Attracting new sellers to your marketplace is a huge challenge, but onboarding is what clinches the deal. In order to effectively incorporate new sellers and ensure ongoing satisfaction, it is crucial to ensure a seamless seller onboarding process, ongoing user support and easy website management.
When building your marketplace, you must first identify your target audience and then locate the best channels to reach them. A deep understanding of your potential vendors, as well as their concerns and interests, will enable you to formulate the right messaging to bring them aboard.
How can you facilitate marketplace onboarding?
Convince vendors that it’s worthwhile
Your first task is to convince online sellers that your marketplace will make life easier for them. Describe how your platform promotes operational control through integration with their existing solutions as well as built-in features such as easy inventory management, order management and an array of payment possibilities. Meet the needs of a variety of vendor types by offering specialized plugins and extensions.
You can also partner with 3rd party product intelligence solutions to quantify the sellers’ opportunity of selling their specific inventory on your marketplace.
Automate your processes
In order to ensure fast scaling of your marketplace, automate as many of your processes as possible. Support should not be dependent only on a manual team. Provide precise explanations for each stage as well as short FAQs to prevent dependency on auxiliary manpower.
Facilitate the seller registration process
When it comes to onboarding, set up a designated, user-friendly page that includes all the required registration steps and specifies the types of documentation needed. Add a link to the page on your website and in the navigation menu to enable easy access.
Provide concise training modules
Rather than grinding out long training guides, prepare short training videos for each of the onboarding stages. You can also prepare an interactive walkthrough, accompanying sellers step-by-step through the process. This makes the training process more palatable and easier to grasp. Short instructional videos can be prepared for each of the back office tasks.
Offer user-friendly templates and DIY tools
While smooth initial registration is important, that is only the first step. Provide your vendors with user-friendly tools to easily upload special offers, ads, images and information. In addition, enable them to easily integrate with your built-in features such as payment and billing systems.
Enable automatic enrichment of catalog data
The prospect of manually uploading hundreds of thousands of products is daunting and susceptible to human error – especially if you require complete item data. An AI-based product intelligence/marketing analysis platform enables automated cataloging of new products, product data enhancement, and accurate product identification in real-time. The ability to provide consistent data about the vendor’s fluctuating range of products is not only crucial during onboarding but also on a daily basis.
Want to effectively facilitate your onboarding process? Contact us today.
