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June 1, 2023
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Is creating a multi-vendor marketplace challenging? What can you expect, and how to create a multi-vendor marketplace website and attract vendors? What best solutions can you implement to scale your eCommerce business faster and within a budget?
Our client, David Kevin Redfern, CEO, and co-founder of TackleTarts, is sharing his experience with you. What challenges they faced, what solutions they tried, how and where SyncSpider helped them, and how long it took for them to see the first results.
The challenge:
Everything started when David and his team began searching for a solution enabling quick onboarding of vendors and a business model that allows scaling from 0 to 150,000 products with minimal capital deployment.
The idea was simple: First, make listing and updating products for vendors easy and simple, then automate all other sale processes (product update, fulfillment, order update)
Their business model didn’t require warehousing, logistics after the sales service, etc., because the vendors managed that. As a marketplace, they work on quite a fine margin, and that’s why they needed to deploy technology to reduce the requirements on HR.
- 1. Enable vendors to list and update their products effortlessly
- 2.Enable automatic order processing for vendors, and order updates
- 3.Decrease business and maintenance costs
01
Enable vendors to list and update their products effortlessly
The bottleneck of every multivendor marketplace is to allow vendors to list products on their marketplace effortlessly.
The second most common issue is to update stock (product sold on the vendors’ online shop, decrease stock on CS-cart marketplace)prices, inventory, etc., without wasting too much time.
A typical vendor would have 500 to 15,000 products, and it would be unrealistic to expect that they will upload the changes in price, inventory, etc., manually.
The marketplace needed to provide a software solution that would enable automation and achieve that.
02
Enable vendors to list and update their products effortlessly
Set up a system where an order made in CS-Cart is automatically sent to fulfillment via vendors’ online shop. Add support for Shopify, Magento, Lightspeed, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce, and also support marketplaces where vendors list their products, like eBay.
Send order updates from vendors’ online shop to CS-Cart marketplace to send order status data back to the buyer. For example, send order status (sent, in delivery.. ), send the tracking number, and notify the order as delivered.
03
Decrease business and maintenance costs
Multivendor marketplaces always have two options:
To build connections to all the individual eCommerce platforms (Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, etc.) on their own (and then have to deal with API maintenance, dealing with developers, and handling bugs themselves) or to pay individual plugins (that may or may not work, and most likely will interfere with each other causing automation setbacks). If they choose this option, they must maintain the plugins, etc.
Or look for a SaaS platform that would cover all use cases and have the entire setup in one system, easily accessible under one subscription.
TackleTarts realized it’s better to go for the second option because it’s more cost-efficient.
The Solution:
Why SyncSpider as the integration platform solution for the multi-vendor marketplace?
According to TackleTarts, there are plenty of software solutions on the market, but they rarely offer what suits their needs, and most of them are not user-friendly and not easy to integrate. SyncSpider was the tool that satisfied approximately 80% of the requirements.
SyncSpider has provided solutions for all listed challenges.
SyncSpider offered a wide range of integrations on its list and resources to help the niggling problems every multi-vendor marketplace faces. It provides maintenance support for the system, which means they deal with eventual problems that might occur.
For example, if the market was experiencing issues with CS-Cart API, it wasn’t up to the marketplace’s team to solve it but to the SyncSpider development team.
And that was the crucial thing that made them opt for SyncSpider instead of other options.
That takes a lot of pressure off us and allows us to focus on development resources on other parts of the business.
And that’s something that I really like.
Georg Horninger – Head of IT at Sonnleitner
It’s constantly evolving and does everything we need to do without me getting involved; it’s autopilot.
And I like the incremental checks.
Georg Horninger – Head of IT at Sonnleitner
The Solution:
TackleTarts doubled the number of products they sell by offering vendors a wholly automated, functional, and reliable marketplace within just 6 to 8 months, including the setup time, which was, in that specific case, a bit longer than usual. From their experience, scaling a multivendor marketplace is possible through using SyncSpider, due to more than 400+ available integrations.
“We can speak to a lot more vendors because we have integrations to a lot more technology, and it makes it easy to scale.”
Why TackleTarts marketplace loves SyncSpider:
That takes a lot of pressure off us and allows us to focus on development resources on other parts of the business.
And that’s something that I really like.
Georg Horninger – Head of IT at Sonnleitner