Is the time spent on multi-vendor marketplace user onboarding necessary?
It is indeed worthwhile. If it’s complicated to join up on a new b2b marketplace platform, many of your vendors would bother. Make the onboarding process as simple as possible and request a few documents. It will have a favorable effect on your vendor acquisition strategy as a whole.
Even the largest of the huge, such as Amazon, AliExpress, and eBay, do not make any extra effort to find vendors. They now have a position of superiority, which explains this.
However, as the proprietor of a brand-new multivendor marketplace, you will need to put in more work to attract vendors. As your website’s audience grows over time, you’ll also be able to find vendors naturally and with little effort.
You need a customer base to check whether your two-sided MVP(Minimum Viable Product) is successful. But how can you get vendors? Let me tell you about that in this chapter.
Top 12 Ways to Get Vendors For Your Multi-Vendor Marketplace
Offer Better Conditions For Vendors
You might start by conducting competitor research to determine the perfect conditions for your vendors. You can find strategies to exceed them by observing what your competitors provide to their vendors. Here are a few concepts:
- Lower Commission fee: Look at the commission fee charged by your competitors and consider reducing your own. Vendors may view the marketplace platform with the least commission fee be the most advantageous when selecting a b2b marketplace among platforms with comparable terms.
- Increase the number of monetization possibilities. Give vendors the flexibility to choose how they want to work with you. Implement a number of revenue-generating strategies for your multi-vendor marketplace and let your merchants select the one that suits them best.
For instance: Amazon’s Subscribe & Save works as another monetization. Particularly for those that offer consumable or one-use items that buyers would need to buy on a regular basis, it’s a great method for Amazon vendors to keep buyers and boost recurring revenue for their businesses.
- Provide a free trial. This strategy was utilized by Etsy to draw in its first merchants. In addition to providing free product listings for one month, they also waived first-month sales taxes.
- Ensure that using your marketplace platform is secure by offering insurance or another suitable incentive. As an illustration, Alibaba integrated an escrow payment system to safeguard vendors and customers from fraud.
Create An Offer Irresistible To Vendors, Not Just Buyers
It’s equally important to establish yourself as a vendor as it is to make an alluring offer to potential buyers.
Identify and study your rivals. Examine their goods or services, business plans, methods of generating revenue, and success rates. As a result, you are able to provide your potential vendors with offers that are competitive.
Give suppliers the information and understanding they need to decide wisely. Create tailored offers that speak to the particular needs and desires of your merchants using the information you have acquired.
Three things to consider are
- The simplicity of selling on your platform
- How to assist vendors in achieving their objectives
- Buyer-vendor fit
If you decide to use a multi-vendor marketplace platform to develop your marketplace business, explain how native vendor connections with platforms, shipping services, and emailing tools make selling on your b2b marketplace a no-brainer.
Contact Vendors Selling On Other Multi-Vendor Marketplace
Top-seller lists are available on several of the largest marketplace platforms, like Amazon, eBay, and Etsy, and you may draw ideas from them.
Examine the vendor lists of the best online marketplace platforms and make a note of any vendors that would work well for your marketplace.
Go Online And Search For Brands That Fit Your Multi-Vendor Marketplace
Online directories are a great place to look for possible vendors.
For instance, you might utilize sites like Crunchbase to find nearby startups or small companies who might be interested in joining your online marketplace.
You can always count on a solid Google search to assist you in finding your ideal vendors. For example, look for “top brands for X” or “X brand with the fastest growth.”
Consider using Google’s “People Also Ask” and “Searches relevant to” capabilities. You may use these to generate ideas for new vendors who would match your market well.
You may use social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn to locate brands.
On Twitter and Instagram, look for pertinent hashtags to see what’s popular. To identify businesses that fit your market niche, use the “Companies” search option on LinkedIn.
Look For Offline Vendors Too
The potential to grow their business and reach a wider audience through your multi-vendor marketplace may be available to offline vendors.
Ask merchants if they sell online and how they attract new clients when you attend conventions and tradeshows in your region. Visit your neighborhood farmer’s market and talk to the vendors there who are selling their products there. To meet local offline vendors, consider organizing meetings.
This is how Airbnb got its first customer. The three founders of Airbnb, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk, also went door-to-door in New York to educate residents on the benefits of using the service and to demonstrate how simple it was to use the website.
They went door to door and made their pitch to the public. When someone utilized their service once that week, they even offered to pay for their first two nights of hosting and demonstrated how much money could be made by using Airbnb.
Run Ads
Run social media ads that are specific to the kind of vendors you want to see in your multi-vendor marketplace platform.
If your budget allows, create a vendor landing page and use paid social media marketing. You may target users on LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook to find the right vendors for you.
Ads should be customized for the suppliers you are targeting. Make sure to emphasize the advantages of utilizing your marketplace when producing ad material.
- Why is your platform different?
- What advantages does it give the vendors?
By responding to these inquiries, you can create advertisements that speak to your target market and persuade people to register for your multi-vendor marketplace.
Find Prospects On Social Media For Your Multi-Vendor Marketplace
Using social media engagement, you can get to know your customers: likes, follows, replies, and mentions all serve a purpose.
Being active online helps to distinguish you from other nosy businesses and builds a profile of someone you know. Engaging with your audience is a great way to solve problems and reduce the gap between your online marketplace’s customers.
Make Your Profile Easy To Find
Get to the top of the search results page by using keywords and creating intriguing, straightforward headlines. Make sure your Facebook profile is optimized and has all the names and links that a person looking for your online marketplace could need.
Join The Right Groups
Be sure to enlist in the communities where your prospective clients converse.
Share The Right Content
Sharing unnecessary or pointless information, being excessively passionate, or being extremely business-focused can turn off your followers, but informative and insightful material will draw them in.
Develop A Plan For Vendor Acquisition
Getting vendors is the first stage in developing your multi-vendor marketplace. Discover them. For instance, if it’s a business, think about the type of business it is and the things that influence its employees’ tendency to approach you.
In order to reach people through social media and the Internet, look for trends in their behavior, including where and why they seek items similar to yours.
Reach Out Through Cold Calls And Emails
If your firm has big stakes, you should give this some serious thought. As it is outbound marketing, making cold calls will provide you with an advantage. You’ll be able to connect with your target audience before anybody else thanks to this.
Remember to familiarize yourself with these individuals, their present issues, and their methods of managing situations before making a call. You will be able to explain why they require your services when you call them if you do this.
Emails are another powerful tool for growing your company. It is a fantastic method for reaching out to customers and promoting your products or services.
Finding an Email List
You just need to follow three simple steps, which are not as complex as they may seem:
- First, increase your visitor count on your marketplace website.
- Include a subscription option for your newsletter on your website.
- Have a Strong Call to Action (CTA) in your sign-up form.
Craft An Engaging Newsletter Content
Email newsletters are a quick and simple approach to expanding your market. Information pollution online is a real problem, therefore you must make sure your message is relevant to the recipient and compelling enough to compel them to click. It needs to be instructive and beneficial.
Knowing your material one month in advance is a good idea.
Map Your Newsletter
The events on the calendar immediately affect all of your market activity. Exist any holidays or significant events that may affect your sales?
Survey Your Audience Regularly
Keep your audience preference on track. So that you can always provide new information regarding trends in your communications.
Keep A Tickler File
If you think your letters could use a boost in terms of quality content, gather some juicy content in advance.
Archive Your Newsletter Articles
When you archive your newsletter article on your multi-vendor marketplace website, you’ll be more likely to attract new subscribers. If more articles are available, more frequently users will reach your marketplace website.
Use Pictures
Most individuals learn best visually. An image that is vivid and vibrant also grabs the attention of any reader.
Simplify The Process Of Running A Multi-Vendor Marketplace
Marketplace vendors may or may not be technically skilled and have previous expertise with complex software. It’s your obligation to give them functionality that’s clear and easy to grasp. When creating a marketplace, you should take into account the following factors.
- Advanced vendor dashboard. Make sure your vendor dashboard has all the features required to enable suppliers to sell in the most convenient way possible. Pay attention to the user experience (UX) and make it simple for your vendors to use a dashboard.
- Automated inventory control. Vendors may save time and concentrate on other essential activities by using this feature, which eliminates the need for them to manually keep track of the number of items that are currently available.
- A comprehensive catalog structure makes it easy for suppliers to list their items and presents them in the best possible way.
These are just a few of the features that can improve how easy it is for vendors to use your multi-vendor marketplace. Consider any element that can make utilizing your marketplace appealing to merchants and strive to incorporate it into your platform.
Pay Vendors
To initially onboard the vendors, pay them to use your product as Uber did. Black car drivers were cold-called by Uber’s founder, Travis Kalanick, with the offer to pay them an hourly wage as they experimented with the service in order to recruit their first drivers. Of the first ten drivers he phoned, three were willing to test it out.
After that, they worked hard to make each customer experience the best it could be and provided free rides at neighborhood activities in the tech-savvy San Francisco region to reward customers. Rather than relying heavily on traditional marketing, Kalanick said that word-of-mouth was the main source of Uber’s sales.
So What’s Next?
A successful tactic that can help you arrange the supply side and draw customers more quickly is luring vendors to your marketplace first.
It might be difficult to identify vendors that are a good fit for your multi-vendor marketplace, but it is achievable if you know what you’re looking for and where to seek it.
Recognize the value of carefully selecting the vendors for your marketplace, and look for tools to assist you in doing so.
With the correct plan in place, you’ll be able to create a robust network of suppliers for your multi-vendor marketplace to satisfy your clients and increase your revenue. Utilize the advice in this chapter to find merchants for the market efficiently.
A vendor needs a buyer. But now your marketplace only has a vendor you need a buyer to complete your marketplace structure. To onboard a buyer, you need the best marketing strategy. We will see them in the next chapter “Marketing Strategy for B2B Marketplace”
