Online Shop Website: Understanding Marketplace

Online Shop Website

An online shop website seems to be a perfect business model for anyone. Even if you are still new to this approach, you can easily learn it by using some tutorials and try it by yourself. You don’t even need to pay a lot of money to learn it from zero. Instead, you can get new knowledge for free. This is one of the positive sides of the internet. And it would help if you, my friend, used this opportunity.
One scoop of online shop websites is a marketplace. The basic concept is creating a place like a conventional marketplace but bring it online so that all people could use it way easier than the physical one. But before explaining the marketplace, let’s discuss a one-vendor online shop website first.

One-Vendor Online Shop Website

One-vendor online shop website gives a different approach to its customer. As the name tells you, you will not see several vendors selling their products. Instead, you will only see the owner of the online shop website itself, and he/she is selling the products.
If you have a one-vendor online shop website, you will need to manage the warehouse, inventory, production, distribution, packaging, and many other things since it’s only you who has the right to sell products on your website. But if you want to make a multi-vendor online shop website, then all you need to do is managing the website itself. It’s a completely different business model. And since we will talk about the marketplace, we should jump to the multi-vendor one.

Multi-vendor Online Shop Website

Just like what we’ve discussed earlier, a multi-vendor marketplace gives an unlimited spot for anyone who wants to join as a partner. The vendor could sell their original (or non-original) product on your online shop website. These are things you should manage when you decided to run a multi-vendor online shop website.

Commission Rate

In a conventional marketplace, we will need to rent a place and commission the landlord for each month. If you want to have an online shop website based on that business model, you need to understand and manage the commission rate. Since every vendor is different and you need to differentiate the commission rate. To be fair.

Partnership

There is a ‘Featured Product’ feature in an online shop website to make one or more products shown on the homepage. This could be part of the deal with the vendor if the vendor wants to pay the additional cost. It’s like an affordable advertisement for anyone. And you can limit it for a day or more. It depends on how your advertisement strategy works. So, it’s like a flash sale that could only happen when you have a deal.

Participating as Salesman

Not just as a vendor, the multi-vendor store also gives another chance for someone who likes to peddle the product to customers. Like a salesman, they will get the commission as well. But of course, the commission rate would be totally different from the vendor one. The rest of the program will be yours. If you want to promote the product besides the vendor itself, you should hire a sales assistant.

Website Development and Maintenance

The last and most important thing for a multi-vendor website is the website development itself. As one of the platforms for developing an e-commerce website, Magento should be your answer when it comes to developing a new website. You can try all possibilities due to its flexibility.

If you can’t find the developer yet, you can try to discuss it with our experts. For now, we have worked on an e-commerce website and mobile app development. We like challenges. So, we would be happy to hear your business plan.

Facing the Giants

Since the marketplace is not a new business model, you will need a particular approach to make your online shop website stand out from the crowd. There are several competitors right in front of you, and you need to take the big risk if you want to compete with the big one. For example, playing with cashback. The customer could get a cashback every time they spend a specific amount of their cash.

Examples

Some examples to give you a brighter glance are looking at Alibaba and Amazon. Those two are one of the biggest marketplaces on the internet.

To think outside the box, you will have to see the box itself. So, if you want to catch a small market share on the blind spot, you will have to see what your competitor aims for and find your chance from there. Since Amazon is so huge and conquers almost all market shares, you will need to find a small spot to grow your business. Whether by using a new product, new promotion, or something else.

Final Word

This discussion was made to bring you a little explanation about online shop websites, especially for multi-vendor and marketplace. Creating a marketplace will need some management system, website development, and website maintenance. A long way to go, huh?
If you need more information, you can drop us a line. See you in the next article!