Do you intend to build an e-commerce marketplace where the sellers can list their products and buyers can purchase them?
If yes, then before you proceed ahead & hire a website designer to build your marketplace, you must know some of the essential features that a successful e-commerce marketplace must have.
In this blog post, I have shared 11 features that your marketplace must have.
Let’s begin!
#1 Fast Loading Speed
Loading speed of any e-commerce marketplace is as essential as its existence in the first place.
Various studies have shown that e-commerce websites or platforms that takes more than 5-7 seconds to load lose more than 30% of their sales.
Therefore, if you want to make sure that your e-commerce marketplace gets more sales & customers, check the loading speed of your website and get it fixed by a web designer, if required. This investment is really worth it.
Recommended post: Tips to enhance the loading speed of your website
#2 Express/Direct Checkout
Express checkout enables the users to buy a product without going through the hassles of shopping cart.
Let’s accept that most of the users who are browsing an e-commerce store don’t want to spend much time on the process of checkout.
If they find the checkout process of any website complicated, they would simply quit that website.
Don’t let this happen to your e-commerce marketplace.
Provide your users with an option to checkout directly. This can really enhance the experience of your users and get you more sales.
#3 Social Login For Sellers & Buyers
Again, in order to save the registration time, most of the users prefer to login using their social account credentials.
There are many e-commerce CMS platforms like WordPress that has several plugins to use & allow buyers to login with their social media accounts and checkout easily.
You can do the same with your sellers too. Don’t force them to register and fill out a lengthy form in order to become a member of your e-commerce marketplace.
Of course, once they login, you can encourage them to fill out necessary information that’s required for them to operate the sales & transactions.
#4 Multiple Payment Options
Don’t restrict your customers to pay with the limited number of payment methods. Instead, provide them with as many payment options as possible so that they don’t quit at the time of payment, without completing their order.
Studies have shown that lack of sufficient payment methods is one of the major reasons for the high order abandonment rate of any e-commerce store.
Recommended post: 4 Best payment gateways for your eCommerce website
#5 Solid Reporting
For both sellers and administrator of the website, the reporting system must be intuitive yet solid.
The sellers must be able to view & download multi-dimensional reports like:
- Total sales for any date range.
- Total commission payable to admin.
- Highest selling product(s).
- Traffic on their webpages.
At the same time, the admin should be able to view all the important reports such as:
- Total sales
- Total sellers
- Total buyers
- Highest selling merchant
- Total traffic
- Commission receivables
- Payouts
#6 Robust Search
Since an e-commerce marketplace may have hundreds of sellers and can also have thousands of products, a robust search is definitely required to make the experience of the buyers convenient.
On all of the pages, your website designer must have a search bar to enable buyers find & buy their desired product(s).
#7 Solid Filtration
On the search result pages or product listing pages, your marketplace website must show solid filtration.
This will enable the buyers to sort out the products according to their preferences and choice.
#8 Instant Notifications
For each action on the marketplace, either by the sellers or buyers, an instant notification must be sent out to the respective parties.
An instant notification helps the users to get informed about action taken by them.
#9 Mobile Responsive Design
Did you know?
More than the 40% of the internet surfers use their hand-held devices to browses the websites.
Given this fact, it becomes even more important for you to take care of the responsiveness of your e-commerce marketplace. Lack of a responsive web design may result in low sales and low revenue too. So, don’t let this happen to you at all.
Recommended post: Why responsive design & 5 best tools to make a responsive website design
#10 Guest Checkout
Don’t force your users to complete the registration process in order to buy any product(s) from your website. Instead, provide them with an option to checkout as a guest, so that they can quickly checkout and buy the product, if they want to do so.
#11 Discount Coupons
Providing an option for the sellers to create discount coupons that can be used by the buyers, will definitely increase your sales.
How discount coupons helps an e-commerce website or marketplace?
- Attracting new customers.
- Free up the products that don’t get sold often.
- Achieve sales goal, when required.