Chris Reddick (President and CEO of Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity) begin their discussion about the importance of scalability in eCommerce marketplaces.

Part 1 of an 8-part series 

RON: Hey, Chris, it's webinar day. How are you doing? 
 
CHRIS: I'm doing great, Ron. Very excited to meet with you and dive in. This is going to be a good one on scalability and customizations for an eCommerce  marketplace. And if you don't mind, will you just walk us through some of the main points we're going to be digging into today?

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RON: Sure. So when it comes to scalability and customizations—when you hit a flexible platform like Clarity, and again, we're talking about all custom eCommerce platform—they should be, and are usually, very customizable. So there's almost everything on the table. And so today, that's what we want to do, we want to talk about the different areas. What does scalability and customizations mean in the numbers of vendors and sellers or SKUs or products events, the number of auctions? What about transactions? How about reports and commissions and how complex it gets? So those are the key areas we're going to walk through. We're going to dive into each one and we'll try to talk about all the complexities of each of those areas.  

So the first one we'll talk about is just the sheer numbers and how you deal with scalability and customizations for vendors and sellers. Because when you talk about marketplace eCommerce like Amazon, how many people are on Amazon selling? I mean, literally hundreds of thousands of sellers. So the scalability of what you're dealing with with vendors and sellers is a big deal. You obviously have to be able to take care of that. And within that, you have to be able to figure out how to deal as both you, the owner of the platform, with all of those vendors and sellers, you have to deal with the logistics of everything behind the scenes with them. 
 
And then you have to deal with, how do I serve up the UI UX for the buyers so that it doesn't affect them? What I mean by that, before I let Chris dive into this—when I go to Amazon and I buy three items, put it in my cart and I go away, I have no idea [where they’re coming from]. Most of the time I don't even think about it, unless it's Prime, right? Which we try to get Prime just because we get it tomorrow. We're creatures of habit.  

But if I buy three different items, the likelihood that those three items are coming from three different vendors is relatively high on Amazon. And so I know without even thinking about it, just being in this business that it's probably got to split that into three separate orders. Those orders have to be sent to three different vendors, but yet aggregate like Amazon needs to track that. And then those three different vendors have to deal with the shipping logistics and the sending and the tracking. And then I, as a user, want a simple way to go in and track those three things. And I don't want it to be complex because I'm not thinking that way as a regular buyer. So that's some of the complexity of the marketplace model eCommerce that we're talking about.  

 

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RON: Chris, why don't I turn it over to you and go ahead and start diving into some of these customizations and scalability issues that we deal with when we're talking about hundreds to thousands to hundreds of thousands of vendors and sellers on a marketplace platform
 
CHRIS: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the perception challenges here is, whenever we talk about scalability and customization, it sometimes implies performance of the application and the infrastructure. And that absolutely is the case. You know, those are foundational pieces. 

But probably the biggest thing ultimately ends up being having the right business logic and intelligent data feed, essentially a feedback loop, and hyper marketplace automation within the process to the fullest extent possible. 
 

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CHRIS: And this really has to be ever-continuing opportunity, a literal, nonstop, constant area of improvement. There's an acronym that Tony Robbins uses: constant and never-ending improvement, or CANI. And I think it's such a great acronym to apply to this. Ultimately, the bottom line here is that there are going to be key priorities as you scale up. As you continue to scale, getting this marketplace automation in place, there will be higher payoff aspects than others, and this may not be necessarily immediately intuitive if you haven't gone through the experience. 
 
I think one of the most interesting things with the marketplace in particular is the reality that you're dealing with bringing two parties together and enforcing a standard and a process for how the logistics and the execution of those two parties interacting is going to go. And if you maintain your focus on that, one of the biggest opportunities with scaling up around the vendor side of things is being able to have a process in place for making sure the quality of the products that they're posting, the categories that they're putting items into, the specific B2B shipping options and inventory and pricing data, and essentially making sure that there aren't duplications or low-quality additions that they're making into your marketplace.  

Logistically, this is a key piece of any marketplace as it begins to scale, is determining what you want your standard and process to be for vendors to offer items within the marketplace. You want to allow them to create new items, and does that need to go through a manual review process? Does there need to be a simple flagging system that we're going to implement so that vendors and sellers can upload and create new items, but they will get flagged if they don't meet certain criteria that the users who are browsing expect.  

 

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CHRIS: Another example might be something simple like, if somebody does a search and they go to that vendor's item and whenever they dwell on that page that they go to from the search result, if that dwell time is really low—in other words, the buyer who's visiting your site goes to a product that a vendor uploaded and they find that it's not helpful and they bounce back to the search results page and you see that consistently with that seller—do you then put a process in place to more formally review whatever they're uploading?  

These are some of the questions that you're going to want to think about and have this as a process that is, to the extent that it makes sense as you scale, that is automated and clear upfront for the sellers and buyers that this is the standard that you operate with on your eCommerce marketplace platform

Continue to Part 2 to learn about importing/exporting information from CRMs.