Marketplace Seller Management: How to Attract Sellers on Your B2C Marketplace

A practical guideline on how to convince sellers to sell products on your internet multi vendor platform and get more suppliers

Every online marketplace starts out empty. The main differentiator of those that attract thousands of visitors daily, is the ability to get the multi vendor e-commerce marketplace magnet for customers—quality sellers.

The e-commerce leaders adopt various approaches to acquire sellers and turn their multi seller shopping malls into globally famous thriving wholesale multi vendor platforms.

Etsy leveraged a large craftsmen community that already existed; thus the ecommerce platform had highly targeted wholsale suppliers on the very day of launching.

Amazon turned an e-store into a multiple supplier ecommerce mall. The Internet shopping mall platform first established a large customer base as an online book reseller, to convince independent selling vedors to join its new web multi vendors website model later on.

Airbnb invited existing suppliers from Craigslist, and developed sellers-newcomers from scratch as well.

Thus, there are many ways to attract sellers to your virtual multi vendor marketplace and convince them to stay there for long.

1. Define Your Ideal Seller Portrait to Find Real Ones Successfully

To form an offer that will convince your targeted wholesale suppliers to try out a new virtual wholesale platform, build a detailed picture of their personalities, professional characteristics, and expectations.

1.1 Define your targeted vendors’ segment

As mentioned in our How to open an online marketplace article, before you approach sellers with your offer, you need to narrow a segment that fits your multi vendor e-commerce mall idea.

By concept:

• Business To Consumer suppliers (B2C): Amazon, eBay.
• Consumer To Consumer sellers (C2C): Airbnb, Etsy.
• Business To Business (B2B), then a marketplace is a medium for businesses to find wholesale suppliers among other organizations: Alibaba, Sears.

By a seller professional level:

• Non-professional sellers (craftsmen, artisans): Etsy, Country Culture.
• Professional selling vendors (traders, suppliers): Alibaba.

By a virtual marketplace type:

• Service-oriented: Upwork, MyClean.
• Physical products: Etsy, eBay.
• Digital products: Gumroad.

Having the narrow segment helps to define where to find wholesale suppliers who match your concept the most, understand their needs and prepare an offer that will work for them.

There are also 5 quick tactics that can help attract sellers to your marketplace. Learn more about them in the video:

1.2 Find and attracting sellers that match your marketplace concept

Potential sellers that would be newcomers in e-commerce can be found in offline and online business directories and aggregators, hobby clubs, networking groups, trade associations, online forums, offline stores, and workshops.

Country Culture, a well-known Australian Internet multi vendor platform for local designers and producers from all over the country, is searching for selling vendors offline.

Ange Lavender, the founder, claims that the main sources to find wholesale suppliers are local villages with designers and producers that are crafting quality products in hidden workspaces.

The team even placed the company mascot—a dog Rusty’s photo on the website, to reflect the way of finding vendors. Most of the time, it’s only locals who know how to find those designers.

Established sellers already work on Internet malls and are presented with their products on other relevant virtual shopping mall wholesale platforms, social media, and communities.

While being a startup, Airbnb launched an email-campaign, though isn’t official but a hidden one, to invite Craigslist’s rental suppliers to try out their ecommerce platform.

The emails were set up on behalf of a random young lady, who was encouraging Craigslist’s sellers to check out Airbnb:

Existing communities represent a highly-targeted group of potential sellers that match your virtual shopping mall wholesale platform concept but don’t sell products online yet.

Before the multi supplier shopping mall idea popped up, Etsy’s future founders were collaborating with getcrafty.com, a 10,000 members message board. Getcrafty was a community of artisans and craftsmen, who were looking for a good place to sell handmade products online.

The Etsy founders decided to establish a virtual multi vendor mall to satisfy that need, and while building it, they discovered another community of around 100,000 craftsmen.

With this, the wholesale multi supplier platform had thousands of sellers to register and try the platform out at the very day of launching. They easily gained more than 100,000 highly-targeted sellers.

1.3 Dig into sellers’ expectations and needs to form a perfect offer

There are the few common advantages that help you with finding vendors so they try your multi supplier e-commerce mall:

• an opportunity to embrace new markets and gain a wide customer audience;
• ability to use a web marketplace advanced features and infrastructure;
• a new sales channel and additional promotion;
• a chance to try out online sales and start their business—for newcomers.

However, it’s useful to establish an understanding of the unique needs and characteristics of your targeted seller group, to form a unique offer that will convince them to join your wholesale multi vendor platform.

Thus, it’s better to implement research that is embracing exactly your audience.

Set up a data-driven picture about sellers

For example, Etsy’s multiple supplier eCommerce website survey reveals important details about its sellers:

• 91 percent of the sellers are female;
• 20 percent work at the platform full-time, and 65 percent part-time;
• 40 percent of sellers needed no funding to start working on Etsy.

The sellers’ business types and demographic information is surveyed as well.

With such information at hand and a well-thought e commerce vendor management processes, it is possible to build a detailed seller portrait, to tweak a proposal, and outline the best approach for future negotiations with wholesale suppliers.

Such a survey can be implemented through polls or questionnaires, or the data you need can be accessed through the existing surveys that are embracing your targeted sellers.

When you have a picture of your targeted suppliers’ characteristics and needs, it’s time to set up an offer and build an acquisition strategy.

True Experience #1

Kim Smith, Content Marketer with GoodFirms, a B2B Research and Review Platform

Digging into the classic Egg-Chicken problem of E-Commerce, where the question is Supply first or Demand first? It is quite evidentiary that the secret lies within the balance. To lure the customers with the presence of attractive products and to lure the wholesale suppliers with a presence of sizable, engaging customers.

So yes, Customers: In the initial phase of the E-Commerce, you can lure in sellers on your platform by marketing yourself that you can bring in targeted customers for them. But on a longer run, it is the size of your customer base which would attract sellers to come on your platform and sell products.

Simpler Logistics: What any seller would be happy to deal with is an incoming order, handing over the product and getting paid. Simple. This ideology plays an important part in marketing your platform to sellers. Making a platform where wholesale suppliers have ease and smoothness in the technology sector would make your platform stand apart. For an example putting a smooth transaction service or a better shipping service.

Seller-Customer Relations: Being the link, what a seller would want is to fill the gap between the supplier (seller) and customer. To become the voice of the customer for the seller to keep up the trend of the market. Plus to become a Customer-Support for the seller to keep the reputation for the seller.

Back-End Help: For an E-Commerce point of view, a seller is not much different from a buyer. Giving a back-end helping hand to a seller to in terms of inventory management, cash flow management, and much more helps gain trust and value from sellers.

2. Negotiations and Acquisition

Before you approach potential sellers with your offer, consider your competitors’ conditions to prepare the better ones and to convince wholesale suppliers to join your virtual wholesale shopping mall platform.

2.1 Research competitors to outperform them with your offer

If there are multi seller shopping malls with the concept that is similar to yours out there, research their offer to find additional elements to strengthen yours.

For example, the reasons why Etsy is popular among its online vendors are:

• wholesale suppliers use the web mall, not having to create their own websites;
• ability to set up a shop and start working quickly: a basic template and payment system are ready to be used as the part of the virtual mall ecosystem;
• for newcomers—they can try running their business without the financial risk;

Thus, the main values that Etsy provides are minimal financial resources and technical skills that sellers need to set up a shop.

At the same time, Etsy has its contra:

• fees are getting higher;
• copycats: the original design of a seller can be copied by another supplier;
• bad customization: listings are relatively unimaginative.

Based on that, consider your virtual multi vendor mall concept and value-added services, and form an offer that will outperform the existing multi vendors website services.

For example, Flipkart has an Infringement Verification process that helps intellectual property owners report listings that infringe their rights:

By combining such an option with a better listings’ customization feature and lower fees you could outperform even a well-known multiple vendor ecommerce mall like Etsy and convince it’s sellers to join your wholesale multi supplier platform.

The example shows that, if after competitors research you’d defined certain points where competitors’ weakness, your online mall strengths and sellers need overlap, you should emphasize them to sellers at first.

2.2 Acquise sellers with concrete steps

Take a personal approachAirbnb’s founders were traveling across the country to meet their first suppliers in person.

The virtual mall specific—sharing living space with strangers from all over the world—implied that it would be the best to personally communicate with the first suppliers, to convince them that the multiple vendor eСommerce mall can provide security and trust.

2.3 Spread a positive example—demonstrate your sellers’ success

If it’s impossible to communicate with wholesale suppliers in person, establish a go-to blog, a seller forum, a vendors website, or a community to show potential sellers the success of the existing ones, to convince them to join through seeing all the benefits existing suppliers have while working on your multi-seller store.

Flipkart is showing its sellers success stories referring to local Indian tradition of the family business:

This case also demonstrates that it is important to adapt your strategy to a targeted seller’s personal characteristics.

In Indian society, the family business is very common; thus the virtual wholesale shopping mall platform is not only showcasing the existing seller’s success, but it is doing it in a way that fits the targeted wholesale suppliers’ values.

2.4 Solve potential vendors’ challenges

For a B2B seller, going global usually requires a large budget and significant infrastructure changes. Emphasize the advantages of working through an online mall to convince B2B-sellers:

• minimum costs;
• ability to use existing infrastructure and ecosystem to tap into new markets;
• the first sales come much sooner than in case if a B2B-seller is expanding business in a traditional way, and building its own local infrastructure.

Also, you could convince a company to join your multi seller shopping mall by solving existing wholesale supplier issues.

For example, a seller’s deadstock can be listed on your multi vendor e-commerce mall at a low price.
This will help to demonstrate a marketplace good work and build trust in advance.

eBay has a Deadstock sub-category to help wholesale suppliers sell products of that kind faster:

Offer special conditions. To motivate sellers to join a new wholesale multi vendor platform, you can put a zero price for the post-launching period, like Etsy:

Besides, this example shows another important argument to convince online vendors.

The virtual multi vendor marketplace demonstrated new sellers how exactly it is going to attract customers and boost traffic–by promoting the wholesale ecommerce platform through the niche events:

Instead of a zero price, an established multi seller shopping mall which wants to attract more sellers can set up lower fees for unique inventory, which is popular among web mall customers.

2.5 Demonstrate your tool-set ecosystem and infrastructure advantages

A flawless ecosystem differentiates the experience on your multiple supplier e-commerce malls in comparison to other e-commerce platforms and can convince sellers to stay on your site.

Offer free-trial runs for sellers to try out your wholesale multi vendor platform features before they join, to compare them to the ones they currently use.

LinkedIn offers a one-month free trial to demonstrate its ecosystem advantages to potential users:

It allows sellers to try the best features in practice, and is turning your tool-set ecosystem into the most powerful argument to convince wholesale suppliers to join your multi vendor e-commerce mall.

2.6 Show added-value services

Highlight all the additional services that differentiate your wholesale multi vendor platform from competitors and make your offer attractive to sellers.

Uber offers gas discounts, vehicle maintenance and other rewards to its qualified drivers:

Thus, choose the steps that fit your targeted sellers’ characteristics and build an effective approach on basis of their unique needs.

True Experience #2

Steve Pritchard, Business Consultant for Ben Sherman

Offer support and solutions to logistic issues. While marketing and promotion is a vital part of attracting online vendors to an online marketplace, this is only the beginning. If the process then involves dispatching large crates of products to the sellers, you may need to provide the sellers with solutions for the likes of storage and packaging.

Find shipping partners that will be able to offer delivery logistics to make the process as stress-free as possible for both companies. If you can offer sellers with low-cost, well thought-out and easy logistics, they will be very grateful and it will set you aside from your competitors.. Sellers need an easy experience as much as their customers, so make sure you can provide them with this.

3. Grow Sellers Network Through Collaboration and Development

A perfectly-organized workflow and constant development for wholesale suppliers—the main two elements that enable a stable flow of new suppliers for your multi seller shopping mall without dedicated efforts and costs.

The good conditions of work itself, together with word of mouth, helps to gain a flawless reputation that is a pledge of growth for any multiple vendor eСommerce mall:

• flawless service and support

eBay offers a toll-free helpline number for Indian sellers who get stuck at any point of the workflow.

• advanced platform’ tools

Easy inventory and order management, payment options and the entire smooth transaction can be a tipping point for sellers to join your virtual wholesale shopping mall platform.

Amazon has set up a small business accelerator in India to teach sellers how to manage inventory, payments and use business analytics.

• educational and developing programs

An Indian virtual mall Snapdeal provides its sellers with the offline classroom program.

• business results demonstration—show sellers substantial profit from the very first day

Flipkart demonstrates its existing sellers’ success to encourage new ones to join the virtual multi vendor marketplace while highlighting the exact features and tools that helped wholesale suppliers to thrive:

True Experience #3

Jon Hayes from Authority Hacker, the company that helps online businesses to earn more money

One of the most important things to consider when attracting new sellers to your marketplace is how it’s perceived from an outside.

It may be tempting to approve low-quality sellers into your website to increase numbers and boost income but the moment you start to do this, your mall will begin to lose integrity and this will be instantly apparent from an onlookers perspective.

While it may be difficult to cultivate a high-quality marketplace in the beginning, once your website begins to gain a reputation for being a high quality and trustable platform, you’ll have high-quality sellers flocking to see what all the fuss is about and keen to make a good lasting impression with you.

4. Write Blogs

To attract vendors, showcasing your expertise can be accomplished through running a blog where you share informative content. You can write about the successes of your current sellers, offer information about selling on eCommerce marketplaces, and other helpful business information for merchants. 

• Show the opportunities of your platform

You can also utilize your blog to educate new vendors about the functionalities of your marketplace. Additionally, you have the opportunity to demonstrate statistics related to the number of buyers and revenue generated on your platform, which can encourage vendors to use your platform. 

• Add guides 

When sellers assess a potential marketplace, the time and effort needed to start and establish their presence become a major factor to consider. To demonstrate the ease of using your platform, a good approach is to provide comprehensive guides that cover all aspects, from the application process for selling on your site to getting started and eventually becoming a successful seller. These user-friendly guides prove the simplicity of launching your marketplace, which can be a compelling factor for attracting sellers.

• Integrate SEO 

Integrating SEO techniques in your blog allows you to fulfil its potential. By optimizing your blog posts, you can increase your rankings in Google search results, leading to enhanced credibility and trust in your marketplace.

For example, such well-known marketplaces like Amazon and eBay use blogs. In their blogs sellers can find news, discussion and knowledge base.

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Successful sellers’ acquisition and retention are based on the ability to define and emphasize the unique advantages that suppliers will be having while working on your wholesale multi vendor platform.

Another point of success is being able to keep up a flawless web mall daily work—from a tool-set ecosystem to the whole sellers’ experience within a virtual shopping mall platform, to gain a solid reputation which is a self-running engine for acquiring quality wholesale suppliers.