Ways to Overcome the Top Challenges Faced by Marketplace Businesses
Starting a marketplace is most often a complex task as there are two sets of customers for a marketplace – buyers and sellers. You would most likely find it difficult to convince sellers to do business on your marketplace without having a quality list of customers (buyers). This is one of the major challenges that is been faced by an online marketplace. Listed below are some exceptional ideas to overcome such challenges for your marketplace business.
Product presentation
The owner in a regular e-commerce business would mostly retain over the way of presenting the product and its details to the customers. Hiring professional photographers and models for creating promotional images for your business is not a familiar way for most marketplace owners. Nevertheless, when a marketplace set up is considered, business owners usually have some control over presenting their products. The problem with online spaces is that many sellers are still learning the techniques.
Customer service
Typical e-commerce stores and direct mail marketing companies have mostly made customer-management their top priority and have set up customer management systems for making fielding customer queries easy. Therefore, the bucks stop with the store owners when it comes to the experience of buyers. However, the buyers in a marketplace who are unhappy with the product or service of a particular seller will express their anger towards the marketplace rather than the particular seller. This is often a repetitive problem that has the potential to form into a social-media backlash or PR problem.
Supply-demand gap
The problem of growing sellers and buyers is just one part of the puzzle. Many a time, marketplace businesses would be facing scenarios where the gap between supply and demand is high during the starting. For example, a seller who provides too many sales might have the chance of backing out. This can make many of your customers as well as sellers leave your marketplace. In other ways, a corporate buyer might sometimes opt for another platform, leaving the sellers in your marketplace high and dry with very little ways of returns.
Trust
Building customer relationships is a great and effective way of earning the trust of your buyers as well as sellers, even though it alone cannot serve as the solution for the problem. If buyers realize that your sellers are not trustworthy even when your online marketplace is, a trust deficit is most likely to arise, which may impact the rate of conversion on your platform.