Managing an online marketplace is not a walk in the park. Contrary to common perception, you can’t just open an online portal and expect customers to come to your marketplace without any effort. There are millions of online stores vying to sell similar products to the same target market.

In order to capture the interest in your target market, you need to do a lot of things right. Here we will discuss five important things that will help you run a successful e-commerce site.

Avoid Ready-made Solutions

You may have come across multi-vendor store builder that claims to launch copies of Amazon or eBay. But you should stay away from these services that claim to offer online readymade solutions.

Most of the turnkey solutions aren’t worth the price. The readymade sites will require a lot of customizations if you want the site to look unique.

Instead, you should get a professional website design team to build a marketplace from scratch. This will ensure that the online website looks exactly as you envisioned. It will also save you costs in the long run.

Select the Right Technology

For your online marketplace, you need to select a stable, secure, and flexible platform. The platform you choose should cater to thousands of online visitors at a time without any problem.

Moreover, the platform should be scalable allowing you to upgrade (or downgrade) as per the demand. This will help you save a lot of money in the long term.

Lastly, the platform should be protected with secure encryption and anti-hacking technology such as SSL, WPS, WPA2, and others. This is important as any incident of data breaches will greatly undermine the credibility of your website.

Buyer-Seller Interaction

Whether you own a website that sells virtual or consumer goods, you will require a platform to connect your buyers and sellers and even better if it is in real time. CometChat and its elaborate chat features helps you with exactly that. Apart from the basic text chat, it also supports enhanced chat features like voice and video chat, file sharing, in-built monetisation tools and much more.

As can be inferred from the image, by adding a simple “Chat with seller” option, CometChat enables buyers and sellers to initiate one-on-one conversation with each other.

Buyers can then clear queries, ask questions about the product, share pictures and invoices and also bargain prices, making the buying process faster, transparent and more convenient.

Adding a chat feature will create a better buying and selling experience which will further result in increased user engagement and retention on your marketplace app/website.

You can learn more about chat use cases on Marketplace websites and apps here.

Create a Digital Marketing Blueprint

Most entrepreneurs put digital marketing to the backburner. They don’t put an investment in time, money, and effort in creating a digital marketing plan.

However, without a digital marketing plan, you will have a hard time attracting online customers. To promote your online market, you will have to create a budget for social media marketing, content marketing, and SEO.

Statistics show that businesses make around $2 for every $1 they spend on Google Ads.

Around 37 percent of online shoppers in a survey had said that social media ad inspired them to make a purchase. The stats show that you cannot ignore digital marketing to promote and market your site.

Focus on a Positive Customer Experience

To capture the interest of online customers, you need to focus on creating a positive online customer experience. From the website design to the checkout process, everything should be primed for customer satisfaction.

Takeaway…

In conclusion, successfully managing an online marketplace requires significantly less effort as compared to a brick-and-mortar store.

However, you need to know about the tools and techniques that can help you grow your business online.

The tips mentioned here are just some of the ways in which you can attract online customers and make your e-commerce site the next Amazon or Alibaba.