If you’re an e-commerce business owner or an entrepreneur looking to build an online store, you have probably heard of Magento. With a gross turnover of over $155 billion in merchandise trade and over 86000 websites built using Magento in the US alone, it’s easy to believe why it is called the best e-commerce platform.
How does Magento work as a marketplace solution?
Curated extensions and themes
Magento covers the entire breadth of customer interaction online – between identifying the consumer need to fulfilling it – and aims to provide a safe, smooth and satisfying purchase experience.
Right from optimizing the website for an aesthetic display and smooth browsing to secured payment gateways to easy and prompt customer support to adhering to ethical marketing practices to partnering with trustworthy shipping partners, Magento marketplace has the relevant themes and extensions.
High quality and standard
Strict quality control for the extensions added to the marketplace makes Magento marketplace a trustworthy choice. The extensions go through a 3-way review process wherein they are assessed for business guideline adherence: an extension needs to solve a problem, adhere to technical guidelines: any extension needs to integrate seamlessly with the Magento architecture, and finally adhere to marketing guidelines: extension documentation and description needs to meet high marketing standards that include plagiarism and grammar-spell check.
Product reviews
Customer ratings greatly impact the saleability of a product. Magento as marketplace offers a new- and-improved rating platform that ensures customer ratings and reviews are authentic and relevant. There is also editorial content that features products that stand out for their quality and uniqueness.
Product search and dashboard functionality
Magento as a marketplace has an organized search functionality with intuitive product categorization and collection. This way, searching for a product becomes easy. Since it also centralizes all purchases, owners can manage their extensions and developers can avail of comprehensive metrics from the dashboard to evaluate sales.
How does Magento marketplace help multi-vendor e-commerce business?
- Store owners are at an advantage because multiple sellers mean more products and therefore higher revenues in the form of commissions. Traffic generated is high due to an increased footfall; hence the site ranks higher in the search engines.
- Developing a multi-vendor online website is a complex and tedious process but the Magento architecture addresses all the special hosting needs and is also highly scalable. The support system, maintenance, and reliability are other factors adding to the pluses.
- The software is capable of handling over 5 lakh products and can undertake multiple orders at the same time. It also has the capacity to support multiple sites simultaneously. The software can be configured to be device-friendly.
- Magento as a marketplace offers a readymade place for vendors to offer their products up for sale. Managing the products is far simpler on Magento. It allows for multiple-pricing-methods for different sets of customers. The features can be tweaked according to business needs.
- A multi-lingual and multi-currency option enables a global presence for the vendor. It also supports multiple payment options, B2B as well as B2C transactions.
- The software allows third-party plugins to blend-in seamlessly.
- The SEO functionality is top-notch that enables your website to rank high in the pages of search engines.
How to implement Magento as marketplace?
The software can be implemented in very easy steps.
If you’re a seller
Get a checklist ready
Before you set up a new marketplace account, there’s a list of technical and marketing items that you need to keep ready. The technical items include the extension code package, release notes, user guide, and license information. The marketing items would mean a product icon, a short as well as a long description of your extension, pricing information, etc.
Manage profile
Once the account is set up, you need to manage the profile information, product details, and monthly payment details.
Build and submit extensions
Go through the process of extension building and learn about the technical and marketing guidelines for submitting your extensions. Once submitted, the extension quality program or EQP verifies if they adhere to the said guidelines and best practices.
Manage sales
Using the sales and analytics reports, the seller can view the extension sales report and manage it.
If you’re a buyer
For a buyer, it is as simple as purchasing it, downloading it and then installing the software.
If you’re curious to know more about Magento as marketplace solution, do write in to our expert team at Suyati.