by Priya
27 Jun 2018
There was a time where huge shopping malls have pushed out small retailers of narrow focus; online marketplaces do so towards ingenuous online stores today.
So, so what do we see?
Few vendors just close their stores and get benefited from the power of eCommerce giants. Those small vendors successfully sell on such multivendor sites as eBay, Amazon or Etsy. On the contrary, others invest a great to develop their own multi-vendor ecommerce platform never to lose in this tough competition.
And the most ambitious online vendors take most recent ecommerce trends and build their own marketplaces.
In short, a multi-vendor marketplace is a website which attracts multiple vendors to have their own online store under a single platform. All vendors should pay a commission for each sale in the marketplace. They may have their own seller accounts where they manage their products and store themselves. But the transactions are managed by the marketplace administrators. It can be a give-and-take policy where marketplace owner gets larger inventory, and each seller gets buyers.
Frequently, the term online marketplace undergoes many transformations. Simply put, under-resourced markets get dished up, and over-resourced markets start delivering an improved or more affordable product and best customer experience.
Needless to say, starting and managing an ecommerce marketplace is not as easy as managing a small online store (single vendor shopping cart software). A multi-vendor shopping cart admin deals with new challenges to explore unique business opportunities.
You may think that how to build your own ecommerce marketplace by saving your time on research? You have to know everything before and during the launch. In this post, we are going to discuss various online marketplace business models and its opportunities.
Online Marketplaces and Business Models
Typically the term ‘multivendor marketplace’ refers to a huge online shopping mall where multiple vendors showcase physical products of different categories under a single platform to sell for a wide audience of consumers. The biggest player in this industry is eBay, Amazon, Aliexpress, Walmart, Flipkart and so on. These are often called as ‘one-stop-shops’ that is selling everything to everyone.
Anyway, today’s trend is niche marketplaces. Powerful trading platforms combine vendors that sell product or services for a specific industry, profession or demographic, i.e., they focus in a single niche, a single category of products (or brand), customers or businesses with specific needs.
In general, specialized marketplaces are of small and mid-size due to the limited products. But they are the true winners in the market in what they do and they offer a great shopping experience to their customers. Airbnb and Fiverr are good examples of such niche marketplaces.
Before starting your own multi-vendor ecommerce platform, make sure you know who will sell there, what they sell, to whom they sell and how they sell.
Laravel Ecommerce is powerful multi-vendor ecommerce software to help you launch and manage a multi-vendor marketplace with as many sellers and products as you need.