Despite the economic challenges and uncertainties faced by businesses worldwide, the eCommerce sector continues to thrive. In fact, 2023 has seen a significant increase in new sellers on Amazon marketplaces, with over 300,000 new vendors joining the platform this year alone.
Why is that?
Multi Vendor marketplaces have retained their profitability in the eCommerce industry. Moreover, people prefer online shopping over local retail shops for obvious reasons, which is further boosting eCommerce businesses.
eCommerce marketplaces are currently thriving, making this the best possible time to focus on your target audience. Recent industry reports highlight the continuous rise of eCommerce, driven by advancements in technology and shifting consumer behaviors.
In addition to eCommerce marketplaces, streaming services, video conferencing, and logistics & delivery have continued to see significant traffic growth. This trend is driven by ongoing technological advancements and changing consumer habits.
In the next section, we’ll discuss two key ways to procure online traffic. One involves using ads and SEO strategies to increase search engine rankings and online exposure. The other method is more budget-friendly, addressing the needs of companies looking to optimize their marketing spend. The points discussed in this section will help you enhance your online presence without requiring a large budget.
So without further ado, let’s get started!
Things that help increase online traffic
SEO
There are other marketplaces on the internet looking to direct traffic to their storefront. An excellent SEO strategy gives you the edge required to rise above them in search results.
And it all starts with what Keyword you want to target and rank when people are searching for similar products.
For instance, let’s assume you’re selling hand sanitizers on your marketplace. Before writing a product description you can open the Google keyword planner and search for target keywords in your region that are relevant to your product.
After opening the keyword planner you’ll need to enter a few search terms.
Once finished you click on ‘Get Results’ to get a list of keywords that matches your search terms.
Use these keywords in titles, meta descriptions, and page content to improve your marketplace’s visibility on the web. These wooCommerce add-ons will also help you to achieve such on-page optimization. Google analytics is yet another tool that can help you and your sellers gauge the performance of your product pages, tweak it accordingly, and attract more traffic.
Key SEO practices include:
Keyword research: Use tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs to find relevant keywords for your niche. Integrate these keywords naturally into your content to improve search engine rankings.
On-page SEO: Optimise your titles, meta descriptions, headers, and images with targeted keywords. Ensure your website’s layout is user-friendly.
Quality content: Ensure your content is valuable and relevant to your audience’s needs. High-quality content attracts more visitors and encourages them to stay on your site longer.
Technical SEO: Improve your site’s speed, mobile-friendliness, and secure it with HTTPS. A faster website provides a better user experience and ranks higher on search engines.
Here is a more in-depth guide if you want to learn more about the topic.
Referral Marketing
According to recent data, 83% of consumers say they either completely or somewhat trust word-of-mouth recommendations from their close circles, making these the most trusted source of information about brands and services (EveryoneSocial) (MarketingCharts)..
You get free traffic for basically a minuscule amount of front end effort. Ask customers to recommend your site to others whenever they buy something.
You can even reward them small discounts or other benefits for every successful referral.
Dropbox is a shining example of this strategy, offering you and your friends 500 MB of cloud storage up to a maximum of 16 GB.
They increased signups by 60%, getting 4 million new users within 15 months. You too can apply a similar plan to increase your eCommerce website traffic.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective tools to increase your online traffic. It’s time to put that subscriber list at your disposal to good use.
The benefits of Email Marketing are:
- Cost-Effective: Email marketing is affordable, offering high ROI with minimal investment.
- Targeted Messaging: Allows precise audience segmentation for personalized content.
- High Engagement: Boosts customer engagement with direct communication and tailored offers.
- Measurable Results: Provides clear metrics to track performance and optimize campaigns.
- Increased Conversions: Drives sales and repeat business through consistent and relevant outreach.
According to a study conducted by Bain and Company, repeat customers are likely to spend 67% more on an eCommerce site.
Promotional emails customised to your customer’s browsing and buying patterns are your best option at tapping into that customer pool and supercharge your online traffic.
Guest Blogging
You can also use guest blogging to generate traffic for your marketplace. The first thing you should consider is to find a website that accepts guest posts and is also pertaining to your niche.
Learn the style and flow of some of the high-performing content on those sites and try to write accordingly.
As for topic selection, you write based on your personal experience, case studies or whatever is trending at the given time.
You might also want to do demographic research, find out who your target audience is and curate your content specifically to their requirements.
It is important that you provide valuable information to your readers because only then will you be able to attract more traffic to your marketplace.
Advertising
Advertising is expensive and if you are on a tight budget, you’ll want the most ROI on your campaigns.
Online ads can generate tens and thousands of traffic, but without a target demographic, you won’t earn profits from your website.
When it comes to posting ads, not only can you post them on websites, but can also take advantage of social media platforms. They already established communities making it easier for you to double down on your target audience.
However, advertising what people want and invoking them to click your visually compelling ads is only the first step of the puzzle.
What you require is an equally compelling website that keeps your customer rooted as they browse through your stock.
A well-structured marketplace contributes to your buyer’s journey, ensuring,
- Higher sales
- Repeat business
- Customer satisfaction
Let’s take a look at some of the prerequisites of a well-structured multivendor marketplace.
Prerequisites of a Well-Structured Multivendor Marketplace
Source: jellyfishtechnologies.com
You researched your niche, looked through the competition, devised a sales strategy and is now excited to start selling.
It doesn’t matter if you’re new to the game or have been playing it for a while. What’s important is to ensure a smooth traffic flow and retain it for the days to come, and the following checklist will help you achieve just that.
Well here is a checklist of all the things for a successful marketplace:
- Differentiator or Unique Selling Point- You need one to stand out amongst your competition, build trust and grow your business in the long run.
- Feature List- Overloading your marketplace can overwhelm the sellers, customers and the (admin).
- Advanced Reports and Data- Data is the driving force of any multi vendor marketing marketplace, enabling you to make sound decisions based on solid numerical data.
- Scalability- A multivendor marketplace needs to be scalable so that you can accommodate more sellers and varieties of products in future.
- Communication- A fast and reliable way to communicate between customers, vendors and the website owner.jellyfishtechnologies.com
- Simplistic User Interface- Allowing the admin and the sellers to keep track of important information from a single dashboard.
- Multiple Payment Gateways- Providing users multiple gateways to complete payments is a great way to encourage customers into buying items from your sellers.
- Mobile Responsive- The mobile market plays a major role in generating traffic and revenues for businesses around the world.
What top sites have in common is a flawless, optimized, and signature web design. Any visitor can relate to the simplicity with which they once navigated a webpage.
As marketplace giants, companies like Amazon have established a standard which they are continuously improving over the years. Be it Amazon, ebay or Airbnb. Though you are not expected to compete with the likes of these giants, the best you can do is to provide a premium shopping experience for your customers.
Multi Vendor websites emphasize on:
- Faster loading times and various product management features, allowing the customers to skim through their itineraries with ease.
- Other customer friendly features include seamless navigation, easy checkout, order tracking, and multiple payment options.
- Feature rich dashboard for sellers to display and keep track of eCommerce sales.
- Other seller friendly features include shipping info, import-export
- Similar dashboard for admins giving them complete control over their marketplace.
- Other admin friendly features include product catalogs, data and analytics, product review management and other customizations.
These websites differ in terms of looks and offer varying ways to communicate with prospective customers. Although they share some core features, they are inherently different in regards to how customers interact with the platform.
Now that you know what’s required let’s take a look at what we offer to help you build the perfect marketplace solution.
MultiVendorX is one of the highest-rated WooCommerce plugins for WordPress, and we provide a wide variety of in-demand features and inbuilt modules.
We also consider user feedback and our development team is working round the clock to introduce features that are mostly demanded by our community. Our goal is to provide you with the right tools and services so that you can start selling without any issues.
Continue reading to find out exactly how we contribute to your online marketplace.
How can we help in Optimizing your Customer Serviceability?
Source: freepik.com
As a multivendor marketplace owner, we understand that you want to provide the best possible journey for your sellers and customers. To help you achieve that goal, MultiVendorX offers 55 modules that you can use to create the perfect shopping experience, such as,
- Easy to understand and informative buyer interface for customers
- Dedicated Q/A sections to answer commonly asked questions
- Multiple payment gateways and multilingual support
We also take suggestions from our community regarding the most popular features they want included in MultiVendorX. We even managed to include a few of them on our latest v18.6.
For a better understanding, we have divided the modules into two categories:
- Essential modules- Recommended modules required to run an efficient marketplace.
- Feature oriented modules- Specific features that provide some additional functionalities.
This way, you can judge which modules are best suited for the current state of your marketplace.
Essential Modules
MultiVendorX is a free plugin. Which means you only have to pay for hosting and domain name. After you’ve installed WordPress and WooCommerce, you can simply download MultiVendorX and start selling. You can even download the shipping addon and get started with your dropshipping business.
You can run a business with just the shipping addon, but as your venture expands, you might need to introduce additional features, not only for your customers but also for the sellers as well.
For instance, the Advanced Frontend Manager provides a dedicated dashboard for sellers. They can now add various product types such as booking, affiliate products, import export features and much more. The front end access enables them to get more done relatively quickly.
Some other essential recommendations include:
- MultiVendorX Vendor Frontend Reports
- MultiVendorX Vendor SEO and Analytics
- MultiVendorX Vendor Membership
- MultiVendorX Seller Verification
These modules provide the infrastructure to run a successful and scalable online marketplace. But you can add even more functionalities simplifying the interaction between the vendors and customers.
Feature-Oriented Modules
Feature oriented modules provide unique features. For instance, let’s take a look at the MultiVendorX Stripe Marketplace Plugin, which enables customers to pay via Stripe.
Stripe also comes with a unique split payment feature which automatically divides customer payments on a single order. The amount is distributed among all the vendors whose products were bought at the checkout.
However, you can also manually distribute the amount among vendors. But as your market scales, you might not be able to follow up on the hundreds of transactions taking place on a daily basis.
The automatic feature is, therefore, an added functionality which you can consider getting later on once your business starts growing. Similarly, we offer other features aimed at providing you with a resourceful marketplace.
Here is a list of all the feature-oriented plugins offered by MultiVendorX:
- MultiVendorX Mangopay Payment for marketplace
- WooCommerce Catalog Enquiry Pro
- MultiVendorX Vendor Staff
- MultiVendorX Vendor Stock Alert
- MultiVendorX Vendor Vacation
- MultiVendorX PDF Invoice
At the beginning of the blog, we began with a vision, an idea for a marketplace. After reading about the modules, we are now aware of what is required to create one.
Now you might be wondering what would happen if something goes wrong? What if an addon isn’t working correctly? What if you don’t know how to operate a plugin? How would your marketplace perform on mobile devices?
Well, fret not as we have got you covered. Here is a list of additional services that we offer to ensure your marketplace runs smoothly and without any issues.
What do we offer?
Mobile-Friendly Interface
In 2024, there are approximately 6.92 billion smartphone users worldwide, reflecting the significant growth in mobile device usage over recent years (Search Engine Journal) (Search Engine Journal). The statistic about Google’s algorithm update on April 21, 2015, granting higher preference to mobile-optimized websites is still relevant as the company completed its switch to mobile-first indexing in 2023, prioritizing mobile versions of sites when crawling and indexing (compileBlog).
A majority of your potential customers could access the marketplace via smartphones. Therefore, a website that can adapt to multiple displays without compromising usability has a huge impact on conversion rates and user retention.
We understand the importance of a mobile interface. That’s why our developers take extra effort to ensure that Marketplaces built with MultiVendorX are always mobile friendly.
Technical Support
We have a long list of customer reviews who are greatly satisfied with our support. MultiVendorX developers work round the clock to provide lightning-fast solutions to any problems you may encounter.
Starting a multivendor marketplace isn’t as tricky as combatting low traffic. Once you have a minimum viable product, you can take advantage of our tools to address the pages experiencing low traffic. You can,Create a robust online presence to satisfy the shopping requirements Scale your business
Conclusion
So what are your thoughts on the matter? Do you think we covered all the important bits about creating and nurturing a marketplace? Feel free to mail us in case of any questions.
In case you’re feeling up to the task, download the free version of MultiVendorX to get a glimpse of what you can achieve within a multi vendor marketplace.
