Articles

What Should Be Considered When Building A Multi-Vendor Marketplace

by Gary Ferguson Technical Writer | Blogger
Building a multi-vendor marketplace with spree commerce development isn't rocket science. Developers who have little experience in developing such a marketplace can understand what the client needs. And as they keep on developing, they gain more growth and experience in handling bigger projects. Spree commerce developers with good experience can deliver the right marketplace and customize it according to your needs.

But there are few challenges teams can face while developing a multi-vendor marketplace.

There is a crucial need for the right process, connectivity & understanding among teams to launch a successful marketplace. A thorough understanding of what needs to build and its purpose is required beforehand to decide on project planning, project delivery stages, setting up, and operations.

Things that must be kept in mind while building a marketplace - an initial list of queries to understand the project context & requirements:

  • What will be the marketplace business model
  • Which are the target markets and who are the audiences
  • Understanding the product catalog, its product attribute, and inventory levels
  • Types of users that will be involved like sellers/vendors/suppliers, buyers, etc.
  • Deciding on marketplace functionalities like product search, review, recommendations, checkout process, payment options, shipping methods, taxation.
  • 3rd party integrations, if any.
  • UI & UX
  • Project constraints like time & budget.

Next comes the prototyping, it takes 2-3 months to market and a marketplace prototype can be built and during that time, developers can analyze the scope of mistakes and errors and check on with product catalog updates & inventory syncing, as both the part belong to the vendor onboarding process, so it's important to know whether everything is functioning properly to understand what the marketplace will look like.

Thus prototyping can help verify the working of the marketplace. Developers can display up to date products from various vendors, perform shipping costs and calculations, capture orders from multiple vendors, capture order payments, send & track shipments, etc. Once it's observed that everything works well on mobile and desktop, the marketplace is then ready for business.

Marketplace clients can reduce prototype scope from their original requirements after reviewing the budget estimation. Clients can sort it out on the basis of necessary features. Getting a prototype is a wise decision from a risk point of view.

Marketplace vendor onboarding should be the first area of concern. It's important to know what kind of vendors will be included in the marketplace, SKUs per vendor, file format the vendor will be used to update data, product category tree, product attributes, is it required to match external vendors to internal marketplace categories & attributes so on and so forth.

Think about when it comes to user experience, think about whether they can search the products from different vendors, products offered, vendors list, etc. The future of the marketplace depends on its model, anticipated developments, the architect of the platform that needs to be scalable.

A multi-vendor marketplace needs good detailing and demands attention. After all both vendors and users are connected. Anything that doesn't function properly can break the entire selling process. So it's imperative to ask all the right questions and to have a thorough understanding of the objectives and the business process. Every team and everything from the discovery phase, prototyping, UX & layout design, MVP marketplace development, quality assurance, or project management needs to be in synchronization.

Developing and running a marketplace requires time & effort and a dedicated team. For a customized marketplace development and a good maintenance team need to be aligned. Remember to communicate well through the entire process.

A multi-vendor marketplace is a trend and most businesses are shifting to that side for better ROIs. If you are interested in building one for your business, then get in touch with the right Web Application Development Company who has the experience and a certified team to deliver spree commerce development services as per the needs.

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About Gary Ferguson Advanced   Technical Writer | Blogger

110 connections, 0 recommendations, 263 honor points.
Joined APSense since, February 6th, 2019, From New York, USA, United States.

Created on Jul 27th 2020 02:19. Viewed 366 times.

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