How to attract sellers to your online marketplace?
Attracting sellers to your marketplace means you are increasing the supply power of your marketplace. Thus you are expanding your business and building networks. And this supply increase is generally meant for people who already have a set of loyal customers because then they can increase the business volume by two or three times. Suppliers are not scarce, but the difficult part is more or less related to your business niche and type.
If you have a niche for your business, you can’t accommodate sellers who are not supplying the products that you need in your marketplace. Plus, including all types of sellers means that your marketplace becomes a hybrid marketplace like Amazon or Flipkart where one gets access to all kinds of products. It’s easy to be fallen into such a track with prospects of becoming a large marketplace, but you should carefully weigh your business domain before deciding because more suppliers don’t bring you more sales. You should examine whether there’s sufficient demand to meet the supply.
Strategies to attract sellers
Also, if you try to solve this problem of choosing between buyer or seller. As a result, you may choose the seller as an option. In that situation as well, you need to adopt strategies to up the amount of sellers. Some strategies are mentioned below to get sellers for your marketplace
- Identify new sellers
- Connect with ecommerce sellers.
- Keep good relations with existing sellers
- Get the sellers to understand your marketplace
- Give flexible pricing alternatives
- Help & Support
Identify new sellers: There may be a score of sellers who are not part of any marketplace or online platform, yet who wish to be a part of an online platform to increase their sales. In- person meetings are one way of getting in touch with them, so that you can convince them what you can offer. You can also identify such sellers on trade shows and other PR events. You can talk them into collaborating with you after getting to know them. You can also widen your relationships through social media as well.
Connect with ecommerce sellers: These are sellers who are doing online business or sellers who are already part of many marketplaces. But they wouldn’t be afraid to join your marketplace if you provide good offers, promise higher rankings and product visibility. They wouldn’t miss a chance to sell and promote their products. You can reach out to such sellers though popular online selling platforms and social media spaces. Since they are more experienced, you get more value from them.
Keep good relations with existing sellers: To onboard new sellers to your marketplace, you have to keep your existing suppliers intact. Sharing the success stories of existing sellers would also boost your image as a clean marketplace. Good relations and fair and square treatment with existing sellers will also increase the business reputation, and other new sellers buy your argument. Experiences and positive feedbacks of current sellers can be shared through blog posts or social media to bolster your claims.
Get the sellers to understand your marketplace model: There are already a slew of marketplaces present in our environment. Sellers don’t need a new marketplace to sell their products. The need is ours, so be specific in terms of your business model, pricing, policies etc. Getting the sellers to understand your business also implies that you need to understand them better. Before on-boarding new sellers, you can ask them their demands and pricing plans that suit them better. It helps you catch the mindset of sellers and you can offer services they would want you to provide.
Give flexible pricing alternatives: Numerous pricing models exist for the marketplace. Generally followed one is the commission model where the marketplace owner takes commission of each sale happening on the marketplace. The commission can be set in general terms or the commission is fixed based on the product that sellers list on the marketplace. Second most popular pricing method is subscription based pricing. In this model, commission is charged based on the number of products listed on the marketplace by each seller.
Help & Support: Reference documents, FAQ sections and blogs will help to a great extent to clear the doubts of sellers. 24/7 seller support is an added advantage to see through the possible difficulties faced by the sellers, and this will help you resolve numerous problems faced by the sellers. A good seller interface makes things easier for sellers, backed by flexible product listings and order tracking. This allows the sellers to easily upload and view their products. The navigation and operations should be kept simpler because all your sellers are not tech experts.
