How to Attract Vendors and Buyers to a Newly Built eCommerce Marketplace

Acquisition of sellers and buyers on a newly built eCommerce marketplace can be a lot of struggle. Established sellers find it difficult to build a customer base on a new eCommerce platform. And customers usually visit the eCommerce marketplaces with plenty of sellers who can satisfy their quality product requirements.

There are several other factors that sellers and buyers consider before choosing a marketplace. This article discusses the strategies for attracting sellers and buyers to a newly built eCommerce marketplace.

Strategies to Attract Vendors to a Newly Built eCommerce Marketplace

Here are some tips on how you can acquire sellers for your new marketplace. 

Start by analyzing the services of your competitors that they offer to their sellers and what makes them seller-friendly platforms. This will give you a clear idea of how you can define your marketplace pricing, commissions, and other add-ons.

You can also reach out to the established sellers on your competitor marketplaces and pitch how your marketplace can be a better business opportunity for them 

A few marketplaces worth checking are eBay, Amazon, and Walmart. 

Keeping your commission models transparent lets the sellers know what they will be paying for. The pricing model for the newly built eCommerce marketplace should maintain a balance with the features and services provided by the marketplace owner.

As the new marketplaces have just begun to grow their customer base, the owners can keep their commission slightly lower to have an edge over the competitors. 

Sellers with huge product collections often face issues while managing their inventory. New marketplace owners can offer sellers a tool to manage and list all the products so that they can have an accurate count of the number of goods left with them. This helps sellers in creating alerts for buyers on the number of items left in stock and also helps them in restocking the products within time.

Active support service is required for the sellers so that a communication channel is always open for sellers to resolve their issues.  Apart from receiving support services, sellers should also be able to give their feedback/suggestions regarding all the services offered by the marketplace, which can be implemented to make further improvements to the platform.

Write detailed how-to guides and troubleshooting articles for the smooth onboarding of sellers on your platform. This would help them in easy learn all the modules available to them

Also check out: How to Create an ecommerce Marketplace Platform

Strategies to Attract Buyers to the Newly Built eCommerce Marketplace

Buyer acquisition is one of the most significant aspects to start making profits, improving your market presence, and making your eCommerce platform successful. Here are some strategies that can help marketplace owners to attract more customers to the platform:

Customers prefer simple platforms that are easy to navigate through. The design of your platform should accumulate all the features in a way that doesn’t puzzle the users. Optimize the product pages, use multiple categories and filters, and improve the in-built search engine to increase user engagement. 

According to PowerReviews, 84% of buyers on Amazon find user reviews helpful for their purchases. Allow the buyers to review the products and give ratings so that it becomes easier for other customers to validate their purchases. Make sure only verified customers are allowed to review the products they have bought. This boosts the transparency of the platform.

Your customers should be able to pay through any payment option of their choice. Include multiple payment modes like credit cards, debit cards, pay on EMI, etc. to grant freedom to the users.

You can integrate a payment gateway that provides multiple payment options with industry-level security standards. I.e PCI DSS

Promote your eCommerce platform to create awareness of your business. Make use of social media, marketing blogs, paid ads, and influencers to let people know about your platform. Additionally, you can give discounts to returning customers, referrers, and referees. This also increases the loyalty of the customers towards the platform.

Optimizing your platform for search engines can help you in grabbing organic traffic globally. 

Click here to see the Leading Ecommerce Marketplace Solutions

Conclusion

The number of sellers and customers on your platform is dependent on each other. So it’s quite important for you to maintain a balance between both the stakeholders. As a marketplace owner, it is your responsibility to ensure a seamless experience for buyers and vendors.