Setting up an effective marketplace

Planning to launch your own marketplace? Are you sure you have thought of every feature you will need to make your project a success? Launching a marketplace means defining your requirements carefully so you can choose the right tool.

Is your first marketplace running into functional or technical limits? If your platform is not mature enough, or if your sellers’ own webshops are more effective, faster or better ranked than your marketplace, your sellers will turn their backs on it. So how do you choose the right marketplace solution?

Launching a successful marketplace means answering a number of questions up front:

• How many items will be listed on the marketplace?
• Will orders be shipped by you, by each seller, or both?
• Do sellers receive payment for their orders directly? Or do you collect the payments and pay the sellers afterwards?
• Is the commission you charge the same for every seller and every item?
• Are all sellers subject to a single VAT regime? Or are some of them VAT-registered in different countries?
• What is the onboarding procedure for new sellers?
• Can every seller list products in every category of the marketplace?
• Can the same product be sold by several sellers?
• Do you need integrations with sellers’ IT systems, or with central product databases?

WiMakeIT can help you define these requirements and set up an effective marketplace.

A marketplace built on Magento2 helps you win the trust of both sellers and buyers in your project.

Your marketplace offers sellers:

• Robustness and reliability

  The marketplace runs on Magento2, the world’s most widely used open-source e-commerce platform.

• Modern and secure

  The Magento2 platform offers secure interfaces with suppliers’ IT systems.

• ROI

  Every seller sees the marketplace as an opportunity to grow revenue, with more traffic than a standalone e-commerce site and at a lower cost.

Buyers will appreciate your marketplace for several reasons:

• A wide product range

  Shoppers can find a wide range of products from different sellers on one single site.

• Reassurance

  Shoppers are reassured by reviews from the whole user community on both products and sellers.

• Product comparison

  Shoppers can easily compare the features and prices of products offered by different sellers.

• Always up to date!

  Buyers enjoy permanent access to a modern platform that benefits from the improvements made by the entire Magento2 community, more than 300,000 developers worldwide.

Now that every player in the distribution chain is online, e-commerce based on “drop shipping” (selling without holding stock, with the supplier delivering directly to the end customer) is no longer in vogue. In this context, however, developing a marketplace has many factors in its favour, as Amazon (among others) understood years ago. The field remains wide open to competing marketplaces that can offer more targeted, or more “European”, experiences…

Have a project? We Make IT happen!