Buyers or Sellers! Who’s more important in a marketplace?

In the case of a marketplace owner, he practically comes against a blank wall in the beginning as both sellers and customers have to be taken on board to secure a safe start. Seller and customer are two main pillars of a marketplace that complement each other in the formation of a marketplace. One helps the other, but if both are not present, your marketplace will not succeed, and face an early demise. It’s a lot more complicated in many ways.

How do marketplaces deal with this issue? Answer is simple. Most marketplace owners would start by securing a trusted group of sellers, and then by advertising, they attract a certain amount of audience to match with the supply. The success of the well established marketplaces is an example that this can be achieved. What happens if this method doesn’t work? Another method is posturing. Even though you failed to secure adequate amounts of sellers, pretend that sellers exist in your marketplace by putting out products in the name of fake sellers, and, then, you can attract customers. Once orders rise from the customer side, you can approach the real sellers.

Solve demand first

This is important because you should test whether your marketplace has got any customer base, and it’s more or less related to your marketplace domain. This really works for new marketplaces. The sellers should rather be approached first to create supply, subsequently; the demand comes from the customer’s side in response to the supply. After analyzing for a while, you can conclude to which direction your business is moving. This is a good test to weigh your demand.

But there may be situations where your supply falls short of demand, and this is not good for new enterprises. How this can be solved? Primarily, You can display fake sellers on your marketplace and can convince your customers that you have adequate suppliers in your marketplace. A question arises is that if a customer placed an order, could you deliver that product to the customer given that the seller you have shown is imaginary, and you have no product in your hand. Anyhow, you have to fulfill the demand by giving the customer the product that they ordered in your marketplace either through drop shipping or buying products from an external supplier .This works for you in the nascent stages of your business.

If you take the examples of successful marketplaces, they all adopted this approach in their beginning to meet up the meteoric demand. The good thing is that when you build a sizable customer base, you can go on asking those external suppliers and you can convince them to join your marketplace.

Practices to attract buyers

• Loyalty program
• Referral marketing
• Social media outreach
• User interface and user experience (UI and UX)
• Search engine optimization (SEO)

Loyalty program: The best way to woo your loyal customers-to-be to your marketplace is to get them participated in a loyalty program. Here, you give perks and attractive offers to customers based on their interaction with your store. It works to your advantage and helps in increasing recurring customers. The selection of the loyalty program should be chosen after measuring the mood and behavior of your customers. You can rely on analytics and surveying to better understand the customer behavior.

Referral marketing: Nowadays customer referrals are most common in all businesses since everyone really understands the benefits it can bring about. By this, any of your customer, acting as an inviter, can invite another person to your platform through a referral, a unique referral code most of the time. If the invitee makes purchases, the inviter is rewarded. Many enthused customers are now accepting this as a supplemental income, and becoming referral inviters.

Social media outreach: Social media has now become the nerve centre of online shopping. Many customers use social media as a tool to know more about a particular product, a brand or a store that they want to buy. Expanding social media presence would boost the prospects of any online store. Running social media campaigns and pushing sponsored ads would be expensive, but it helps you in the long run.

UI and UX: Even if you do everything right, but you fail to make an impressive first look for your marketplace, you can’t make a fast progress. Your sales and marketing depend on the user experience. You can do it by reducing the loading time of your website, and making your site more mobile friendly. A help section containing all answers to clear customers’ doubts would also do you good.

SEO: Search engines use techniques like discovery, relevance, authority and more to find your website given that ranking is so cut-throat and fierce. Make sure that keywords are properly used in all sections including blogs to attract more traffic. There are many applications to help you implement SEO techniques smoothly. Taking advantage of them would prove to be a game changer for you.