Chris Reddick (President and CEO of Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity) finish the webinar by discussing the benefits of using platform data to help make business decisions.

Part 8 of an 8-part series (Return to Part 7)

RON: Now that we've built it, now that we know the features of online marketplace software, how we're going to deal with all the products, the catalog, the vendors, the transactions, the events, the auctions. Now, how do we measure our success? How do we report on it, and how do we pay out and track all our commissions? 
 
CHRIS: That's a key topic. And ultimately, this is what makes or breaks most eCommerce marketplaces foundationally. And, bottom line here, is that there are two facets of this that I would like to focus on. One is, what exactly do you have to have as a baseline? A lot of times this is going to be a lot of the mechanics. So paying out the commissions or showing reporting on what the percentage fee that you ended up taking as a percent of the sale, what happened with the actual cost versus projected cost? A lot of our marketplace integration clients will handle most of the logistics. 
 
So if you're handling logistics, there may be a delta between the actual costs for shipping versus the estimated cost, and any detail like that. Maybe there were damaged items and there were items that were returned and we need to be able to reconcile all of that and report on it consistently to the sellers on their vendor dashboard and, in some cases, to some extent, you may have reports you want to show to the buyers, but typically it's going to be mostly oriented around the sellers. 

 

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CHRIS: The other thing, though, and I think this is a really powerful aspect as well that is really key, is aggregating the sanitized data within the B2C marketplace to give valuable business intelligence to your different niche and category-specific sellers so they can understand how they're performing relative to their peers within your marketplace. This can be one of the most valuable things about the marketplace platform for the sellers so they can understand, “Oh wow, my margins are way too low for this product compared to everyone else, and they're actually selling more volume than me and they're providing more value with their delivery.” 
 
Now, I know these are topics that we can expand on and we've talked about before regarding B2C marketplaces, but those are some of the big tenets that I would point out, Ron, that I think are really, really valuable to focus on within the reporting and commissions, etc. 
 
RON: I totally agree. Well, thanks everyone. I think we've covered everything. Appreciate you listening in. If you've followed us this far, please smash the Like button. Leave a comment. Go ahead and go on our website: clarity-ventures.com, request a meeting with me. I'd love to jump on the phone and talk to you about your marketplace software, maybe get you unblocked on some ideas, do a little brainstorming, and would really look forward to working you if we had if given the opportunity. Chris, you want to tie us off? 
 
CHRIS: Yeah. I say feel free to reach out to us if we can help and we will look forward to seeing you in the next video. Thanks again, Ron. Thanks, everyone. Bye for now. 
 
RON: Thanks, Chris. Bye for now.