Enterprise Marketplace

Multi-Vendor Marketplace 101: How to Hypergrowth your Multi-brand Retail Site

In a multi-vendor marketplace, brands and suppliers are brought together on a single platform, where they can list their products and make them available to customers. This allows retailers to quickly add new products and brands to their sites without having to go through the painstaking process of curating each one individually.

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What is Multi-vendor Marketplace Model for Multi-brand Retailers?

As a retailer, you know that eCommerce is important for your business. But what you may not know is that the multi-vendor marketplace model (also called enterprise marketplace and 3P model) is the key to unlocking hypergrowth for your retail site.

Traditionally, most multi-brand retailers sell in a B2C model, in which the retailers' merchandising team would carefully procure items from suppliers and then work to market and sell those items to customers. However, this process is becoming increasingly inefficient as the number of SKUs (and brands) retailers carry continues to increase. To keep up with the competition, retailers need to be able to quickly expand their merchandising mix and become a destination for customers to find the products they want.

The multi-vendor marketplace model is the solution to this problem. In a multi-vendor marketplace, brands and suppliers are brought together on a single platform, where they can list their products and make them available to customers. This allows retailers to quickly add new products and brands to their sites without having to go through the painstaking process of curating each one individually.

Benefits of Becoming a Multi-vendor Marketplace

1. Increased Agility: A multi-vendor marketplace enables you to quickly respond to the changes in customer needs by recruiting new emerging merchants. This can save a significant amount of time and effort on the part of your merchandising team.

2. Access to More Products: By connecting you with multiple brands and suppliers, you can access a much wider range of products than you would have if you were sourcing them individually.

3. Becoming a Destination: By recruiting and engaging a suitable list of merchants in your specialized categories, you become the destination site for your targeted customers whenever they have the needs in your verticals.

4. Boosted Sales and Increased Customer Satisfaction: When customers can find all of the products they want in one place, they are more likely to be satisfied with their purchase. This can lead to repeat business and increased customer loyalty.

How do you convert your eCommerce site into a Multi-vendor Marketplace?

1. Depending on what eCommerce platform (such as Adobe Commerce/Magento, Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, etc.) your eCommerce website is currently running upon, you may consider a solution that can integrate and extend your current B2C site into a multi-vendor marketplace.

2. How your B2B2C marketplace solution enables you to recruit, onboard and engage sellers to sell on your website? What kinds of sellers do you plan to recruit? How do your sellers list their products, manage the inventory, fulfil the orders, receive settlement payments, etc?

3. As a retailer, what kind of customer experience you would bring to the customers when they purchase from you and the 3rd party sellers in an order? Can the customers receive all products in a single shipment? Can they still collect the products at your physical stores? Or do they need to receive separate shipments from each seller?

4. The role of your marketplace when the customers request returns, exchanges or refunds. Will your customers only contact you or the sellers directly when they have customer service requests? How would you handle disputes?

5. The marketplace fees you charge to the sellers. What kind of revenue model do you want to have for your multi-vendor marketplace? How would you charge the sellers – a flat monthly/yearly fee, a commission on each sale, or a hybrid of both? How would you settle the payment to the sellers?

What CLEARomni Marketplace can do for you?

We can convert your B2C eCommerce site into a multi-vendor Marketplace. CLEARomni can connect and extend your existing eCommerce platform, whether it is Adobe Commerce/Magento, Shopify or Salesforce Commerce Cloud. You can easily onboard new sellers, letting the sellers list their products (with customizable approval & publishing workflow) and manage their inventory. Together with CLEARomni OMS, your marketplace can provide flexible order splitting and fulfilment workflow processes, allowing you to provide customer-friendly fulfilment options while giving choices also to the sellers and your own fulfilment operations.

To learn more about how CLEARomni can help you build your multi-vendor marketplace, contact us today.

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