10 Time tested online marketplace growth strategies

The surge in online shopping has not only brought tsunami-like changes in customer buying habits but has also reshaped the future of ecommerce.

How are you planning to fuel up your marketplace website for the formidable shifts in ecommerce trends this coming year?

Have you made a survival guide? Have you aligned your growth strategies to go ahead with?

If not, it's time to start working on it! 

Let us start by looking at how customer buying habits are going to evolve in 2024: 

• 95% of all purchases are estimated to be done through ecommerce by 2040
• 93.5% of global internet users have purchased products online
• $ 51 billion is the expected global D2C market size by 2024
• 59% of customers say that personalization influences their shopping decision 
• $3.4 trillion of mobile e-commerce sales expected by 2027

Source: Statista

Is your marketplace platform flexible enough to incorporate the rapid evolution of modern customers’ buying habits? With what we just saw in the trends above, one thing is more than certain - to stay ahead of the curve, enterprises need data-driven, battle-tested growth strategies. As enterprise ecommerce brands plan effective strategies and implement them seamlessly, they can capture the audience and grow their business.  

10 Time-tested tips to help you ace your ecommerce game on your online marketplace

To gain traction on your online marketplace and achieve long-term growth, you need to strategically plan your marketing approaches. Wonder what are these growth strategies that have stood the test of time? 

To help you triumph in the ecommerce battlefield, StoreHippo brings a set of 10 time-tested growth strategies. 

1. Onboard multiple vendors 

Wonder why onboarding multiple vendors is a time-tested strategy? Well, the answer is simple. No buyer wants to choose from a limited number of sellers. The more options you provide your customers to buy from, the more inclined they will be to shop on your marketplace website. Yes, as your customers get the chance to evaluate and pick the sellers of their choice, they come running to your website. You can rope in sellers from different geographies, different product lines, etc to increase footfall on your marketplace. 

StoreHippo ecommerce solutions come with a comprehensive and easy-to-use vendor dashboard. Even novice sellers with no technical know-how can seamlessly register on the platform and start selling to a wider audience. The end-to-end vendor management solution from StoreHippo helps the sellers to overview the business operations and other everyday activities in using a feature-rich, easy to use dashboard. While vendors can do their business seamlessly, the online marketplace admin(s) still hold the power to add, approve, or reject vendors and their products, view complete vendor details, calculate their commissions and payouts, etc.

2. Go intensive with personalization 

Personalization has always been a powerful growth strategy when it comes to ecommerce shopping. With the hyper-personalization age kicking in, each of the customers is inclined to go for brands that offer a customized shopping experience to them. Wonder how to go intensive with personalizations? Well, starting with personalized product recommendations, you can send out customized notifications to your customers with personalized offers and discounts. With the right set of features and tools, you can create a seamless personalized shopping journey on your multi vendor marketplace.

StoreHippo ecommerce solutions are built on a decoupled headless architecture that helps you offer multi-level personalizations to your customers. You can create a chain of personalized multistores for different sets of customers or locations to offer an extremely personalized shopping experience. With the powerful built-in discount engine from StoreHippo, you can create multi-level discounts that are customized to your audiences. You can also recover abandoned carts by sending out real-time personalized notifications. You can seamlessly customize your shipping solutions, and payment processes, offer multilingual customers, customize the product pricing, overall look and feel, etc on your online marketplace. 

3. Offer multi-channel engagement 

Customers who shop on multiple channels have a 30% higher lifetime value than those who shop using only one channel. The modern-age customers like to shop on more than 4 touchpoints and use more than 6 touchpoints to interact with a brand, making it imperative for you to offer a multi-channel engagement. If you have been pushing the omnichannel ecommerce strategy to the back seat, now is your time to reconsider and roll out a powerful omnichannel marketing plan. 

StoreHippo multi vendor marketplace solution comes with 300+ API endpoints and a decoupled headless architecture that helps add new touchpoints using the same backend logic and APIs. You can cater to all the multi-channel selling needs of your business with StoreHippo omnichannel solutions and create consistent buyer experiences across multiple channels. With StoreHippo, you can centrally control all your sales channels and improve the operational efficiency across all channels. As you get rich customer insights from various channels, you can leverage the most profitable channel to take your marketplace website ahead of the curve. 

4. Leverage mcommerce for faster conversions

Mobile shopping is highly categorized with quick conversions. Wonder why? Well, 80% of the online orders come from mobile devices, implying that mobiles should be considered a primary sales channel. To set your enterprise business up for unrestrained growth in the coming years and stay consistent with the market dynamics, make sure to sell to your customers on mobile devices. You can cash in on the impulse buying habits of your customers with mobile sales channels. But how do you plan to create a well-defined m-commerce strategy before you take your marketplace website to international markets?  

StoreHippo ecommerce solutions come with an inbuilt mobile app builder that helps build mobile apps directly from your dashboard. Built grounds-up on a mobile-first principle, StoreHippo offers complete mobile solutions for your enterprise business. You can build Android and iOS apps without having to code and at zero additional costs. You can also create multiple mobile apps for your multistore ecommerce business and get built-in apps for different users like admins, vendors, delivery boys, etc. to handle business on the go. Online marketplaces built by StoreHippo are PWA stores that look, feel, and work like mobile apps even on entry-level devices with poor internet connectivity. 

5. Keep introducing new products and services

The one thing modern customers love about online shopping is a vast variety of options to choose from. They run to marketplaces where they can find different products or multiple services under the same roof. For example, Amazon's online marketplace is famous for its A to Z line of products. The one growth strategy to boost your ecommerce business is to keep adding new product lines and expanding your business on multiple fronts. 

StoreHippo ecommerce solutions come with a built-in product management system that helps sellers manage their products in the backend and front end with time-saving features and tools. The sellers can seamlessly add, delete, edit, import, export, search, publish, or unpublish single or multiple products in just a few clicks. With the built-in order management system on your marketplace platform, you can streamline your order and inventory planning with advanced, automated, and simplified order processing features.  

6. Market your enterprise brand well 

Marketing is one growth strategy that is going nowhere. While it takes your business places, the trick to grow your business stays. You can put your brand out there to your customers with a solid marketing strategy. Implementing different marketing strategies like real-time interactions, repeat offers, quick deliveries, etc, can help you to keep the flow of customers pouring in. All you need is a feature-rich ecommerce software that comes with the right set of tools to help you take your multi vendor marketplace to your customers. As you have access to rich customer data, you can also implement personalized marketing strategies that are tailored to the needs of your customers.  

StoreHippo ecommerce solutions offer a host of marketing tools to help you analyze your audience segmentation and implement marketing strategies. StoreHippo comes with a powerful built-in discount engine that enables you to implement multi-level discounts and create customized coupons. With the built-in SEO tools, you can position your brand to rank higher on SERPs. You can also create personalized content around your brand with the built-in blog engine. StoreHippo also enables you to recover abandoned carts on your online marketplace with push notifications, SMS, and email notifications. The integrated reporting and analytical tools help you analyze the best-performing marketing channel, so you take the approach that suits your brand the most and helps you reach the target audience seamlessly. 

7. Make payments effortless 

Payments should be the most secure and smooth experience on your website. A slight inconvenience in the payment process or a lengthy payment cycle can lead to a negative shopping experience on your marketplace. You wouldn’t want that, right? With an effortless payment process, you can seamlessly boost your conversions manifold. Wonder how to ensure a seamless payment process on your enterprise ecommerce marketplace platform? How about adding multiple payment gateways, so your customers can pick and choose the payment solution of their own choice? Well, it definitely adds an extra layer of convenience for your customers.  

StoreHippo offers 60+ pre-integrated domestic and international payment gateways for you to choose from. You can also integrate with multiple payment options like UPI, digital wallets, net banking, store credits, etc. This enables your customers to choose their preferred payment option on your enterprise ecommerce platform. You can also offer personalized payment gateways based on your customer's location on your marketplace website. StoreHippo also supports transactions in multiple currencies for your global customers.

8. Ensure faster order fulfillment 

Did you know that 61% of the customers are willing to pay more just to receive same-day delivery? This makes it imperative for enterprise brands to focus on faster order fulfillment. Yes, it can prove to be an effective growth strategy where your customers are satisfied with the timely deliveries. As word of mouth spreads, more and more customers will come flocking to your ecommerce platform. 

StoreHippo offers 30+ pre-integrated shipping solutions to help you offer a seamless delivery solution to your customers on your marketplace website. You can also optimize the delivery charges by offering multiple shipping solutions on your enterprise ecommerce platform with StoreHippo. You can also integrate with local delivery partners of your choice to ensure faster order fulfillment. The inbuilt delivery boy solution from StoreHippo helps you manage your own fleet of delivery boys seamlessly. 

9. Offer multi-channel support 

Customers love the time and attention you give to them. As they look for engagement across multiple channels, you need to be available for your customers, listen to their grievances, and offer them support as and when needed. Your marketplace platform will thrive manifold when the customers are happy and satisfied. You can develop a support team that can stay in constant contact with the customers and make sure the customers are well attended to.

StoreHippo ecommerce solutions help brands connect with their customers seamlessly on multiple channels with its smooth integrations and automated tools. StoreHippo offers features like live chat, abandoned cart follow-up, SMS, push and email notifications, social media integrations, etc to help enterprise marketplace websites be on top of their customer grievances. With StoreHippo’s 300+ API endpoints, you can also seamlessly integrate with the customer servicing software of your choice.

10. Take your marketplace to global customers 

Do you have global expansion on the charts? Well, even if it’s not at the moment, we bet you might want to expand your business to global customers in the future. Even though going global is a win-all plan for your enterprise business, it can be challenging without an ecommerce software that has built-in global solutions. You need features and tools that help you enable seamless shopping for your global customers, right?

StoreHippo multi vendor marketplace ecommerce solutions come with a gamut of global features that help you create a seamless shopping experience for your customers across borders. StoreHippo offers 100+ languages (including right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew) to help global customers shop in their native language. With multiple domestic and international payment gateways from StoreHippo customers can also seamlessly pay in the currency of their own choice from anywhere in the world. StoreHippo helps leverage the global markets with a host of features like multi currency invoicing, a built-in tax engine, international shipping partners, location-based pricing, etc.

Conclusion 

The customer buying habits are no longer linear. With the ecommerce industry growing leaps and bounds, you need to align your online marketplace to the future of ecommerce. Wonder how to keep up with the pace? Well, with flexibility, you can offer your customers exactly what they are looking for. 

StoreHippo is a 360-degree robust ecommerce platform that helps businesses reach a wider audience and unleash their growth like never before. Built on MACH architecture, StoreHippo gives inherent flexibility and scalability to build tailor-made solutions for the unique needs of your business. You can implement all the above-mentioned time-tested growth strategies to grow your marketplace website with StoreHippo. Check out the 300+ built-in enterprise-grade features that help improve efficiency, reach a wider market, and reduce costs. 

Grow your marketplace platform with StoreHippo ecommerce solutions. Start your 14-day free trial now.