Key Challenges Of Building A Multi Vendor Marketplace And How To Overcome Them

Where do you end up looking for products when you want to sample a few alternatives and different prices for the same product? No second guesses for this one.

All of us are conditioned to searching products on popular multi vendor marketplaces!

Online marketplaces have not only spoilt us for choice but also made them the first place we search for anything we need be it gadgets, household stuff, fashion and almost anything else.

Did you know?

• $3.5 trillion is the estimated  sales from B2C marketplaces by 2024

• 48% of online shoppers navigate directly to multi vendor marketplaces when buying online

• 47% of global online purchases via online marketplace platforms 

• 63%  of ecommerce business in USA is done via marketplaces

• 40% growth in sales for top 50 marketplaces during the COVID 19 pandemic

• 14% of first-time online buyers prefer to shop at an online marketplace

• 37% of repeat buyers buy from an online marketplace

Source: Forbes, Statista, Forrester

Well, the stats clearly underline one fact, the multi vendor marketplace model is an unstoppable juggernaut! Enterprise brands looking for disruptive growth need to adopt it in some form or another.

Multi Vendor Marketplace: The tested growth engine for Enterprise brands

The beauty of the multi seller marketplace set up is that it is a virtual GOLDMINE for every party involved, be it the sellers, the customers or the business owners.

While buyers are most comfortable buying from the huge catalogue offered by the online marketplace, sellers find regular traffic for their products or services. Owners of the multi vendor brand also reap rich dividends in form of commissions on each order along with multiple other revenue streams.

And if you thought all the goodness of the multi vendor model ends there, you certainly haven’t witness the way it just mixes and matches with other popular business models and metamorphoses into a hybrid, innovative and disruptive business model. 

Sample some real life examples:

• Bigbasket, Blinkit, Zepto - Multi seller marketplace with multi store set up for different locations

• Nykaa, Purplle- Niche beauty multi vendor marketplace with D2C brand website

• Swiggy, Zomato - Food delivery marketplace with hyperlocal brands as vendor partners

• Urban Company, HouseJoy- Service aggregator multi vendor marketplace with local service providers as vendors

• Practo, WebPT- Health tech marketplace with doctors, pathlabs and other diagnostic service providers as vendors in a hyperlocal set up

Well, the list is endless. Whatever, be the industry vertical, you can build your own marketplace brand to change the market dynamics. The marketplace model is a winner, through and through!

Getting started : Building the best Multi Vendor Marketplace Platform

Once you have a business idea and enough market research to validate your idea has a sizeable market, there is nothing that can stop you from achieving your fair share in the booming marketplace economy. 

However, to begin your journey on a strong footing you need to decide on the best multi vendor marketplace platform to power your brand. Once you have analysed and tried a multi vendor solution on factors like scalability, flexibility, cutting edge technology, seamless integrations, security, inbuilt marketing tools etc. you have overcome the biggest hurdle in getting started. 

However, there many other things to handle when you get started with your online marketplace. 

Like every other exciting business, a multi vendor marketplace set-up comes with its own set of challenges. Building a successful marketplace needs meticulous planning and execution and a lot of alignment to set the wheels in motion.

How to overcome the key challenges of building a successful Multi Vendor Marketplace business?

There are many challenges that crop up every day when you create, launch and run a multi vendor marketplace. These existential threats can come from the mismanagement of products, software, customers, orders and even your approach to marketing and sales. 

Well, there are other potential threats and challenges that your marketplace brand might have to come over  to survive and thrive in the industry. If not tackled, timely these challenges can spell doom for you brand.

Luckily you can counter these challenges if you have the right ecommerce platform at your disposal. Read on to know the key challenges of building a multi vendor marketplace and how to overcome them.

1. Hefty management of order and inventory

So, you have the customers, vendors, and inventory in your online marketplace and customers started purchasing, and the orders started rolling in. Awesome. It’s time to get organized now. 

Having products and vendors on your marketplace is one step of the equation. If you cannot manage the challenges of order and inventory management properly, it can lead to major business losses. With the best multi vendor marketplace platform like StoreHippo, you can easily manage orders and inventory and be super organized. The platform helps you to keep a track of pending and completed orders, lying products, vendor sales, and check every order by status.

2. Delivery management hassles

While the vendors are liable for maintaining the quality of their goods, the online marketplace is responsible for handling the delivery management. While the shipping and delivery challenge is one of the major challenges for a multi-vendor marketplace, this problem can be eliminated with a dynamic marketplace platform. StoreHippo helps to manage and automate the logistics system on your marketplace platform to save the vendors from endless shipping hassles. The platform allows you to set up vendor specific shipping charges to promote the bestselling products and vendors. The platform integrates with 30+ logistics partners to enable seamless deliveries. Additionally, it also allows you to manage returns and exchanges, provide estimated delivery time and other regular updates.  While the delivery boy module increases the transparency between business and customers, it leads to enhanced customer satisfaction and ultimately, improved sales.

3. Handling price competition

While numerous sellers are registered on a single marketplace, it gets highly convenient for customers to buy everything from one place. But at the same time, it also results in a substantial price war as there are several substitutes for every product. This price war is a big challenge for multi vendor marketplaces as everyone has registered themselves to grab a larger market share. With StoreHippo, you can implement innovative pricing strategies with the inbuilt features and tools of the platform. It helps you to personalize prices on the basis of customer demographics, spending habits, interactions of customers with the website, and shopping channels. The inbuilt dynamic pricing settings of StoreHippo allows you to adjust the product pricing and help you overcome the pricing war challenges.

4. Managing varied product lines efficiently

Marketplaces mostly deal with a large variety of products and various customers to make considerable sales. And for the same reason, they need to manage the varied product lines efficiently. StoreHippo platform allows you to manage the varied product lines seamlessly. The multi vendor marketplace platform allows the admin and vendors to add, edit and delete products. They can also add product details such as product description, images variants etc and add them in bulk as well. The higher the number of products and sellers, the higher the income for the marketplace. StoreHippo also comes with the easy management of orders as it is super important to ensure that the right products are delivered to the right customers. The easy order management tools help vendors to easily mark open and completed orders, cancel orders, generate invoices etc.

5. Managing dynamic personalization needs

Customers expect personalization everywhere. Be it payment, shipping rates, product prices, store currency, country-specific taxes, content translation, and more. Especially, when it comes to the marketplace, customers need exactly what they are looking for. But in reality, managing dynamic personalization is very challenging. But not anymore with the best multi vendor ecommerce platform like StoreHippo. The platform helps you to offer personalized pricing, coupons based on customer details. Relying on StoreHippo multi vendor e commerce platform for customizing and automation your marketing tasks provides two-way benefits. IT provides a personalized shopping experience to the customers by setting up and managing prices based on the customer buying journey. It also allows you to reach into the global market with multi-currency and multilingual features.

6. Leveraging customer insights from multiple shopping channels

Customer insights are an important note to keep an eye on. The online marketplace is liable for looking into the customer insights like order volume, purchase history, returns, preferences, and more. It helps in delivering personalized customer experiences based on the customer data. But you need a multi vendor marketplace platform like StoreHippo to gain important customer insights and assist the buying process accordingly. The multi vendor ecommerce platform helps you to understand the pain points, purchase cycle, purchase history, preferred shopping channels and provide personalized offerings across all platforms and devices. Based on the collected customer data, you can easily send relevant promotional notifications, emails, messages and even show relevant advertisements. 

How StoreHippo can help you overcome all the challenges of building and managing a Multi Vendor Marketplace?

Well, it is clear that the multi vendor marketplace model offers plenty of benefits for your business. And it also gives you better chances to reach new markets by onboarding multiple vendors from different locations. With the endless possibilities to take your online business notches higher, you will definitely want to leverage this opportunity while managing the key challenges of building the marketplace.

StoreHippo is the best multi vendor ecommerce platform to manage all the aforementioned challenges of building and managing online marketplace. The platform provides the functionality of setting up horizontal, vertical, service aggregators or any custom model of your online marketplace. StoreHippo platform is built on mobile-first principle to ensure full compatibility with mobile devices and PWAs to make your website look, feel, and function like a native mobile app. This helps you to leverage maximum benefits of mobile commerce and sell better.

Are you ready to get started with your digital journey with the multi vendor marketplace solution of StoreHippo? Schedule a 14-day free online trial store period to explore all the amazing features right away.