How to Attract Sellers on Your Virtual Multi Vendor Marketplace

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

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 vendors on the very day of launching.

Amazon turned an e-store into a multiple vendor ecommerce marketplace. The Internet shoping mall platform first established a large customer base as an online book reseller, to convince independent sellers to join its new web marketplace 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.

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

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 marketplace idea.

• Non-professional sellers (craftsmen, artisans): Etsy, Country Culture.
  

Professional sellers (traders, suppliers): Alibaba.

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

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 sellers offline.

Ange Lavender, the web marketplace founder, claims that the main sources to find vendors are local villages with designers and producers that are crafting quality goods in hidden workspaces.

The team even placed the marketplace mascot—a dog Rusty's photo on the website, to reflect the way they search sellers. Most of the time, it's only locals who know how to find those designers.

Established sellers already work on Internet marketplaces and are presented with their products on other relevant virtual shopping mall 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 platform concept but don't sell online yet.

Before the multi seller 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 things online.

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

With this, the Internet multi vendor 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.

There are the few common advantages that attract sellers to try a multi vendor e-commerce marketplace in general:

• 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.

For example, the Etsy's multiple vendor ecommerce marketplace 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 marketplace sellers' business types and demographic information is surveyed as well.

The Etsy sellers demographic chart

With such information at hand, it is possible to build a detailed seller portrait, to tweak a proposal, and outline the best approach for future negotiations with sellers.

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 on your targeted sellers' characteristics and needs, it's time to set up an offer, and build an acquisition strategy.

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

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 sellers are:

• vendors use the web marketplace, 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 marketplace 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 vendor;
  
• bad customization: listings are relatively unimaginative.
  

Based on that, consider your virtual multi vendor marketplace concept and value-added services, and form an offer that will outperform the existing multi seller shopping malls 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 marketplace like Etsy and convince it's sellers to join your wholesale multi vendor platform.

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

Airbnb's founders were travelling across the country to meet their first suppliers in person.

The virtual marketplace 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 ecommerce marketplace can provide security and trust.

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

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, family business is very common; thus the virtual shopping mall platform is not only showcasing the existing seller's success, but it is doing it in a way that fits the targeted vendors' values.

For a B2B-seller, going global usually requires a large budget and significant infrastructure changes. Emphasize the advantages of working through an online marketplace 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 vendor issues.

For example, a seller's deadstock can be listed on your multi vendor e-commerce marketplace 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 vendors sell items of that kind faster:

To motivate sellers to join a new Internet 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 sellers.

The virtual multi vendor marketplace demonstrated new sellers how exactly it is going to attract customers and boost traffic–by promoting the 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 marketplace customers.

A flawless ecosystem differentiates the experience on your multiple vendor ecommerce

marketplace in compare 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 vendors to join your multi vendor e-commerce marketplace.

Highlight all the additional services that differentiate your Internet 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.

A perfectly-organized workflow and constant development for vendors—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 ecommerce marketplace:

• 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 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 marketplace 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 online vendors to thrive:

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

Another point of success is being able to keep up a flawless web marketplace 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 vendors.