The Magento Multi-Vendor Marketplace Extension is a solution that converts your Magento eCommerce store into an online multi-vendor marketplace site. Just like a physical Shopping mall or marketplace where you can invite sellers to open their shop and sell their products. In return to it, you have the option to take commission from the sellers as the rent for the online space you would provide them in your complex (marketplace site).
Marketplace ad-dons on the other hand, are those extensions which add new features and functionalities to the Magento marketplace extension. These features add new opportunities for the marketplace admin and sellers to manage various aspects of the whole marketplace. There are ad-dons for SEO improvement, Conversion Rate Optimization, Product Management, Helpdesk management and much more.
Here in this article, we are going to enlist 3 such marketplace ad-dons that can help you make a strong relationship with your sellers. These extensions provide some extended accessibility options that make the operation of the marketplace shop easier for the sellers. By using these ad-dons, the marketplace admin can create an improved UX for the sellers/merchants/vendors and encourage more sellers to come and register a shop account on the marketplace.
Now, if you ask, why it’s so important to keep the sellers happy, then just understand the Chicken and Egg problem of a Marketplace business, and you will understand.
1. The Marketplace Contact Admin ad-don
Any seller who wishes to register on a marketplace would first of all want to know if he is doing business with a responsible business on the other side. Not having a seller support system is a clear sign of chances for negligence in seller grievance handling by the marketplace admin. No seller would want to open a shop in a marketplace where they can’t even register their query or complaint if needed.
In this situation a marketplace site can always provide the desired support to its sellers with a seller support system on board. The Marketplace Contact Admin ad-don is one such seller support system that would be liked by your onboard sellers.
- It allows a seller to create a query or complaint ticket with the marketplace admin right from the seller dashboard.
- Allows admin to check the complaint and queries from all the sellers and reply back repetitively.
The seller or admin might not be logged for the whole time to instantly see the tickets and replies. That’s why, along with the messages on the marketplace interface, the ad-don also sends an email to the seller and admin whenever a new message is received.
This ad-don could be a great extension for the marketplace. With better user experience and seamless seller support, you will have a USP on your marketplace site that will attract more and more Merchants to do business with you.
2. The Marketplace Return Manager Ad-don
When we look at the eCommerce competition level in 2017, keeping the sales rate at desired level is a complex task. When everyone in eCommerce market is busy recovering their abandoned carts, new sales generation seems to be a mega task.
However, if you are not able to complete this mega task and keep your marketplace’s conversion rate optimal, you would hardly attract any new seller to your site. Moreover, there are chances that the onboard merchants would also pull their hands back.
In this situation, you need to keep your customers happy by providing every possible facility that can be imagined on an eCommerce store as of now. Happy customers mean more sales, more sales mean happy sellers.
The option for easy returns is one such facility which every eCommerce customer looks out for. You will hardly find an eCommerce customer making a purchase without reading the products return policy of the store. That’s where you need a return management ad-don on your marketplace.
- With easy return facility through the ad-don, you can allow your customers to place a return, refund or replacement request directly to the concerned sellers.
- The admin and sellers both get notified on a new return request. The sellers can process the return request and can approve/disapprove it based on the marketplace’s return policies.
Now based on your return policies you can use this ad-don to create an ultimate shopping experience on your marketplace. Of course, the customers will like the return and refund facility. Such facilities to the customers can help generate more sells and a good name for your website in the market.
Who doesn’t like the speedy refund management of Amazon on failed for undelivered orders? Despite, I had an undelivered order experience due to courier boy’s mistake, I was happy to place a re-order with Amazon because they refunded me for the undelivered order so fast.
That’s how even a bad shopping experience cannot stop your customers to trust you if you have a recovery plan like easy refund and returns.
3. Marketplace Seller Vacation Mode Ad-don
Whether you have a run a marketplace site or an inventory based eCommerce store, customer experience is one such thing that will decide the fate of your business. But you cannot expect your website to provide even a decent customer experience when you cannot fulfill the orders on time.
On a marketplace, the failure to fulfill an order on time can happen due to many reasons:
- Product was out of stock
- Courier service’s mistake
- Seller didn’t dispatch the order or time etc.
Whatever be the reason for the failure in product delivery or order fulfillment, the bad name is going to stick on your marketplace; not on the seller. So it’s your job to make sure that sellers are dispatching the orders on time.
Now, that’s a hectic task. Not always but sometimes there might come a situation for a seller when he/she might not be available to fulfill an order received for his product. The reason could be anything:
The seller might have gone on a holiday and he might not have anyone else deployed to manage the marketplace shop till then. The reasons for the holiday could be numerous- recreational or unavoidable circumstances.
In such situation, when the seller would not be available to fulfill the orders, it’s a sure thing that you will lose some happy customers due to this.
How to avoid this?
The Marketplace Seller Vacation Mode Ad-don is the answer. Behind explanation of all these situations, my main aim was to introduce this ad-don as a big problem solver, and it efficiently does that.
This ad-don allows a seller to turn on the vacation mode before going for any such holidays. In this situation:
- All the product listing from the particular seller will get hidden from the customers. That is, the customers will not see the products of this seller on the marketplace until he is back from the holiday.
- The seller can set an automatic timer to turn off the vacation mode, or can manually do it when he is back from the holiday.
- The marketplace admin sees the list of all the sellers who have turned on their vacation mode.
- The admin can choose to approve or disapprove a seller’s vacation mode request. That means, the sellers cannot turn on the vacation mode until the admin allows them.
So, admin is still the boss, sellers cannot just go on the vacation every now or then.
Over to you
So, these three features on any marketplace site are definitely the conversion booster and saver as well. The Magento Multi-Vendor Marketplace Extension is backed by many such ad-dons like these. You can have a free demo of both the Admin panel and Front-end interface. Have a tour of the extension as see how it can help you launch a marketplace business of your own.
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