Scaling a Multi Vendor Marketplace with Acquiring and Onboarding

Do you plan to create a new super-cool and hyper-lucrative marketplace similar to Etsy, eBay, or Amazon? Do you need help with onboarding vendors? What strategies could you implement to get the best results quickly? And how to get the best results on scaling a multi-vendor eCommerce marketplace with acquiring and onboarding?

Let’s see what you can do to speed up acquiring and onboarding vendors since that has been the backbone for most multi vendor marketplace owners.

What strategies can you implement to speed up the process?

Acquiring and onboarding vendors is crucial in building a booming multi vendor marketplace business. The success of your venture depends mainly on this step, and if you fail here, you’re most likely to end up with a website with high maintenance costs and low income.

To prevent this from happening, you might want to implement some (or perhaps all) of these strategies:

1. Outreach
2. Networking
3. -Referral program
4. Online Advertising
5. Optimizing onboarding process
6. Offering support and training
7. Setting standards

Now that we named them, let’s see what each strategy brings to the table and how to suit your business model best.

Outreach

Reaching out to potential vendors for your multivendor marketplace through email, phone, or in-person meetings can be challenging, draining, and time-consuming. Not to mention you’ll need salespersons to do that if you don’t want to spend hours and hours talking to buyers yourself.

The email outreach strategy was the most efficient back in the old days when people actually used to open their emails. Nowadays, when the average office worker gets more than 100 emails a day, it’s most likely they won’t even open an email you send, or in a worst-case scenario, you’ll end up in spam.

But hey, email outreach is a strategy that only costs a little. All you need is the following:

• A list of email addresses of the potential vendors
• A great subject line that attracts attention and nudges the recipient to click and open your email
• Excellent explanation of the benefits of joining the marketplace and how it can help them grow their business
• A tool such as Mail Chimp, Moosend, or similar to send many emails automatically, securing your letter doesn’t end up in spam.

Networking

What can you achieve with a networking strategy? You want to reach people who are your target market, and where are they all today? On social media, of course.

Okay, networking doesn’t mean that you’re doing that only through social media; it encompasses trade shows, industry events, conferences, fairs, etc., but ever since the pandemic made us switch to the online world, most of the networking is online.

What’s good about networking? Well, first of all, you can present your brand to the audience, build awareness of your brand, and easily reach out to the target market.

Networking helps build relationships and trust, making it more likely for vendors to join the marketplace. So, all you have to do is to check what social media your audience uses the most (depending on a specific niche, if you have it) or what trade shows would be interesting for your audience and start showing up there!

Referral Program for Business Growth

You know, the best advertising tactic is mouth-to-mouth, and a referral program is precisely that, with a reward. Besides being one of the most effective ways to increase sales, it’s an excellent multi vendor marketplace strategy for attracting high-quality vendors quickly.

So, what you’re actually doing with the referral program is incentivizing current vendors to refer other vendors to the marketplace. What you need to do to make it as efficient as possible is to:

1. Determine the incentives – You need to decide on the incentives you offer to vendors who refer new sellers to your multi vendor marketplace. Will it be a commission on the generated sales by the referred vendors, monetary reward, or some other type (physical gift, lower commission for the vendor who referred, or similar)? It’s all up to you.
2. Make it clear – You need to clearly communicate the referral program to the existing vendors, especially regarding incentives, the way program works, who is eligible to participate, and how to do that. Make rules and show them to your current vendors.
3. Set up a system for tracking referrals – You need a tracking system to ensure that vendors are credited for their referrals. It can be a simple Google Sheet integrated with your marketplace that collects the information automatically.
4. Promotion plan – Promotion is an essential part of referrals. You must inform your vendors about the referral program through your website, newsletters, and other marketing channels. Encourage your vendors to participate.
5. Strong support – If your vendors have questions regarding referrals, you need to offer support, answering any questions they might have.
6. Assess and adjust – Like any strategy, the referral strategy is subject to change. You must constantly monitor your campaign and change it if the results differ from what you expected.

By following these steps, you can create a successful referral program that helps you acquire new vendors, build relationships with existing ones, and scale your marketplace.

Online Advertising for Scaling Multi Vendor Marketplace

Online advertising can be an excellent strategy for attracting new vendors. Not to mention the impact it has on your brand awareness. But if you don’t set it right, it might cost you a fortune without any results.

So, what you need to do, is to research a bit and see which channel is the most suitable for online advertising in your case. Yes, you can use various combinations, but the primary channel will be where your target audience hangs out.

Let’s see what online advertising strategies you can use!

1. Social media advertising – Whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, or any other channel, you need to know your potential vendors’ primary marketing channel. For example, LinkedIn is a B2B platform; therefore, it’s an excellent choice if you want to attract vendors selling products or services to another business. Instagram advertising is probably your best bet if your marketplace offers visually appealing products. If your potential vendors are more consumer-based (B2C or C2C), then Facebook might be your advertising channel, etc.
2. Google Advertising – Yes, you all know Google AdWords, and it’s a great (a bit expensive, but still great) way to promote your multivendor marketplace. Just make sure you set right what you want as a result of your campaign and what’s the budget for that.
3. Retargeting – Okay, if you don’t know, retargeting is when you set advertisements to be displayed to those who have already visited your website. This type of advertising can effectively keep your marketplace top of mind and drive users back to your site.

Now, here’s the thing about online advertising. There are too many catches, and slipping into the high costs budget is easy. So you might consider hiring an expert to do that for you for long-lasting success.

Easy Onboarding Process Enables You to Scale Your Marketplace

Here’s a big truth, you can have excellent and fully efficient marketing campaigns, but if your onboarding process is too complicated, you won’t see an increase in the number of vendors on your marketplace. Let me explain why.

Most owners often forget that their marketplace is typically not the only marketplace their vendors use to sell products and services. And guess what? In most cases, it’s neither the first one they ever used. Therefore, to make your multivendor marketplace appealing, make it easy for onboarding.

What does that mean? It means your vendor can easily connect their (already) existing stores on other platforms, marketplaces, websites, etc. (other sales channels, in a word) with your multi vendor marketplace.

Make the onboarding process as simple and efficient as possible by providing a user-friendly system that functions perfectly behind the screen, allowing your vendors to connect their stores with your marketplace without needing to leave your site. That way, you’re enabling vendors to join your marketplace quickly, and you’ll be able to scale the marketplace in no time.

For example, SyncSpider has an excellent addon built especially for multivendor marketplaces. This Addon adds an additional dashboard for your vendors from your marketplace frontend dashboard, enabling vendors to integrate their shop into your marketplace in a few clicks.

It means they can integrate their Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, or any other online shop within your marketplace in the simplest possible way. And not only that!

The selected actions are automatically fulfilled through prepared templates for synchronizing your marketplace and vendors’ shops, with minimal input and control.

What do you get from it? Well, you have an easy onboarding process for your vendors and don’t have to think about order processing, stock updates, or order update! That’s all you ever wanted!

 

Support and Training

Yes, you will need to have professional support. That’s a must because vendors sometimes get stuck, even if you provide the most seamless onboarding process. Provide excellent support, and you will overcome any issues they might encounter.

Now, as for training, if you can’t make the onboarding process to be more straightforward, training is a great way to teach sellers how to use your marketplace.

These two (support and training) will help you build trust and ensure sellers become successful using your platform.

 

Be Selective When It Comes to Sellers!

This is just a reminder. I know that starting with your multi vendor marketplace can be overwhelming, up to the point that your standards sometimes lose. But make sure you remain selective regarding new sellers because you can damage your reputation by accepting everything and everyone.

Don’t forget your business encompasses both buyers and sellers, not just one side. And if you want to create the best marketplace, you need both. Your ultimate (and long-term) goal is maintaining high-quality standards to keep customers happy and returning.

 

Conclusion

Firstly, it’s important to note that the best strategy may vary depending on the specific marketplace and its target market. Experiment with different approaches to see what works best for you.

Secondly, set a system that works as perfectly as possible and provide a seamless integration system for your vendors because no one wants to lose time doing tasks manually.

And lastly, don’t give up. If one system or one strategy is not functioning or not giving the best results, change it, try another one, and get your multi vendor marketplace strategy to work.