An online marketplace or eCommerce platform is a place where multiple sellers offer their products on a common website. In recent years, this business process has gained great importance because of the lower costs than the traditional shops due to the competition for a much wider range of products than in single-seller stores and brick-and-mortar retail.
An online marketplace is an application or website where third-party providers can sell their goods and services to potential customers directly. The key advantage of Amazon and Etsy is the peer-to-peer approach which means anyone can be a distributor and a buyer.
Starting an eCommerce platform is a big thing and it requires a clean-cut scheme, investments, and a little luck. Whether you are a big enterprise or a startup, you have to be ready to face the upcoming challenges that will come on your way.
This post will guide how to create your eCommerce marketplace. So without much ado let’s start.
How to start a multi-vendor eCommerce marketplace from scratch?
Build trust in your brand
IIf you want to increase sales at your eCommerce store, it is very important for you to develop trust in your target customers. Just follow these steps
Try to give your best efforts in terms of quality. Make sure that your product matches the description given below. This shows that you sell the right products and be honest with your customers.
Maintain customer engagement at your website by conducting webinars, shooting live videos of your warehouse/office, and initiating sweepstakes. All these activities help you to maintain customer engagement at your online store.
Blogs, social media pages, and websites can be used to share user-generated content. Your users can also tweet about their wonderful shopping experiences from your web store. These can be tweets or testimonials about your products.
Get honest reviews of the customers on your services and products and ask them to rate your website.
Select the reliable hosting for eCommerce that is optimized for quick load times.
Set your prices right
As you have developed the trust of customers in your business, people will start visiting your online store now. It is the time when you set up affordable prices so that people can buy from your store.
Get to know about the cost of what other stores are offering; it may benefit you to set your unique selling price.
Consider changing wholesalers if they are selling the product at a higher price. It will be worth hunting down in the long run, but it will take some time.
Try to provide free shipping services if the customer shops above a certain amount to keep them engaged or reduce shipping prices.
Create a Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Get answers to the following questions:
What does your product cost?
What kind of customer services do you offer?
What makes you different from the other online stores?
What is the product quality?
Sometimes you don't know what your USP is; if that is the case, visit the review website and see what your customers are writing about you and what keywords they are using to find your products. Use the keywords in your marketing stuff as they are the WORDS best searched by your customers.
Optimize and Split Test Website
There is a term called "website usability," which is used to grab the customers' attention. You only have 15 seconds to seek the attention of people on your website. The second rule which is important is conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the 3 click rule. It describes that the user should need only three clicks to reach the checkout place.
Offer Unique Customer Service
Your company needs to give unique or exceptional customer service because customers are more likely to buy things from the store that resolves their issues soon and grants them services different from others. See what different you can offer:
Add the feature of live chat with your customers to your eCommerce store.
To increase the trust factor of customers in your store, adds the 24*7 hour service.
Email messaging is a great way to add unique customer service to your online store. It helps you increase the number of customers at your site. Try to reply soon to the customer query to decrease the bounce rate on your store.
Make sure that your chatbot automatically reverts to the questions of the customers. It will boost the sales and decrease the manual replies of the visitors.
Reduce the shipping time
To increase the engagement of customers and get a large number of orders on your online store, it is necessary to reduce the shipping time to increase the store's ratings. You must ensure that you deliver products taking very little time of shipping. Try these ways to get the delivery on time:
Add the service of free shipping. Set a budget and, according to that, add the feature of shipping time. If the customer wants fast delivery, they have to pay for it.
To handle the store logistics and delivery options add third-party logistics that is 3PL.
Provide multiple sales options
You should also display testimonials on your website so that you build trust with your brand. This is a great way to showcase your company's performance and let people know how good your service is.
Create top-quality product images
Ecommerce sales can be boosted significantly with high-quality product images. Taking high-quality ecommerce product images will help you increase sales online because it inspires trust among users. It's imperative that you take high-quality images of your products if you want them to present themselves in the right way. This will boost your eCommerce sales immediately.
Since no one wants to waste valuable time standing in long lines at the market or waiting for their turn while paying, online shopping is on the rise.
Everyone now wants to create their eCommerce platform like Amazon to sell stuff online. Through eCommerce applications, any person can shop from home without wasting time or fuel.
Do you want to build an online business application to sell your products? As far as starting an eCommerce business is concerned, the primary focus should be developing an application.
In comparison with other shopping applications like Snapdeal, Myntra, Flipkart, Alibaba, and Alibaba, Amazon is the best. Setting clear and specific business goals is the first step in developing an application like Amazon.
Step by step guide to developing an eCommerce website like Amazon:
Planning and market research
Building a customer engagement website like Amazon. The first and crucial step is to do the market research, i.e., the needs and requirements. It is very important to know the target audience for your products, decide whether you want to specialize in one type of product or sell multiple commodities on a single platform, and conduct your research procedure according to that.
Once you get to know about your target audience and the market needs, you can now set the features of your product or service after knowing all.
Choose essential features
After considering all the factors look at these features you can offer to your customers to increase sales :
Customer log-in
Product search
User reviews
Smoothie checkout
A reliable and safe payment gateway
Shipping options
Recommendation engine
Implement professional design
Creating outstanding and unique designs to design tour websites like Amazon will help you get customer engagement on your online store. Most users from their opinion of online shops based on visuals alone. Design your app professionally because it will also increase its popularity and brand recognition.
Tips to follow for the newly launched app:
Design a simple and unique logo:
It is one of the most important parts of your design. Your brand logo should be simple to attract an audience that carries a unique design. Make sure your logo should through an impact on the customers.
Make your good stand out:
We as users see 80% of the information but when it comes to remembering the things then we remember only 20% of it. So make that 20% information rememberable.
Use white color background
Display the photos in large sizes to attract the customers
Enable the options to zoom in and zoom out seamlessly.
Have quality pictures made from every angle.
Apart from this, you should also add videos to showcase your product. Add the feature of videos so that customer can get an idea of what looks does the product give you. And don’t forget that your design includes all the highlights of the available product info including photos, descriptions, and size or color options.
Choose the platform
Choose the platform significantly. When it comes to selecting the platform most users get confused. You need to optimize for a greater variety of devices and screen resolutions which prolongs development with Android. If it increases the budget then you can target the most popular Android phones and take a smart move.
Take care of Product Growth and Support
After all the things are done and successfully launching your app, the time comes when you can collect the customer feedback, do additional research, and decide what features to implement in the next development cycle.
Increase the speed of the app
According to the reports, it was found that back in 2012, Amazon calculated each extra second of loading time would cost 1.6 billion USD of 1% of the annual profit. It is found that the cost of sales each second would be reduced by 7%. This speed of loading is most important when it comes to the home screen, product page, and checkout.
Organize top-notch customer support
Not everything is perfect. Everyone has to face the risks of losses and customer complaints when doing business, even if it is an online business. You should be ready to accept the flaws of your service provided to customers. Most users want to communicate and make their complaints on-site only instead of mails and mobile phones, so it's necessary to have a page of complaints and propositions. We recommend having a 24*7 hours service for customer's queries, or you can go for FAQ, a list that contains contacts.
Promote you app
After doing all the research, adding designs and features, and choosing the platform, the most important feature is to promote your app.
We have seen a lot of shopping apps that are good enough but fail because they underestimate the importance of publicity. We recommend to spent atleast twice as much time marketing an app and developing it.
Firstly, you should make your app visible by using optimization techniques to help your site make the app more visible in the App Store.
All the social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and youtube are mandatory to promote your app these days. Engage the customers directly by offering great discounts, loyalty programs, and special incentives.
How to increase eCommerce sales:
In my experience as an ecommerce store owner myself, I often observe other ecommerce store owners bragging about their sales numbers. However, it becomes very irritating for those businesses who are doing everything to increase sales but still are not able to generate a substantial number of sales.
In general, there is no strategy to get huge sales on your eCommerce store. It only depends on the type of eCommerce store you operate, the target audience, the layout of your website, the products and services you offer, and how you use to operate your store.
Develop your own online marketplace with Suffescom Solutions and earn great revenues for your business.