The multivendor marketplace platform is a great way for businesses that need to source vendors, manage inventory, and sell online rapidly. Having a multivendor marketplace can be particularly useful for these businesses because vendors can list their products and sell directly to end customers.
However, as with any online retail market, selling through a multivendor marketplace requires maintenance. By taking the right steps now, you’ll have time to relax once your business grows – but only if you support your new ecommerce solution with continuous customer support.
This article will discuss the key benefits of customer support for your multivendor marketplace and how it fits into your business’s overall ecommerce strategy.
Why is Customer Support Important for Your Multivendor Marketplace?
When you set up a vendor marketplace, you’re, in effect, opening up your business to dozens, or perhaps even hundreds, of vendors. This puts you at risk of a range of issues affecting your bottom line. For example, supplier stock outages, incorrect inventory reports, and other problems can all damage your sales figures and make your marketplace appear less attractive to future suppliers. If you’re also selling products online, you’re at risk of fraudulent orders, incorrect returns, and other issues that can lose your customers.
To reduce these risks, you must ensure that your support team is constantly monitoring your marketplace and taking prompt action to resolve any issues as soon as they’re spotted. This may sound like a lot of work, but it’s really not. Since most issues are easily resolved, most businesses can hire a support team that can handle the minimal requirements without any major investment or disruption to their workflow.
With the right level of support, your multivendor marketplace can be a highly profitable addition to your business’s operations.
Read more: Maximizing Your Profits with a Multivendor Marketplace Platform
Key Features of a Good Multivendor Marketplace Platform
Accessibility – Every ecommerce platform has its own rules about what support staff can do when responding to issues. If you’re not certain about the regulations in your country, the guidelines in your multi-vendor marketplace agreement may not be clear enough to be relied upon. A good ecommerce support provider should be clearly defined as your ‘first point of contact’ for resolving issues.
If a customer contacts your support team, they should be able to expect an accurate response within a day or two. If the issue is more complicated, they should be able to expect a detailed response that includes clear instructions and advice. If you’re happy with the level of service you’re receiving, you can easily look for another provider. But, if you’re not, you can complain about the provider’s service and demand that the issue be resolved as soon as possible.
Reliability – Another key feature of a good multivendor marketplace platform provider is reliability. When you’re using your multi-vendor marketplace as your primary sales channel, customers and vendors need to have complete confidence that they will receive their orders when they expect to. When this is not the case, customers are likely to be frustrated – and potentially even less inclined to buy from you in the future.
To address this, you need to ensure that the provider can deliver a high level of reliability. This may sound straightforward, but it is important that the provider you choose meets your needs in this area. You can ask the provider to provide you with a short, free reliability report. You can also ask the provider to provide a more detailed reliability report if they charge a price for it.
Customer Service Score – Many large multivendor marketplace platform like eBay and Amazon use a collection of subcontractors to support their customers. This can result in a high level of inconsistency across the board, so it’s important that you make sure that the provider you choose has a high customer service score. You can do this by visiting a commonly used rating site, such as Trustpilot, and reading customer reviews about the provider’s level of service.
Cost – Finally, you need to ensure your provider is reasonably priced. The best ecommerce support providers are often priced at around $10 per support ticket per month or $50 per month for a dedicated ticket. If you’re offering goods that are expensive to replace or have a long production lead time, you may want to look at higher levels of support.
Ongoing Maintenance Is Vital for a Successful Marketplace
Every multivendor marketplace platform is built on the premise that suppliers are willing to share their own contact information and sell directly to customers. This means that they have a high level of trust in those customers and feel confident that those customers will not damage their reputations or products. If the marketplace provider is not maintaining this level of trust and confidence, the marketplace will not succeed.
To ensure that the marketplace provider is doing what they need to in this area, you need to hire a provider who will consistently monitor their marketplace and resolve issues as soon as they’re spotted.
Read more: How to Market A Multivendor Marketplace Platform
What Should You Expect from Your Multivendor Marketplace Platform?
Availability – The first thing you should expect from your multivendor marketplace platform provider is that they will respond to your support tickets within a reasonable time frame. If you’re working with a provider who consistently fails to respond to issues within a reasonable time frame, you should consider moving to a different platform.
Resolution – The second thing you should expect from your provider is that they will resolve your issue most efficiently. You should be clear in your ticket that you expect the provider to resolve your issue quickly. If the provider doesn’t meet this expectation, you should ask for a new provider who will.
Accuracy – The third thing you should expect from your provider is that they will provide accurate information in all their responses. If your ticket contains information that is incorrect, you should ask for the information to be corrected.
Conclusion
Today, most large-scale businesses outsource some level of support to a third-party provider. This is an ideal way to save money and increase your availability while also managing your workload more easily. If you’re managing your own customer support team for your multivendor marketplace platform, you need to make sure that the team is adequately trained and resourced to manage issues as they come up. However, if you don’t have the time to manage the support team, you might want to consider outsourcing some support to a third-party provider. You can also take the help of an external multivendor marketplace platform provider to develop apps and solutions to meet your customer support requirements.
