04 Mar

Top 10 Mistakes to Avoid in your Multivendor Marketplace

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Many online entrepreneurs are launching their ecommerce businesses to attain customer satisfaction in order to rise their business profit. But a lot of them are facing struggles with their online marketplace software.

The reasons are either they follow the wrong marketplace strategy or they stepped into an unsuitable platform. So, by researching deep about these reasons, here are some of the mistakes that are encountered in marketplaces.

Online marketplaces are the best platform in this busy world as it helps you to reach your targeted customers in a short time. When compared to stores, people are getting attracted to online stores more, because they can shop 24/7/365 with free or low-cost delivery. This online process makes them happy and comfortable to purchase and also it saves their time and money. In simple, online stores are the best way to improve your business sales.

If you are confused with launching an online store, this step-by-step guide will help you: How to Launch your eCommerce Marketplace like Amazon?

In this article, you will learn about the common mistakes that are to be focused and avoided in your marketplace software and tips to improve your online marketplace performance.

Top 10 Marketplace Mistakes:

Mistakes are part of every business. Without worrying about the issues, you can learn about the common mistakes from the past multivendor marketplace businesses and you can implement these lessons in your business to get profitable returns and be successful in your ventures.

1. Choosing the Wrong Ecommerce Software:

Some of the online startups are quit because of adopting the wrong platform. The beginning step in starting an ecommerce store is to choose the best ecommerce software. From many software available online, you have to find out a suitable platform.

Basic 4 features to be checked while purchasing the ecommerce software are:

SEO and User-Friendly software:You are building an online store only for your customers. Hence, choose a platform where you have to build your store with customer-friendly features. Also buying the SEO friendly platform will help you to rank higher in search engines.
Interactive Dashboards:The platform should provide you the interactive dashboards so that you can easily manage your customers and vendors.
Customizable and Filter options:The platform should provide you various customized options to design the store. Besides, it has to provide you filter options that are useful for your customers to narrow down their search for the products which is easy in your online store.
Affordable and Worthy: In every business, you have to invest your valuable time and money to make it profitable. So, before buying a platform, you have to think twice and know whether the platform is budget-friendly and whether it's worth money and time or not.

2. Stepping into Multiple Niches:

Some of the budding entrepreneurs always intend to carve a niche for themselves in the competitive world of business. But it is not the perfect way to grow your online store.

Niche is an important part to consider while running an online business. Niche is all about the product field that you are going to sell the products in your online store. There are different product categories available.

Go into the field that you are interested in. You can consider product niches like Hardware & Software Products, Cosmetics, eBooks, Home Appliances, Kitchen Essentials, Sports Equipment, Fashion Outfits, Pet Products, etc.,

As a beginner, don’t choose many niches. This is one of the ways that will help you to grow your online store higher.

Begin your business from one niche like Etsy (Etsy is an ecommerce website focusing on handmade or vintage products) that you are interested in and have less competition. Then you can include multiple niches like the Amazon store by growing step by step.

3. Using Unfit Products:

As an admin to your ecommerce platform, you have the right to decide which products of the vendors can be exhibited in the store. You can avoid the unfit products from the category as the small and unclear product will make your brand less valuable and popular.

You have to check twice the product title, product description, keywords of the products, etc., to make sure that you are offering quality and useful products to your customers.

Also, you have to remove the product from the list that is out of stock. If you do so, then the customers will be disappointed as they ordered for the product that is out of stock. This will waste your visitor’s time. So be careful while listing products in the category.

As the term, ‘Category’ repeatedly used, you have to arrange your products in a particular category like low cost, various colors, particular brand-wise products, or in some other required categories; this will help your customer to quickly filter the needed products.

4. Improper UI/UX Design:

UI (User Interface) and UX (User Experience) may seem like a technical term. In nutshell, UI is the front-end (customer-side) of the website where they can search for products and make signup processes and payments. UX is the part of getting a better user experience with your online store website. Thus, both are important to achieve complete customer satisfaction.

From a lot of ecommerce stores available based on your niche, you have to make something unique to draw the attention of visitors. So, UI/UX plays a pivotal role here. Design the store as appealing as possible to attract your customers. Ecommerce templates help you design your store according to customer requirements.

It is an undeniable fact that Quality is more important than Quantity. So, providing quality products will help you to get more customers.

5. Issues in Site Performance:

The website is the place where you display all your products and business details. Statistics reveal that the web page with more loading speed will make visitors disappointed and have chances that the customers are navigating to other alternative websites.

Image and Video are the two things that play a prominent role here. The visual representation will attract visitors more quickly than the text messages. Product descriptions are listed along with essential product images. You have to use the image with medium quality. If you are using video for your ecommerce website, make sure that the video with medium quality is uploaded. These two will help your site to increase the performance by lowering the loading speed.

Image or video with low quality doesn’t look appealing, on the other hand, image or video with high quality will yield the required result with more loading speed of the web page. Hence medium quality will be the solution to these issues.

6. Payment Gateway Problems:

Payment Gateways are the essential parts of every online store where the customers are going to pay for the products they purchase.

There are two main ways of payment viz. offline payment or online payment. If you are delivering the products locally then offline payment is an easy and comfortable process. But your customers will access from different places, so providing online payment is the best choice and it is more comfortable for many customers.

But keep in mind, you have to support multiple payment gateway integrations as customers are comfortable in their ways.

For example, in Purchase Commerce, an ecommerce software, the platform will provide you multiple payment gateway options that will help you to manage the payment process as simple as possible.

Confused about which payment gateways to choose? Read here: Top 25 Payment Processing and Gateway Companies

In addition to payment gateways, supporting multiple currencies and providing multi-lingual options are the added advantage to your ecommerce website.

7. Careless About Analytics:

In an ecommerce business, many entrepreneurs are not aware of Analytics tools. Analyzing your website performance frequently will aid you to improve the website and also helps you to increase traffic.

When taking Analytics tasks, use Google Analytics to know your customers’ behavior with your ecommerce website and Google Webmasters tools will provide you the SEO performance of your website.

Hence with Analytics tools, you can track the status of your customers easily with different details like their location, their browsers, their landing page, etc. These will help you to know which webpage or product is getting higher traffic and which page results in low traffic. Thus, you can make changes to the low traffic web page with more useful information.

8. Irregular Feature Updates:

Features are the most expected thing by the customers. Customers will always look for a new feature or new customization options in their UI design and go for the website that offers them their expected features.

Hence updating the new features in your online store is appreciated. Also, it will help you to get new vendor registration in your platform if you are running a multivendor marketplace platform.

Customized options are all about changing the font style, color, turning the white screen of the webpage into a dark mode, etc., New features like multiple languages, currencies, mobile-friendly website, etc., can also be included.

The mobile-friendly feature is an important process as most of the customers access your website on their mobile rather than PC or tablets. Hence adjust your ecommerce website as a mobile responsive app. If you are affordable, then you can also develop a dedicated mobile application for your ecommerce website like the Amazon app.

9. Inability to Retain Customers:

Customers are everything for every business. Getting fewer customers will result in low profit. Retaining old customers is also as important as aiming to get new customers. If you aspire for providing new offers in the store to reach new visitors only, then you are on the wrong path. Your existing customers are the ones who vested their trust in your products and have a chance of coming to your website again. Hence, you also have to provide valuable seasonal offers for your old customers. If you are not able to do it, then you have to face the struggle.

Existing customers will help you to increase your business sale by recommending your ecommerce website to their families and friends. Hence don’t miss your existing customers because they are indirectly promoting your products.

10.Wrong Marketing Strategy:

Finally, using the wrong marketing process will also make your website fail. Some of the mistakes you are doing in promotion are:

Using irrelevant image and video
Using an unclear image

Using unclear text to represent the image
Doing SEO rarely with the wrong keywords, etc.,

You have to avoid these issues and follow these smart marketing strategies:

Post regularly on your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any other social media platforms where you are driving with more traffic.
Pinterest is the best platform to post colorful images which also helps you to reach customers.

You have to use a clear and quality image for your social media updates.
If you are creating a video about your business, then it is a good choice and you have to explain the information clearly in that video. You have to make a video that is useful and fun.
Always remember, all these above things should be based on your niche.
Use proper keyword research and do the SEO activity correctly.

By doing so, you can see improvements in your marketing process and also see gradual improvements in your ecommerce website.

Conclusion:

This article will help you to improve your ecommerce website to the next level by avoiding the mistakes mentioned above.

Purchase Commerce is the ecommerce software that provides you two ways to start your online business like a single vendor shopping cart website or multivendor marketplace business that too with a lifetime subscription option.

Purchase Commerce is an SEO friendly platform with multiple payment gateways integrations and various customization features.

Purchase Commerce have filtered all the mentioned mistakes in its ecommerce software. So, you can give a try. Let’s chat to build your successful ecommerce business together.