As business growth specialists, we are seeing a clear trend towards transforming a traditional eCommerce website into a multi vendor marketplace. Increasingly, digital entrepreneurs are widening their single vendor stores and offering their customers multiple varieties of products and services provided by different independent retailers.
Both eCommerce websites and marketplace are designed to maintain the online activities of retail businesses, some fundamental differences still exist between them. An eCommerce site, in most cases, is developed to serve a specific brand and sell only in-house products in its own inventory.
Instead, marketplace owners only sell their platform services. For example, each retailer rents the space on a marketplace website and, depending on monetization methods, pays the fee.
Advantages of Marketplaces over eCommerce Websites
The reason for the rapid growth of multi vendor marketplace platform, and the popularity of the business model surpass to a slight degree of building a simple online store. Here some of the benefits of marketplaces
A marketplace itself will not sell any products; this might reduce financial risks. An eCommerce website owner must invest in inventory and sell new supplies as soon as possible. If that is not the case, the investment will not be profitable.
The marketplace has a high demand with various retailers, as registering and selling on a marketplace website is easier and far more reasonable than investing effort in building and maintaining a separate website.
Marketplace offers a huge range of products and services than eCommerce websites; therefore, buyers can compare the quality and price of products and make more choices.
How to Convert an eCommerce Website into an Online Marketplace?
If you are looking how to add marketplace functions to your online store, it is possible with Magento 2 multi vendor marketplace extension is an efficient way to turn your traditional e-commerce site into a real marketplace. There is a wide range of Magento 2 marketplace extensions are available on the market.
Magento 2 marketplace module converts your Magento 2 store turns into a complete marketplace for online shopping with multiple vendors. With Magento 2 extension, the sellers can manage their own product listings, orders, inventory, shipment, seller profile page, and more.
Marketplace multi vendor module for Magento 2 is an all-in-solution for creating your own shopping marketplace. This extension includes multiple payment gateway and shipping integrations, like PayPal, Aramex, FedEx, and DHL.
Characteristics of Multi-Vendor Marketplace Modules for Magento
The basic features of the Magento and analyze the additional functionality of the Multi vendor marketplace module for Magento 2.
- The module allows creating an attractive interface for customers and sellers on the go which is easy to use and understand.
- The store owner may manage the vendor’s approval manually or automatically.
- The administrator may modify the market layout as required.
- Vendors can easily manage their storefront profiles from their dashboards.
- The administrator may set the seller’s fee separately or may set a global rate for all sellers.
- Customers have the option to report against the seller and their products.
- Simple checkout process
- The module supports multiple payment and shipping gateway.
Additional functionality of the Magento marketplace module
Magento has plenty to offer marketplace users. With help of the Magento marketplace module, customers can:
- Search for sellers by seller store names within a seller list page.
- Compare products by price, vendor rating, and location.
- Compare prices for products from different sellers.
- Contact the vendors with captcha support.
Vendor panel
Although seller panels are not able to see to buyers, they are vital to managing and handling all internal processes in a convenient way.
Common sections
These extensions offer basic sections for sales process management:
- Dashboard
- Order management
- Product creation
- Product management
- Seller profile settings
The Magento 2 marketplace extension provides many tools to manage an online store.
The Magento 2 module provides two interface options for sellers: as a user account on a website and as an administration panel.
User account
- Keep track of their transactions and earnings.
- View the total earnings of their store
- Generate reports and create product attributes & multiple product types
- E-mail notification
- Set invoices and shipments sent by a store.
Admin panel
- Set option to auto-approve for a seller and their products
- Manually can approve or disapprove a seller’s products
- Assign products to a seller.
- Check sellers’ product details.
- Set commission
- Tracking the seller’s income, total orders, and latest orders.
- Build an email template for a marketplace.
Wrapping up
The marketplace website development is a clear trend among entrepreneurs, vendors, and online shoppers. By managing an online marketplace, you can recoup the value of the funds invested in the short term. Nevertheless, to make the most of this business model, you should approach development carefully.
The Magento 2 marketplace module is more supportive and suitable for building eCommerce marketplace websites, which need a highly scalable solution. Magento 2 has countless marketplace extension and analytics tools for merchants and buyers to ahead of their competitors.