe we do a credit check on them, we've done that before. So wherever you are in the spectrum with vendors—and keep in mind, with vendors, you want a higher bar for them. And so you just want to understand what that process is for you? Is it going to be just a few questions and maybe some verification for them and then you let them in? 

A lot of times what we see whenever we're dealing with vendors, we're going to set it up so that they have to behave a certain way or complete certain gamified steps so that they can then get access to more features, some level of commitment that they're going to have to make in order to get access to our eCommerce marketplace website so that we can maintain a level of credibility and consistency for our users within the marketplace.  

So we want that relatively higher bar for the vendors. It just depends on your industry that you're in, as to what that's going to look like.

what is hipaa

RON: On a simple level, it might just say they have to agree to the terms of use. It might be really simple. But like you said, on some of the bigger ones, you certainly want them to behave a certain way to maintain not only the consistency but the trust that you're trying to establish on your eCommerce website, which brings those buyers back over and over again. 

Continue to Part 2 to learn about features of an eCommerce marketplace.