Up your eCommerce Game: Leverage the Best-in-breed Multi Vendor Marketplace Solution

The dynamic of online shopping has had a makeover since the pandemic. Consumers are turning towards digital marketplaces to purchase everything from apparel, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, electronics to food and beverage. People are now drawn to digital commerce solutions that provide everything under one roof. Hence, the gaining popularity of marketplaces. A marketplace store can fulfill every demand of consumers and save customers’ time and effort while shopping online.

Statista recently revealed that more than 47% of eCommerce sales are now being generated via online marketplace stores. Furthermore, 14% of first-time online shoppers prefer to shop at an online marketplace, while 37% make repeat purchases at digital marketplaces. 

This considerable change in the shoppers’ behavior has made online retailers realize the importance of investing in a multi vendor marketplace. Due to these promising numbers, 23% of eCommerce businesses have already transformed into online marketplaces, and many others are planning to join the bandwagon very soon.

If you are an eCommerce aspirant or a current player looking forward to investing in hot trends like growing marketplaces, right now is the best time. This article brings you the fundamentals of a digital marketplace and how you can leverage the best multi vendor marketplace solution to up your eCommerce game. 

What is a Multi Vendor Marketplace?

If you’ve ever visited Amazon, eBay, or Etsy, then you already have the basics right about what a multi vendor marketplace is. We now advance with the formal definition, 

“A multi vendor marketplace is an online marketplace store where multiple sellers & buyers conduct transactions. It acts as a digital middleman connecting sellers with potential buyers on a single platform.” 

By signing up on a multi vendor marketplace store, sellers can find new buyers for their products, establish an additional sales stream, and increase their overall business revenue. On the other hand, buyers can find everything they desire to purchase at one place, saving a lot of time while shopping online.

You, being the marketplace owner, will not just be able to sell your products, but you’ll also have the opportunity to earn a fixed amount of commission from the sales generated by other sellers on your multi vendor marketplace store.

Still unsure! Let’s look at some of the most compelling reasons to invest in a multi vendor marketplace. 

Why Multi Vendor Marketplace?

The popularity of multi vendor marketplaces has been growing enormously during the past few years, and there are indeed solid reasons for it. 

1 – Easier to Generate Traffic & Sales

The multi vendor marketplace setup involves multiple sellers setting up their shop and selling products, creating a humongous product catalog. And for any store that sells diverse products, homogeneity is a boon to attract customers & generate sales. Just think about it: If Amazon or Flipkart were sourcing all the products by themselves, do you think they would have been able to generate as much traffic & sales as they do today?

2 – Reduced Expenses

Since every seller on your multi vendor marketplace will be managing their shops on their own, you’ll no longer need to employ people to do it. This, in turn, will considerably bring down the maintenance expenses and allocation of resources. Plus, you’ll be able to spend more time increasing your brand awareness & scaling your business to newer heights. 

3 – Maintaining an Inventory is Not Obligatory

Warehousing and other inventory management-related costs can be pretty stressful at times. But converting your eCommerce store into a multi vendor marketplace will eliminate the need for maintaining an inventory altogether as it will be the seller’s sole responsibility. 

4 – It’s a Win-Win Equation

Managing inventories, logistics, products, pricing, and other related operational undertakings requires substantial effort in an eCommerce store. However, the multi vendor marketplace shifts most of the hassle to individual sellers. And because the sellers are required to manage only their shop, the task of managing becomes relatively more straightforward, making the multi vendor marketplace a win-win equation for you as well as the sellers.

By now, it has been made evident that marketplace development is the way of the future. 

So, going forward, let’s introduce you to a best-in-breed multi vendor marketplace solution to cater to all your marketplace needs.

Introducing RocketBazaar: World’s Most Flexible Multi Vendor Marketplace Solution

Rocketbazaar is the world’s most flexible Magento 2 multi vendor marketplace solution using which you can either build a new marketplace from scratch or transform your existing Magento 2 store into a multi vendor online marketplace.

The solution is bundled with everything you’ll ever need – a robust admin panel, powerful vendor portal, impressive storefront, and other essential features to smoothly manage payment & shipment, marketing, orders, and more. 

Feature-List for Owners

Store owners’ number #1 priority is managing their multi vendor marketplace effectively. RocketBazaar provides you with a plethora of features to manage customers, vendors, orders, payments, shipping, and taxes.

• Marketplace Configuration: RocketBazaar is equipped with an interactive backend console that allows you to configure your multi vendor marketplace as per your business needs quickly.
• Vendor Management: The vendor management features allow you to manage all vendors in one place. You can check new registrations, approval & disapproval requests, and inactivate and delete vendor accounts through this feature. In a nutshell, you have complete control over adding, modifying and deleting any vendor-related data.
• Vendor Payout (Stripe Connect): This feature will eliminate the risk of managing the payouts manually by automating the entire Vendor payout process. So, whenever a customer places an order, the vendor will instantly get the payment, while you’ll also receive your commission fee directly to your Stripe account.
• Differential Commission Structure: You can set custom commission rates product-wise, category-wise, and vendor-wise to maximize revenue generation in your marketplace store.
• Shipping Options Management: RocketBazaar comes with an abundance of shipping options for customers to choose from. This, in turn, helps lower the cart abandonment rate and significantly improves the conversion rate.
• Payment Methods Management: RocketBazaar offers extensive payment options to transact smoothly, increase conversion rate, and grow revenue. Furthermore, the most popular payment gateways, including Stripe, Braintree, Paypal Express, Authorize.net, and PayU, come built-in with the RocketBazaar.
• Notification Management: Notifications are a must-have feature in any marketplace store. RocketBazaar comes with a built-in notifications feature that allows you to easily notify customers, vendors, and admins about each event in your marketplace store.
• Tax Management: RocketBazaar is designed to be used by merchants from all over the world. And this feature makes it effortless for owners to define and manage taxes for any country. Additionally, you can even add Tax Rates based on location, customer group, and quick import/export tax rates.

Feature-List for Vendors

RocketBazaar is equipped with numerous features to help vendors streamline their shop management & increase their earnings.

• Product Catalog Management: Vendors can easily manage their products and monitor inventory. They can also search for a specific product and discover out-of-stock products from their catalog. There is also a quick edit feature that lets vendors edit the price & quantity of a particular product.
• Vendor Dashboard: The dashboard helps vendors to track & monitor orders, sales, account balance, number of products sold, daily orders amount, best-selling products, low inventory products, and more. Vendors can also manage their overall account, products listed in different categories, and bank account information.
• Bulk Upload: The bulk upload feature allows vendors to upload products to the marketplace in bulk and manage/modify their records such as attributes, prices, quantity, and so on in a matter of a few seconds.
• Vendor Order Management: Vendors can view all orders based on their status like Active, Completed, and Cancelled. They can also search & filter orders by the order date, the total amount of orders, and customer name.
• User & Roles Management: Since a vendor alone cannot manage all the business operations independently in a marketplace store, the vendor portal allows creating users and assigning specific roles for managing products, orders, and other business-related tasks to multiple users.
• Vendor-Buyer Communication: RocketBazaar provides a unique messaging feature to the vendors to communicate with their customers. Using this feature, customers can ask the vendors about their products, raise complaints, etc., and receive an appropriate response on the same channel.
• Finance & Commission Management: Vendors can access all the details about orders, including the service tax, marketplace fee, shipping cost, and commission amount. This, in turn, gives a clear idea about how much they are paying to sell on your marketplace store.
• Promotions: The vendor portal creates discount offers and coupon codes to encourage marketplace visitors to turn into paying customers and spend more on their orders.
• Vacation Mode: This feature allows vendors to disable their shop in your marketplace for a chosen period. They can also broadcast the reason for being on vacation so that the customers who recently bought their products don’t get disappointed with the long wait time for receiving their orders. 

Feature-List for Customers

For customers, RocketBazaar provides equally powerful features to boost customer engagement, increase customer satisfaction, and enhance the overall customer experience in your marketplace store.

• My Account: Customers can access and update their account details, including orders, address, payment details, and leave product reviews on specific products they’ve purchased. First-time visitors are not required to create an account initially; they can browse through the products, add products to the cart, and register their account at the checkout page.
• Quick Navigation: RocketBazaar is designed with the mega menu functionality that allows customers to quickly navigate to any product, category, or CMS page in just a matter of split seconds, enhancing the browsing experience in your marketplace store.
• Smart Search: Customers sometimes don’t know how to spell a product’s name. This is where RocketBazaar’s smart search feature comes in handy. This search feature provides auto-suggestions as soon as a customer starts typing in the search bar & helps in finding the right product from the list.
  

Promotions Features

For any marketplace store, it is crucial to attract and encourage potential customers to purchase more. And customers nowadays are more inclined to buy from the stores that offer deals & discounts on products. 

RocketBazaar provides numerous promotions features to help you grow your marketplace business rapidly in the competitive market.

• Daily Deal: Daily Deal is a vendor feature that helps them win new and repeat customers by setting up daily flash sales with the deal price, duration, and quantity.
• Gift Cards: Gift cards are a powerful tool to acquire new customers and increase customer loyalty in your marketplace store. RocketBazaar is integrated with the gift card feature that lets you create and sell different gift cards that customers can purchase & send to their loved ones during holidays, festivals, and special occasions.
• Gift Wrap: Gift Wrap is a highly effective yet under-appreciated feature contributing a lot to your marketplace’s overall sales. The feature helps cater to customers who are purchasing gifts for their loved ones and would like the product to be gift wrapped for the receiver.
• Automatic Related Products: Using this feature, you can easily set up custom rules to display relevant products automatically in the product detail pages in your marketplace store & increase the average order value.

Order & Payment Features

Order & Payment management is the backbone of any eCommerce business. RocketBazaar’s order & payment features will help optimize the order & payment process & amplify your business growth.

• RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization): This feature will cover all return, exchange, and refund requests in your marketplace store. Vendors can specify the return policy, while customers will be able to track the status of their requests, enhancing the overall shopping experience for customers & increasing the chances of retaining them in the future.
• Store Credits & eWallet: The store credits & eWallet feature provides your customers a quick payment option to place their orders in your marketplace store. Customers can top up their wallets by adding money from credit cards or bank accounts.
• Email/SMS Notification: Using this feature, you can notify customers via email or SMS about new orders, order status, and so on. Additionally, you can also send email/SMS alerts to vendors whenever there are any updates regarding products, accounts, and orders.
• Payment Restrictions: RocketBazaar is equipped with Magento 2 Payment Restrictions extension to quickly hide or restrict specific payment methods based on custom conditions to particular customers or customer groups.
• Partial Payment: The partial payment lets your customers pay some amount at the checkout time and the remaining amount in easy installments, providing customers with great flexibility in payment.
• Multiple In-Built Payment Gateways: RocketBazaar is integrated with almost every popular payment gateway such as SagePay, Payfort, Moneris, and First Data payment module, to name a few.

Shipping Features

Shipping is an essential part of every eCommerce marketplace, and RocketBazaar’s shipping features are unmatched in terms of quality.

• Multiple Shipping Options: This feature lets you offer multiple shipping options along with their individual shipping rates for customers to choose from. This gives customers more control by checking each vendor’s shipping charges and opting for the best shipping rate available.
• Zipcode Serviceability Check: It is practically impossible for vendors to deliver to every zip code. This feature helps customers to check if the products they’re planning to buy can be shipped to their location or not, based on their area zip code.
• Drop Shipping: Drop-Shipping is one of the best ways for marketplace owners to sell products without physically stocking the products. You can have all the orders shipped directly from the vendor to your customers through drop shipping. 

How to Catch the Multi Vendor Marketplace Wave with RocketBazaar?

For any multi vendor marketplace to thrive, it needs to provide a broad range of features to vendors and customers to keep up with the increasing competition. 

RocketBazaar has exceeded the demands of marketplace merchants through its extensive range of out-of-box features and unlimited customization, giving vendors the means to attract more customers & offer a unique shopping experience.

The solution is cost-effective and comes with practical eCommerce tools to keep you ahead of the competition in any thriving eCommerce marketplace.

If you’d like to know more about how RocketBazaar can power your multi vendor marketplace, try the demo and see what your RocketBazaar powered multi vendor marketplace will look like from every aspect.

Conclusion

Building a multi vendor marketplace from scratch may seem like a time-consuming & expensive process, but it is equally rewarding once you launch it. More importantly, with readymade solutions like RocketBazaar, you can set up & launch your multi vendor marketplace within just a few weeks, not months.

That being said, if you have any questions regarding RocketBazaar or need professional consultation, you can always reach out to our experts at any time.