An Insight Into Marketplace Management Challenges And Strategies In 2023

From the past few years, mainly after the pandemic, e-commerce marketplaces have become new favorites of retailers because of their capability of creating an exceptional user experience. These marketplaces have given businesses a seamless way to reach their customers. 

The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic gave a push to more businesses to go online. Even though many businesses expanded their operations online and were successful, many did not succeed as presumed. Many businesses faced challenges while implementing marketplace strategies. 

Needless to say, with this rapid adoption of e-commerce, every business needs to work harder to make it to the top place. And to step up their business amongst the massive competition, and to take advantage of $5.55 trillion e-commerce, all businesses need to understand the challenges in marketplace management to overcome problems in the marketplace. 

Challenges in Marketplace 

There are a lot of challenges that sellers face during selling like data security, customer loyalty, unexpected price increase, stockouts, SEO mastery, return, refunds, fulfillment, and more. Marketplace business consists of two groups of business, the buyer and the seller, and all face their type of challenges. Let us look at the main challenges in effective marketplace management, they are as follows. 

Ranking and Listing:

Every marketplace management system organizes, lists, and ranks the available products differently, for example, Amazon’s system is different from Flipkart's. A noticeable fact is that the sellers focus on few rules and often tend to ignore others, which leads to the mismanagement of a multi-channel marketplace presence. 

Redundant Activities:

It is seen that having a presence in various marketplaces, sellers add or modify listings repeatedly. It in turn can add a lot of workload and errors to your marketplace.

Forecasting and Inventory Mismanagement:  

Sellers need to understand the need for a perfect grasp of inventory. A lot of businesses tend to overstock, oversell, or do incorrect product forecasting and more. And if the business has multiple channels, it can become a big problem.

Poor User Experience:

Having a poor product page can give the seller tough times. Customers lose interest in the product if the navigation page is not attractive, and they may leave in between. That can lead to high cart abandonment rates, and it can be harmful to the business.

Poor Retention Rates:

The business can only be successful when your customers come back to you. Many times business focus on getting new customers while not bothering about the existing employees. Such strategies can lead to less retention rate, so it is important to keep offering customers coupons, discounts, and more to existing customers. 

Updates and Changes in Algorithms: 

We are living in a world where nothing is fixed, the same goes for marketplaces. The marketplaces keep updating their algorithms as well as listing requirements. So, keeping yourself updated with the algorithms and finding out an efficient solution can help you a lot in your business. 

Efficient Strategies for Effective marketplace Management

Great strategies and effective marketplace management can help you boost and get a seamless user experience. With the right technologies and practices, the marketplace can be managed easily and efficiently. There are a few strategies that businesses need to opt for to make efficient marketplace management. 

Regulate Listing and SKUs: 

Having a defined and specific format for your SKU and listings helps you track, and use different listings while managing inventory. Defining a standardized process can include creating titles, descriptions, and other elements of your listings; leaving no room for errors.

Investing in Inventory Management Software:

Managing inventory can be a tough and tricky task, mainly when you are a multi-channel seller. Not having a systematic system for inventory management, you can lose out on many sales. The issues like unavailability of products, long delivery times, supply chain, etc, can be seen due to poor inventory management. To avoid such issues, it is wise to use inventory management software that can keep a track of all your products. Using the software can keep you updated 24×7 when you are running out of products or when the products are reaching their expiry date and other information.

Listing Automation Solution: 

Listing Automation Solution is crucial for multi-channel sellers, as it helps you eliminate the work of managing listings across multiple channels. Which in turn increases efficiency and helps you find and resolve any listing errors that can harm the business.

Product Catalog: 

Having your data at a single location helps you manage your listing properly. This is useful if you are listed on multiple marketplaces. Moreover, a centralized product catalog serves as a reference for your team and minimizes problems while logging into marketplaces individually. 

Engaging Product Page Experience: 

The product page guides the customers to navigate properly and helps them find the products, interact with them and purchase them. An interactive page must have interactive content and graphics, which in turn increase the credibility and trust among the customers. 

Effective Analytics and Reporting:

To know more about your customer’s purchase patterns, every business must have access to customers’ data like behavioral patterns, purchase decisions, and more. Customer data can help business to make mindful decisions while keeping the customers in mind after doing proper analytics and reporting.

Summing-up

Using services like catalog management, marketing operations, customer support, and reporting and analytics can help you manage your marketplace listings and overcome challenges related to the marketplace. 

If you are looking for the best Marketplace Solutions, you are at the right place. Leverage the experience and expertise of the jiWebTech team to manage your marketplace presence and get holistic marketplace management solutions. Our solutions help you grow your marketplace presence by implementing the right growth strategies effectively.