Features of a Fully Functional Marketplace

Ease of joining

Entrepreneurs need to be multifaceted and learn to divide their time efficiently. A successful entrepreneur should aim to make business transactions less complicated. So the first thing in the design of any marketplace is the online signup and onboarding process. This process should be fast, simple, and easy, as much as possible. The lesser effort it takes to get started on your platform, the more people will join to sell with you.

Convenient Order processing

It takes a lot of work to run an e-commerce company. You must provide a framework for your vendors to handle and process orders rapidly and effectively.
Enable your sellers to print shipping slips and mark orders as dispatched after you notify them of new orders.

Another helpful aspect that the clients would enjoy is the option to specify tracking numbers.

Product management that is more effective

It’s possible that your marketplace isn’t the only location where vendors can sell their wares. They could also have their own Shopify stores and sell goods on Etsy and Amazon.

So make it easy to list items for sale! This means simplified product listing formats, a simple way to generate product combinations, and the elimination of fields that aren’t needed.

If you partner with small companies, try making it easier for new vendors to source goods from third-party sites like Amazon and Shopify.

High-quality product data

One of the most visited places in your market is the product web page. It aims to provide buyers with all the data about the product they are looking for. This page must be as informative and valuable for clients as possible. Towards this end, the product web page consists of the following main characteristics:

Images

You can secure clients by giving them high-caliber and genuine photographs. This may include review videos. It allows you to build strong relationships with consumers and create a high level of trust in your platform. Buyers can also ensure whether the product will meet their requirements or not.

Description

The buyers first study the images because visible recognition is a lot higher. Then, they pass to the product description which includes essential details about an item. For this, you need to make this segment as informative as possible, in the most concise manner.

Features to promote listings and sell more

Give the salespeople the ability to sell more!

Allow vendors to participate in discount promotions, build and share coupon codes, and prominently display their goods to increase sales.

Tools to speak with the buyers

Communication fosters confidence which makes it easy for the customer to make a buying decision.

Enable your vendors to collect and respond to customer inquiries, request and receive feedback, and connect with customers in order to rapidly address any order problems that may arise.

Chatbots are a noticeably new web development pattern. And they are being effectively utilized by online businesses. Basically, this marketplace function can perform any or all of the following:

• Offer customer support
• Send buyers product recommendations
• Helps to complete the purchase

Advanced search and filters

Search

Users look for their required products or services through various means. For example, a few people can utilize the specific model number or enter an item type. In any case, a successful marketplace should offer purchasers an option within the platform to search for the desired products and services. For example, eBay has implemented Advanced Search capability which allows consumers to specify the info and narrow their search.

Filters

When clients get their search results page, you can assist them in finding the specific product to save time. This is possible with additional filters. Filters sort through the list of items and short-list those products which meet the specific needs of the buyers.

For example, category filters. These can help customers narrow down the search page results to give only the required product or products similar to that. Allow visitors to utilize filters simultaneously with the search results to get more exact results.

Convenient checkout process

A complicated checkout can cause users to abandon their cart and leave your marketplace platform without completing their purchase. Therefore, you need to optimize this factor to reduce cart abandonment.

1. Focus on the shopping cart

It’s difficult to envision an e-commerce site without this marketplace functionality. As a result, it deserves your undivided attention.

Just displaying the number of objects is inadequate. In addition, your shopping cart can show the following vital information:

• Displaying the shipping process, whether free or paid;
• Possibility of removing a product;
• The ability to adjust the number of items;
• The ability to add comments to order.

2. Offer customers with guest checkout alternative

According to SaleCycle, 23 percent of consumers abandoned their purchases because they were required to create an account first.

Given this, it would be sensible to have a guest checkout choice. Allow users to resume checkout after entering only their email addresses. As a result, they can provide their payment information more easily and make a transaction even quicker.

You should give shoppers the opportunity to sign up after they make a purchase. After registering, their payment information will be cached, and they will not have to enter it again while making subsequent transactions.

3. Take into account the smartphone checkout UX.

Because of the small size of the displays, accidental clicks can trigger a variety of problems, such as the fields being reset. As a result, consumers can be dissatisfied because they must retype their order details. Therefore, this risk should be reduced.

The best way to prevent this problem is to make type fields and calls to action the appropriate size.

You can also ensure that there is sufficient space between fields and links. Users would be less likely to type their order data in the wrong area in this situation.

Admin Interface

While the purchasers and vendors populate the marketplace, you, as the owner, are eventually answerable for it. You will require a bunch of tools in the form of an authoritative interface that permits you to monitor and make the important modifications to help your clients.

An administrative interface should be able to monitor activity on your platform and send out alerts when certain rules are broken, such as your terms of service. Your administrative system can also be used to authorize vendors and merchandise, develop customer outreach materials, run contests, and adjust marketplace settings.

It assists you in keeping track of the main measurements, such as which vendors are doing well and which could use any assistance. In a nutshell, the administrative interface serves as the command and control center. It is the toolbox for making day-to-day changes to meet a rapidly evolving market.

Smart Phones Friendliness

Online shopping is progressively moving from PCs to mobile phones and tablets. As per a 2020 study, just 27% of individuals utilized a PC or laptop to connect to the internet away from work. Conversely, 56% of people utilized smart handheld gadgets, for example, cell phones and tablets, to access the web.

Your online store must be where your prospective customers are, and that is where your vendors want to be. This means that your marketplace should be simple to use on any computer or screen size. Responsive web design allows the marketplace site to dynamically adapt to whatever screen size is being used to display it.

Your marketplace should also launch easily on every smartphone, as 53 percent of mobile users would abandon a platform if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Google has also officially made mobile page speed a search ranking element. Faster loading marketplaces usually have higher traffic and sales results.

Currency and Language

The web was made to overlook limits and divisions. However, if you compel users to communicate in your language or pay only in a single currency, then you will lose clients. Dealing with a worldwide scale implies having the option to communicate in more than one language, selling in different currencies.

When it comes to language, you would prefer not to lose customers. So, huge numbers of your merchants compose product and service descriptions in more than a single language. They are probably going to put in writing on one version, and it will be dependent upon your platform to make a translation of it into different languages.

Similarly, after language, the currency is the next crucial issue. Currency can be complicated with exchange rates fluctuating from minute to minute. Buyers prefer rates in their chosen denomination, while sellers prefer to be paid in their native currency. Your marketplace should keep track of numerous exchange rates and make real-time adjustments to ensure that your buyers and sellers receive correct, equal pricing regardless of the medium of exchange they use. Is the market platform up to the task?

Analytics Dashboard

The best marketplaces aren’t static; they advance. The simplest way markets can develop is through client feedback and continuous data. Regardless of the industry, there are certain factors that must be measured. For example, which vendors sell the most, or which goods do not sell. However, each niche necessitates a unique emphasis and metric. To take the marketplace to the next level, you’ll need to watch not just the traditional metrics, but also the ones that matter to your consumers and market segment.

At OSC Professionals, we initially assist our customers in finding the correct measurements they expect to monitor. Then we build a dashboard so they can monitor those parts of their business. The outcome is that time spent on authoritative responsibilities reduced by 20%, maintenance proficiency doubled, and conversion ratio improved by 30%.

SEO

For your marketplace, search engine optimization can be a perfect source of traffic. More future buyers would click through to your website if your marketplace, its vendors, merchandise, and services rank high in search results.

There are three parts of SEO: technical, off-page, and on-page. Off-page SEO is mainly concerned with content promotion activities such as backlink creation, but the other two can be done by you, the marketplace owner.

Technical SEO is concerned with the platform’s structure. You will make the sellers’ and their goods more discoverable, readable, and shareable by using HTML elements like meta info. Using metadata, for example, ensures that the seller’s product will show up in search results with star reviews and pricing. These rich snippets have been shown to maximize conversions and click-through rates. Making sure the platform is quick, stable, and has a user-friendly site design and navigation is also part of technical SEO.

On-page SEO involves building a structure for the sellers’ content that is optimized. You can make their content stand out by paying attention to items like heading tags in listing form fields.

Since organic search makes up 46% of web-based business traffic, you can’t ignore this significant development driver. At OSC Professionals, we have a proven track record with regards to actualizing SEO structures, with traffic increments of 100x, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. We can do likewise for your marketplace platform.

Customizable Shipping Service

If you can’t guarantee the delivery of products or services, all the work you put into building a fantastic customer interface is for nothing. When it comes to marketplace shipping, there are additional obstacles.

In addition, vendors would not want to pay for the customer’s delivery. Amazon has developed a norm, and the general public seems to have adopted it. Buyers are normally able to pay for packaging, but they prefer a personalized service and want to cut their costs as much as possible. As a marketplace user, you want to keep delivery costs as low as possible because they don’t help the bottom line and can alienate consumers.

We looked at a number of platforms to see how each one dealt with shipping. This has taught us how to develop a simple, clean interface that helps consumers to choose the most suitable shipping process. Buyers should still know how much each shipping alternative costs and when their goods will arrive. Although the interface appears to be straightforward to the buyer, it hides a complicated but well-organized workflow that ensures flawless execution every time.

We’ve discussed the most critical marketplace functionality for consumers to introduce on your website in this post. This feature would make your e-commerce website more user-friendly for your customers. This can result in a significant increase in the number of visitors on your website. We have been assisting in building the best marketplace platforms. We ensure that the marketplaces designed and maintained by us cater to the demands of vendors, buyers, and owners, by incorporating the above features in the marketplaces. Feel free to contact us and let us assist your marketplace platform.