Creating an Online Ecommerce Marketplace: Solutions and Challenges

The way we shop today has changed tons within the past decade. New technologies and connectivity have led us to a replacement age where consumers are set into “always-on” mode. Now think what and how we used to search and share information on the go and make a purchase decision faster than we did before.

Customers search for frictionless shopping experience through various devices at their disposal and therefore the promise of personalization of the shopping cycle has become ever truer. We have the technology and therefore the price for it's been improving with time.

However, although the technology provides us with new ways of solving them, the challenges we meet even today within the e-commerce industry with online eCommerce marketplace are an equivalent. Let’s elaborate.

Market Analysis – Product Sourcing and Placement

Common Problems with Product Placing

Product information import and maintenance are possibly the only largest problem faced by enterprise-level e-commerce today. It’s not uncommon that a retailer’s product base changes a minimum of once per annum.

When shopping during a brick-n-mortar store, the customer can see the merchandise, feel it, invite information right there and skim its packaging.

In order to supply an equivalent experience online for the customer, the retailer must provide a minimum of one photo, a short product description, its variants in shape, color, and size, and an inventory of product specifications.

Now, let’s imagine an ideal scenario where it takes you know quite 5 minutes to urge all of this ready. If your store features a product base with over 10000 products it might take you around 800+ hours just to urge your catalog up and running.

At 100000 products, you’d need three people working the complete year, no holidays, eight hours straight each day. Now add the annual mix by the retailer and your head will certainly spin.

The Solution

You need to find a top-notch e-commerce platform that comes with its own import/export feature and an application programming interface (API). With the import/export feature, you'll use an Excel or CSV file to upload product information to save lots of time.

Buyer Personas – Segmentation and Development

Common Problems with Persona Segmentation

Customer segmentation and persona development is not any walk in the park for an e-commerce marketplace. Having an enormous product base split during a significant number of categories with additional filtering available to the user won’t ensure a profit.

Some marketplaces transcend twenty different buyer personas, which is tough to scale, optimize, and maintain. But, these marketplaces got a huge logistics wing to handle big data and are ready to make predictions about customer and market behavior.

The Solution

Keep in mind that it’s always better to settle on up to four buyer personas, max. Else, you'll burn your marketing and acquisition budget. Use your website and e-commerce analytics to trace down patterns in users’ demography, behavior, and interests.

Create audience segments that supported these patterns and validate your assumptions. You'll refine your segmentation with specific type surveys with targeted groups and feed this info into your CRM.

This will greatly influence how your customers engage with your website engagement and can allow you to create more personalized experiences, ensuring lower bounce and cart abandonment rates.

Acquisition Channels – Choice and Optimization

Common Pitfalls with the Acquisition

The acquisition does have some pitfalls but that’s not uncommon that companies burn their acquisition budget by investing in non-optimized funnels on various acquisition channels. This mainly happens because the choice is driven by the quantity of potential traffic which will be acquired without previously confirming that the audience is there within the first place.

And after a short time, the budget invested reaches a scope when it becomes impossible to chop the losses – you came this far, you can’t stop now and lose money.

The Solution

Before choosing a selected acquisition channel, you would like to be a minimum of somewhat sure that your audience is there. Create a marketing campaign with specific channel to target a selected customer persona, run it with a little budget, and track CTR and CR via your e-commerce and website analytics.

You can further reduce customer acquisition costs and check out to refine your channel testing by running several campaigns and A/B/n and multivariate tests to verify the effect and ROI of an equivalent.

Customer Retention

Common Problems with Customer Retention

It’s not uncommon that enormous e-commerce has problems with retaining customers. It is hard to work with thousands of products and vast traffic made by customers via online, it becomes hard to scale and optimize.

A vast majority of consumers are probably there for one visit only – whether they make a sale or not. Customer retention usually plummets due to trust issues, delays in communication, or just lack of continuous customer engagement.

It’s difficult to create trust when the sole sort of communication between you and them happens behind the screen, oftentimes automated.

The Solution

Your customer continues to interact with the merchandise purchased but it doesn’t end with conversion or product purchase. Not only you'll engage him/her in making more purchases afterward, but may also become a future referral point or tend a chance to advocate your products online.

Any practice for retaining potential costumers starts from email marketing and interaction with both you're existing and potential customers.

Allow referral program and reward systems to create long-term relationships with customers and improve their engagement.

Final words

The biggest challenges we see today within the e-commerce platform development don’t differ much from what we had a decade ago.

However, by taking over a customer-centered approach and visualizing their shopping cycle and making a shift focused on its retention will assist you to tackle any challenge you would possibly face in your e-commerce platform development and growth.

With a well-developed methodology to research, isolate and solve parts of their journey while placing the customer-focused, you'd be ready to quickly develop, test, and launch any new feature and ensure continuous retention and revenue growth.