Ecommerce Marketplace Pain Points & How to Solve Them

When Jeff Bezos launched Amazon in 1994, the same year eCommerce registered its first-ever retail transaction. This happened more than two decades ago and today Amazon is among the most efficient eCommerce marketplaces registering a record $96.14 billion in revenue in the third quarter alone.

E-commerce operational efficiency is a reliable medium to evaluate marketplace success. While brands like Amazon have the resources and expertise to address issues that may affect operational efficiency, many small medium-sized enterprises and startups aren’t that fortunate. They lack funding, sound business planning, and access to key technology solutions for marketplace success. This is the reason why so many SMBs fail to register revenues similar to Amazon. Addressing the pain points is a fundamental step towards ensuring eCommerce marketplace success.

Yo!Kart is an industry-leading multivendor marketplace solution with consumer-centric design, distinctive eCommerce features, and dedicated technical support. The platform is fully customizable and highly scalable currently empowering 1000s of marketplaces worldwide. The team follows an agile development process where each element is meticulously crafted and carefully integrated to deliver ready-to-launch eCommerce marketplaces accelerating the growth of a business.

With this approach, Yo!Kart is addressing many pain points that may affect your business efficiency. Below I’ve highlighted key issues and how Yo!Kart addresses them.

Pain Point #1: Vendor on-boarding

Vendors are the backbone of an eCommerce marketplace – emerging or established. Consider this, Amazon has over 2.5 million registered sellers out of which 25k sellers have nearly $1 million in sales according to Marketplace Pulse research. This success of Amazon is largely attributed to its seamless vendor onboarding process.

To build a successful business venture, the marketplace owner needs to ensure a seamless onboarding process is in place to attract maximum vendors that are equally excited to partner with them. For instance, offering a simplified seller registration form, the freedom and flexibility to create a vendor subscription plan (paid and free), and allowing vendors to easily customize individual storefronts. Unfortunately, many existing marketplace software restricts business owners from attracting new vendors to register and sell on a new marketplace.

Yo!Kart with its customizable individual storefronts, manageable vendor subscription plans, and omnichannel inventory management solutions (by partnering with EasyEcom) is ensuring a hassle-free vendor onboarding process.

Pain Point #2: Inconsistent product information

Poorly constructed or inconsistent product information in an eCommerce marketplace is a huge setback to its operational efficiency. Each product listing must always be structured in a consistent format to ensure an impeccable consumer experience. Maintaining consistency on all retail channels is the key to retaining your consumers, especially in an omnichannel retail world.

Yo!Kart with its efficient product catalog management provides a consistent and well-structured approach to keep a check on products data quality. The platform ensures:

1. All product tags are well-defined and can be easily managed
2. Products can have niche-specific attributes and are not limited to the same set of attributes
3. Cross-selling or up-selling of related products to increase AOV (average order value) and more

Pain Point #3: Multilinguistic functionality

English is a global language with over 1.1 billion native and second-language users. Still, the majority of the population prefers to interact and communicate in their native/regional language. According to a survey by Common Sense Advisory on 3000 global consumers, 75% of online shoppers preferred to purchase products in their regional language. Also, 60% claimed they rarely or never bought products from online stores with English as the only supported language. This is a major concern for business owners.

Consider this, many existing marketplace software either allow limited customization or no integration to include multilinguistic functionality. This means that the admin needs to manually translate information in the native language (catering to the local audience) each time a new product is added to the marketplace. Also, to cater to the global audience, this process cannot be followed.

For an eCommerce marketplace to develop a diverse user base, offer impeccable user experience, and expand business globally; multilinguistic functionality is paramount. This platform comes pre-integrated with MSN Language Translation API providing support for more than 70 languages. Besides, Yo!Kart also provides right-to-left multilingual support essentially for Arab countries. This platform ensures automatic language translation targeting global regions.

Pain Point #4: Integrating customer’s payment preferences

In 2019, digital/mobile wallets accounted for almost 42% of all eCommerce transactions worldwide according to Statista. Still, there are many regions where COD or bank transfer is the only mode for online payment. Understanding the consumer’s payment preferences and offering local payment solutions is an optimal way to increase sales and drive international success. But, this isn’t possible with eCommerce multivendor software that does not support new integrations or is limited to a few basic customizations.

Yo!Kart provides support for multiple payment options including debit/credit cards, COD, bank transfer, and 15 payment gateways pre-integrated. Moreover, you can always customize and integrate your preferred payment solution. This improves operational efficiency and reduces the chances of cart abandonment.

Paint Point #5: Seller Payout

All successful eCommerce marketplaces facilitate hundreds of thousands of online transactions each day. Take a look at Amazon where millions of transactions take place every day. This wouldn’t have been possible without the availability of multiple payment transfer options and not just bank transfers. An efficient fund transfer mechanism for timely payments to sellers is integral for smooth business operations. Unfortunately, several marketplace solutions are limited to minimal customization or scalability which restricts their growth and affects marketplace efficiency.

Consider this, an online marketplace of 50 registered sellers has Paypal payout as the only payment gateway for vendors. Now, assume 10 out of 50 sellers demand they need their payments through bank transfer but the system doesn’t support this method. Therefore, to ensure seamless business operations, the marketplace eCommerce solution must support both automated and manual payout options like Yo!Kart does.

Yo!Kart is pre-integrated with both manual and split payment options such as Stripe Connect, Paypal Payouts, & bank transfer to seamlessly transfer funds to thousands of sellers in a marketplace.

Pain Point #6: Tax Management & Accounting

45 US states collect statewide sales taxes while 38 states collect local sales taxes on the majority of transactions. And, this is just in the US. Product taxes differ around the world and to accommodate these taxes a proper tax management & accounting system is required. This is why a marketplace platform must allow integrations with tax management APIs for automated accounting solutions.

Setting up product taxes in a streamlined manner is critical for an effortless business operation and eCommerce marketplace success. Yo!Kart’s in-built tax management and accounting system allow easy set up of product taxes depending upon the product category. Just enter the tax category information and the cost is adjusted accordingly. For advanced tax management solutions, Intuit’s QuickBooks and TaxJar APIs are pre-integrated into Yo!Kart.

Pain Point #7: Shipping management

Managing shipments, creating shipping labels, or retrieving shipping rates – eCommerce shipping hassles are plenty. To ensure timely delivery and increase profit margins strategic shipping solutions are required. Take a look at Amazon with its free two-hour or same-day delivery.

Deploying a similar strategy is a hassle for many eCommerce marketplaces due to poor inventory visibility, inadequate returns management, and many other shipping management challenges. Yo!Kart offers a reliable shipping management system to streamline the delivery process. The platform comes pre-integrated with Shipstation API that automates tasks like creating shipping labels, retrieving shipping rates or even order tracking in real-time. Moreover, you can easily integrate your preferred shipping API to minimize cart abandonment.

Pain Point #8: Abandoned carts

When a potential customer begins the checkout process on an eCommerce store but doesn’t complete the transaction or drops out from the process, the cart is considered to be abandoned by the vendor/admin. In 2019, the global digital shopping cart abandonment rate was around 70% according to Statista. Cart abandonment leads to leakage in purchase funnels – a grave concern for the majority of sellers on eCommerce marketplaces.

Every seller or the marketplace owner wants to minimize the cart abandonment rate and improve conversions. But in order to achieve this feat, a reliable abandoned cart recovery feature is mandate. Yo!Kart provides an in-built abandoned cart recovery solution to help follow-up cart abandoners and send reminders (including special offers) enticing them to complete the purchase.

Go to the “Abandoned cart” feature under Orders in the admin dashboard to view all abandoned or deleted orders. Easily generate discount coupons and send them to users as reminders to complete the purchase.

Pain Point #9: Online visibility

SEO-Friendly site structure is crucial for an eCommerce marketplace success. Multivendor platforms that are natively designed to be SEO-Friendly offer seamless navigation to users, direct users to relevant information and help improve organic rankings in search engine result pages (SERPs). Plus, they allow individual sellers the freedom to rewrite their product URLs and even add meta titles/descriptions to optimize product pages. This saves admin from the hassle of optimizing each product URL when there are hundreds of thousands of product pages.

Unfortunately, several marketplace software do not completely allow businesses to leverage the benefits of an SEO-optimized structure. Yo!Kart is a comprehensively designed platform that delivers SEO-optimized eCommerce marketplaces. From basic SEO settings to advanced optimization tools, the platform is integrated with all essential SEO-friendly features.

Pain Point #10: Mobile Commerce (m-commerce)

Nearly 73% of global retail eCommerce sales will be generated through m-commerce in 2021 up from 53% in 2017, according to Statista. Accumulating a larger global share, m-commerce is an increasingly important aspect of an eCommerce marketplace. While most traffic comes from handheld devices, not every marketplace is optimized enough to handle this traffic and as a result, loses a chunk of its revenue.

Yo!kart powered marketplaces are fully optimized and PWA compliant for a compelling mobile shopping experience. Yo!Kart also offers intuitively designed mobile apps for Android and iOS platforms to cater to the majority of users.

Addressing the pain points that limit sale conversions, restrict marketplace growth, and affect operational efficiency is crucial for marketplace success. These concerns are a real headache for business owners. Choose Yo!Kart – the most advanced multi-vendor platform with robust eCommerce solutions to lead the changing retail landscape.

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Originally published at https://www.yo-kart.com/blog/pain-points-affecting-ecommerce-marketplace-efficiency/