What is an e-commerce marketplace?
A marketplace is a platform where both sellers and buyers meet. In other words, a seller can signup, list their products and sell them to the users.
This kind of e-commerce marketplace has been in trend for the last few years.
A marketplace helps users/buyers to find plenty of options to choose from and at the same time, it helps sellers to bypass the hassles of developing an e-commerce website and market it.
So, if you too, are planning to build an e-commerce marketplace, this blog post will help you.
Here, we will be sharing 11 essential features of a marketplace that you or your website designer must not miss out.
Let’s get started.
#1 Social Login
When your website developer provides an option for the sellers or buyers to login using their social credentials (Facebook, Twitter etc.), it takes less time for them to sign-in and use the platform, rather than going through the whole process of signup.
In other words, you can get more users (buyers & sellers) when your e-commerce marketplace has an option for them to login through their social credentials.
#2 Easy Product Management
The process of product management for the sellers must be easy & user-friendly.
On the top of it, you may also provide FAQ & Help section for your sellers to understand the products management process.
Lack of user-friendly product management system for your sellers may lead to a drop in the usage of your e-commerce marketplace that may further result in the failure of your project.
#3 Guest Checkout
For the buyers, your e-commerce marketplace must provide an option to checkout without registration. By forcing your users to register in order to checkout, you may lose a lot of new orders & customers.
#4 Instant Notifications
Your e-commerce marketplace must send out instant notifications to the respective parties, for all the actions like:
- Order confirmation (to both customers and sellers).
- Payment confirmation (to both customers and sellers).
- Order status change (to customers).
- Rating & reviews (to both customers and sellers).
Instant notifications help users and sellers to get informed about the current status of each order.
Therefore, this feature is so important that your website developer must ensure the seamless integration of instant notifications with each stage of an order.
#5 Commission & Payout Management
As the business model of a marketplace is mainly based on commissions, it must be very easy for the administrator to manage the commissions & payouts.
The backend of your marketplace must allow you to:
- Change the commission based on product value or order value.
- View & download the commission report.
- View & download the payouts report for each seller.
This feature can be a bit tricky and therefore you must make sure that hire an experienced website developer to build your website.
#6 Discount Coupons
In order to encourage users to buy products from your e-commerce marketplace, your sellers must be able to create discount coupons from their dashboard.
#7 Order Status Update
The sellers must be able to update the order status during each stage/phase like:
- Order processing
- Order ready
- Order dispatched
- Order completed
This feature will allow buyers to track their orders through the marketplace, without calling or emailing you.
#8 Reviews & Ratings
This is perhaps one of the most important features of any e-commerce marketplace.
Your website must provide ability for the buyers to rate & review the sellers and vice versa.
The good ratings of any seller will encourage not only new customers to buy from this seller but it will also motivate the sellers to provide best products & services to the buyers on your e-commerce marketplace.
#9 Payment Options
Providing multiple payment options on your e-commerce marketplace will help to get more sales and lesser abandoned orders.
Depending upon the demographic & geographic details of your customers, you must provide them with the variety of different payment methods so that they can find it easy to pay & complete their orders.
Lack of multiple payment methods on any e-commerce website or marketplace is one of the major reasons of high order abandonment rate.
#10 Robust Search
Since a marketplace can eventually have thousands of products, a robust search feature will always help the customers to search & find their desired products.
Have you noticed how robust is the search feature of marketplaces like Amazon?
A smart & robust search feature will save the time & effort of your potential buyers to find a product. And as a result, you will get more sales & customers.
#11 Products Filtration
A search feature combined with different filtration options can do wonders for your e-commerce marketplace. It will help your customers to filter & sort the products based on their preferences and choice.
A product filtration feature can have some of the important filters like:
- Colors
- Size
- Price range
- Category
- Brand
