5 sure-shot ways to grow your online marketplace

By |Updated Date : Jul 03, 2024 | 46323 views | Jul 26, 2023
  • 5 sure-shot ways to grow your online marketplace

Your enterprise business grew rapidly in the past few years.

You defined your customers, identified their pain points and addressed them.

But what’s your next move?

How do you plan your growth milestones going forward?

How will your online marketplace add value to your customers' lives? 

With the new-age customer buying habits evolving each second, how are you planning to cope with every new piece of information that floats your way?

Do you have ideas in mind to scale your multi vendor marketplace

Well, the harsh reality of ecommerce is: to scale your business and boost revenue, your marketplace website needs a series of thoughtful strategies that are not only well-planned but also well-executed. 

Wonder what those secret strategies are and how to make them a reality? 

How about taking cues from the customers? Let us check some of the customer buying habits before getting started.

  • 50% of e-commerce sales happen over multi vendor marketplace
  • 93% of online shoppers use a coupon or discount code throughout the year
  • 61% of consumers are willing to pay more to have their products delivered same day
  • 92% of buyers say an easy return process motivates them to shop from the same brand in the future
  • 1 in every 3 customers leaves their favorite marketplaces after just one bad experience.

Source: Infosys, Influencer Marketing Hub

Online shopping habits are no doubt going to see further developments. And for your online marketplace to survive the competitive landscape, you need to future-proof your enterprise business with the right solutions in hand. 

The question here is - how to do so. 

5 sure-shot ways to grow your online marketplace

With 97% of customers purchasing online today, it is given that you need to go the extra mile to set your business on an upward growth trajectory. With a constant increase in the number of people buying goods online, brands are adding new features to their marketplace websites with the intent of providing the best-in-class shopping experience to their customers.

Let’s make sure you are ahead of your competitors with these sure-shot ways and scale your marketplace like never before:

1. Add Vendors from New Geographies and Product Lines

You might have a lot of products on your marketplace, but is it enough for your buyers? Certainly not, the new-age customers are always on the lookout for more options to explore before making a final purchase.  

So how do you achieve that? Simple - add vendors from new and multiple geographies and product lines on your multi vendor marketplace and scale your product lines. As you add new product lines from multiple vendors you can not only expand your business but also boost your conversion rates by attracting a wider customer base.

StoreHippo ecommerce solution provider offers such a quick and easy vendor registration and online selling solutions that even novice vendors can seamlessly start selling on your marketplace. The comprehensive admin dashboard reflects the overview of everyday business activities and vendor performance in just a few clicks. 

The marketplace admin can easily manage their vendors with the power to add, approve or reject vendors and their products, view complete vendor details, calculate their commissions and payouts, and analyze the performance of each vendor. StoreHippo multi vendor marketplace platform also offers an easy product management system to help vendors manage products in your backend and storefront with time saving and simple features. 

2. Create Loyal Vendors

Onboarding vendors is one thing, but keeping them loyal to your brand is just another. As you facilitate ease of selling for your vendors on your marketplace, your brand grows. Wondering how? Your vendors will pull in more vendors with their word of mouth publicity and promote your brand as it helps them sell better. With more vendors on your online marketplace you are also able to offer a wide variety of product options to your customers. Isn't that a win-win for all parties? 

StoreHippo offers an intuitive and feature rich vendor dashboard that helps the vendors easily manage their day-to-day business. With a separate vendor dashboard, each seller can completely overview and understand their business, products, inventory, order status, best selling products etc in just a few clicks. The vendors can seamlessly add, edit, and upload products in bulk using CSV. With the mobile-first technology your vendors can also manage their business on the go. The StoreHippo multi vendor marketplace platform also helps you give special discounts and offers to the bestselling vendors on your platform. 

3. Retain Your Customers 

The sure-shot way to grow an online marketplace is a 3-step process, engage-convert and most importantly, retain your customers. But how do you keep customers glued to your marketplace? Quite easy, offer them discounts and coupons. Make buying seamless and transparent. Send them personalized notifications. And with all these features combined in a single platform, your work is half done. 

StoreHippo comes with 300+ enterprise-grade features to help you retain your customers. With a powerful in-built discount engine, you can offer multi-level discounts on your online marketplace to motivate your customers to buy more. While you push them towards buying more, StoreHippo helps you make their buying process seamless and transparent with frictionless payment processes, easy returns and refunds feature etc. Built on the decoupled headless architecture, you can tweak your marketplace inside out and offer extreme personalization to your customers. You can customize your shipping solutions and digital payments, offer localization with multilingual content and personalized pricing, different store designs, etc. with StoreHippo multi vendor marketplace platform. 

4. Pivot to Hybrid Business Models 

To upscale and grow your marketplace website, you might need to pivot to hybrid business models in the near future. Starting with a few channels and then realizing the need to add multiple customer touchpoints is quite common for enterprise businesses. You might have started with a B2C business model but now want to pivot to a D2C model, as Nykaa did. The marketplace started with selling beauty products from different brands but eyeing the huge demand for the products, it started its own chain of products and cosmetics. 

You need a fully hosted and managed enterprise ecommerce solution like StoreHippo that comes with built-in solutions to create disruptive hybrid online marketplaces. It offers battle-tested solutions for B2B, B2C, D2C, B2B2C, quick commerce and other hybrid business models enabling enterprise brands to go to market in record time. With StoreHippo’s inherent flexibility and adaptability, it is easy to switch or combine any new business model with their existing model. 

5. Plan Global Foray 

If you stand against a global expansion for your online business, it's time to reconsider. Wonder why? See for yourself: 

  • $2.25 trillion is the expected value of the cross border e-commerce market by 2026
  • ~4X growth in international cross border ecommerce market value from 2019 to 2026

With such promising figures at hand, planning a global foray is just the wise option to scale your online marketplace. However, you need an enterprise ecommerce solution that helps you easily scale to global markets with its comprehensive features and tools. 

StoreHippo multi vendor marketplace platform comes with a host of go global features to help you establish your brand among the global audience. With the automatic translation feature from StoreHippo, you can quickly translate your website content in 100+ languages (including Right to Left languages like Arabic) and offer your global customers ease of buying with personalized content. StoreHippo also offers 60+ domestic and international payment gateways to help you provide a customized payment process to your global customers making it easy for them to shop on your marketplace website. With multi currency invoicing, in-built tax engine, location based pricing, global shipping solutions etc, from SoreHippo, you can quickly grow your brand beyond borders.

Conclusion

With a comprehensive sales strategy, you can seamlessly grow your online marketplace and make a kill in the ecommerce industry. All you need is an ecommerce solution provider that helps you plan and execute these strategies to boost your growth. 

StoreHippo multi vendor marketplace platform helps you future-proof your marketplace website by offering 360-degree solutions. With its 300+ inbuilt features and tools, you can improve efficiency, reach a wider market, and reduce your costs. 

So are you ready to grow your online marketplace with these sure-shot ways? Explore StoreHippo’s enterprise-grade features by starting your 14-day free trial now. 

FAQ

1. How much time will I need to create an online marketplace?

The time needed to create an online marketplace depends on your choice of method. There are two ways to create your multi vendor marketplace platform

  • Building your marketplace from scratch entails 12-24 months on an average, along with a group of IT professional that can be expensive
  • Using a turnkey ecommerce solution might typically take 4-8 weeks       

StoreHippo is a SaaS-based ecommerce solution that helps you create an online marketplace in quick time. You can also customize your platform as per your business needs, which will however take a few weeks extra. 

StoreHippo multi vendor marketplace platform supports a variety of business models like B2C, D2C, B2B, B2B2C, or any hybrid business models. You can seamlessly pivot from one business model to another or create hybrid solutions for your enterprise brand.   

2. Do marketplace website builders offer marketing tools or will I need to buy paid software?

Not all marketplace website builders offer marketing tools. If you choose StoreHippo ecommerce solutions to take your enterprise to the online markets, you get access to a host of marketing tools and features. StoreHippo comes with a powerful discount engine to help you create multi-level discounts and attract customers to your marketplace. You can also recover abandoned carts using the PUSH notifications feature from StoreHippo. With the built-in discount engine, you can rank your online marketplace higher on SERPs. You can also create personalized content for your customers using the built-in blog engine from StoreHippo. You can, however, also integrate with different marketing tools of your choice with StoreHippo’s seamless integrations.    

3. Will I need third-party apps and software to run my marketplace website seamlessly?

If you are creating your marketplace with StoreHippo marketplace website builder you might not be required to opt for additional plugins, or paid apps and extensions for different business operations. StoreHippo is a fully hosted and managed ecommerce solution that helps you run and grow your online marketplace seamlessly. However, with StoreHippo’s headless API-based architecture, you can integrate with multiple third-party apps and software like CRM, ERP, analytics, accounting, etc.  

4. How can I ensure quick shipping and timely delivery on my online marketplace?

To ensure quick delivery on your online marketplace, you need to choose an ecommerce solution provider that gives you multiple shipping solutions for ensuring streamlined and fast deliveries. StoreHippo comes pre-integrated with 30+ logistics solutions to help you create a seamless supply chain. You can integrate with more than one shipping solution to optimize the costs. StoreHippo also offers a built-in delivery management solution to help you manage your fleet of delivery boys. 

5. Will it be possible for my vendors to set their own prices on my online marketplace?

Yes. It is possible for your vendors to set their prices on your online marketplace. It, however, depends on the choice of your marketplace website builder. When you choose the StoreHippo platform, you can implement and manage multi-pricing on your marketplace with its tiered pricing feature. Your vendors can quickly set up multi-level prices like volume-based pricing, rule-based prices, min-max quantity-based pricing, customer segment, or customer-specific pricing to attract and engage with customers from various segments.            

6. Will I be able to implement customer reviews for vendors and products on my online marketplace?

Yes. When you choose StoreHippo ecommerce solutions to create your online marketplace, you can enable a custom feature for your customers to leave reviews for vendors and products. However, because it is a customized feature, creating tailored solutions will involve extra costs. Based on your customisation requirements our expert team will assess the time and effort and charges will be decided on a pro-rata basis. 

7. Will it be possible to find an enterprise marketplace website builder that supports multiple payment options like digital wallets, UPI, etc?

Yes, with many options for enterprise marketplace builders in the ecommerce market, you can easily find one that supports multiple payment options. One such multi-vendor marketplace platform is StoreHippo which comes pre-integrated with 60+ domestic and international payment gateways. You can integrate with more than one payment solution to create a frictionless payment process on your marketplace. Your customers can choose from COD, net banking, digital wallets, card payments, etc, and pay using their preferred payment option with StoreHippo, the best multi vendor marketplace platform.    

8. Will we receive support and training on how to use the marketplace website builder?

When you are using the StoreHippo platform, your vendors do not need special support and training to sell their products. StoreHippo comes with a comprehensive vendor dashboard that makes it easy for your vendors to manage and perform their day-to-day business activities. With a common central dashboard, your vendors can overview their order summary, sales report, etc in just a few clicks. For a detailed guide on how to use the StoreHippo multi vendor marketplace platform, you can visit the help center that comes with detailed answers to all your questions.   

9. How secure is our data when we build our marketplace website using a turnkey software?

A turnkey marketplace website builder like StoreHippo helps you secure all your business data. The robust multi-layer security from StoreHippo comes with an SSL certificate and highly secured payment gateways. You also get a free SSL certificate directly from the StoreHippo admin. As you build your online marketplace on the PCI DSS compliant ecommerce platform from StoreHippo, you can ensure payment safety and seamlessly secure sensitive information like passwords, customer details, etc.

10. Is it easy to pivot multi vendor marketplace into a hybrid multi-store online marketplaces?

Yes, pivoting your business model with StoreHippo marketplace website builder is easy. You can pivot your multi vendor marketplace model to a multi vendor multi store ecommerce business set-up. You can also create hybrid business models best suited to the needs of your enterprise brand. StoreHippo supports a variety of business models like B2B, B2C, D2C, B2B2C, quick commerce, etc. StoreHippo comes with a fully hosted and managed enterprise ecommerce solution that helps you create hybrid business models. With the plug-and-play solutions from StoreHippo, you do not need additional apps or extensions. 

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