How Do You Attract Vendors to Your Marketplace? 5 Stories from Acknowledged Experts

“How to attract vendors to marketplace?” is the priority question a marketplace owner asks himself before launching his or her business online. We’ve collected some recommendations from the mature business owners and marketers about their methods for attracting vendors to their eCommerce platforms. Real merchants share what challenges they did face, what they did to overcome suspicion with their candidate partners, and win the battle for resellers!

Independent expert opinions

Jam Paper & Envelope Case

Tyler Brooks is a manager at Jam Paper & Envelope. The Company that he works for is a family-owned business the history of which began in 1954 from a physical store in New Jersey.

Being a mature Digital Marketing expert, Tyler thinks that prior to attracting the vendors you should prepare your website to please the customers. 

A great way to appeal to people is to give customers great online shopping experience, and great eCommerce practices are key. 

So, he advises the following practices and tips that the perfect ad software would adhere to:

• Constantly be on the lookout for ways to make your site cleaner, faster, and easier to use. Simply changing your add-to-cart button color can increase your conversion a large amount, as can adding a guest checkout option. Make
• Sure you’re keeping up with other websites when it comes to usability. You need to be careful, though. Sometimes what isn’t broken isn’t worth fixing.
• Make sure you test a new layout, color, or design before making a permanent change. Also, the tiniest technical issue can cripple your conversion rate, so you need to have trust in your web development staff when making these changes.

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Jampaper.com’s first eCommerce website first appeared in 1996 and then underwent several redesigns in 2006, in 2007 to add more eCommerce functionality. Today, the JAM’s website has a clean and simple appearance focused on creating a good user experience. Definitely, Tyler knows exactly how to add more trust to a website look-and-feel.

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5 most effective ways for improving conversions according to Tyler:

• High-quality images and /or video on your product pages
• Competitive pricing;
• Well tested checkout process;
• Guest shipping option;
• Decreased loading time;
• Though it may seem low, 5% is a great conversion rate;
• Bounce Rate is a great metric to use to track and gauge the overall store conversion rate.

The approach of the CEO of IronMonk

Amine Rahal, the founder, and CEO of IronMonk Solutions with +20 years of entrepreneurial experience recommends having an exceptional website design to attract vendors. 

Your eCommerce website must be fast, mobile-responsive, and SEO optimized to compete in the highly competitive eCommerce space. A professionally designed website will certainly assist in attracting numerous vendors.

GetVoIP shared experience

Reuben is the founder and CEO of GetVoIP, a New-York company that generates revenue from affiliate marketing. As an entrepreneur and tech enthusiast, Reuben brings a wealth of hands-on telecom industry experience, backed by a 10-year track record in strategically shaping operational functionality in all his ventures.

Here is what he says about his way while growing the VoiceIP App:

My business area is Voice over IP solutions. We use our platform to review different providers and recommend the best ones to our audience. We then funnel that audience to our affiliate partners.

Top challenge

The top challenge I have encountered when trying to attract new affiliate partners to my business area is convincing them the review and recommendation process will be fair.

First success

I overcome the challenge by making verified user reviews the core of our platform. User reviews are unarguable, fair, and honest.

Recent success story

A recent success case is RingCentral. According to their head of marketing, our marketplace has played a significant role in RingCentral’s growth over the past few years.

Cases with experienced brand managers

Urbankissed interview

During the interview, Sophie, the founder of Urbankissed shared her pains and gains while growing her eCommerce business.

Metrics of success

Urbankissed has been live for 11 months, and I want to talk about brand awareness. I measure success by the increase in traffic, a growing number of vendor applications, and followers on social media. But most importantly, Urbankissed has received earned media from fashion industry insiders such as Virgin, Women’s Health, and Chloé Kian. That is inspiring!

First steps in crafting vendor plans

Going back to when I just started, attracting vendors was a tough task. And even when I did, because there was not much traffic and sales going through my platform, my vendors, unfortunately, forgot to update their stock and sometimes sold products out of stock. Luckily, I don’t have such problems anymore. My vendors also got very independent when it comes down to managing their accounts.

Reasons for success

Sophie started with WooCommerce and Shopify, but then she realized that her marketplace strategy needs rebuilding to attract the vendors that meet her high requirements for brand adherence. 

She selected the Multi-Vendor platform for the availability of multiple vendor accounts, handy dashboard, and the option to finetune vendor plans to enable 0% commissions. She put forward her demands for a perfect eCommerce platform:

To work with a software which includes everything: eCommerce, Multi-Vendor Accounts, 0% commission on sales performed through my site (unlike e.g. Shopify marketplace which charges you commission per sale), one-time fee for software (apart from yearly fees for updates), easy to handle interface, to offer great and many add-ons, to offer professional tools (technical and design).

Results

In the very beginning, it was extremely hard to convince vendors to sell through my platform. These days, this has completely changed! I receive at least 10 applications per week.

Recently, we’ve got an interview with our merchants to get to know their way in eCommerce. In one of the interviews, a manager described his challenges while attracting vendors to a vaping market. That was the story of the vawoo.co.uk marketplace. 

Selling in the vape market is not an easy task, actually! Promoting your business with resellers, especially in such a tough business area as e-cigarettes, needs a lot of marketing skills. Here is what the Vawoo CEO shared with us:

While preparing the store for first visitors

His team is focused on:

1. Implementation and testing of multiple add-ons on the administration panel by means of CS⁠-⁠Cart.

2. Intensive word-of-mouth marketing.

3. Engaging new business partners.

Challenges

We were calling large and small vape manufacturers and retailers, describing considerable benefits Vawoo can bring to their company; we were offering a lifetime Free Plan with features of a paid plan for registration before the launch. However, our requests were met with a refusal, rudeness, and putting down the phone on us.

Sudden success

We had several hundred products listed on the platform and we were doing our best to make people know about the uniqueness of our website. In terms of the functionality of our marketplace, we had to rely on the capabilities of CS-Сart. We have acquired a number of add-ons that were successfully integrated into the system.

He enumerated the add-ons that helped him to make their platform more appealing for vendors. Mention just a few of them:

• Amazon Synchronization add-on allows our business partners to synchronize smoothly their products, prices, inventory, and orders in their Amazon sellers account with their new CS⁠-⁠Cart store on Vawoo.
• Sales & Social Proof add-on is an effective psychological tool for us that encourages purchases by the demonstration of the high value of vape products on the marketplace and thus motivating customers to buy. 
• JSON-LD for SEO add-on helped us to organize and structure data on our store as well as to increase the searchability of our marketplace, products, or blog across the web.
• SEO templates add-on optimized the most important metadata for our products, categories, pages, blog posts, and product images.
• Product Bundles add-on is a powerful tool for us, which enables us to create effective marketing campaigns for the customers. They love collections of products that are sold as a single unit at a bargain price. This is a great way to motivate our customers to purchase several items instead of only one. 

Read the full story 

SimtechDev Expert Opinions

Growing audience with automation

The businesses that are ready to pay for listing on your marketplace needs automation.

You need to automate your Multi-Vendor marketplace to save the time of your vendors:

1. Product import. If you can provide vendors with the ability to quickly add a large number of products by loading feeds, this will speed up their entry into the marketplace by many times, which means they will start selling and making you a profit sooner.
2. Feed synchronization. It doesn’t matter, the feed is on a hard disk or in an online service. The ability to automatically update the list of products and stock balances, prices, and images, makes the work of the vendor more convenient and easy.
3. Cross-channel synchronization. A very important point for existing eCommerce businesses. If you can synchronize the product lists correctly with the store without creating feeds, this will be your huge advantage. Vendors won’t have to take additional steps to start selling on your marketplace.

Crafting a special offer for vendors:

Offer your vendors to:

1. Add a vendor feed to the catalog for free. Each vendor will have its storefront acting as a landing page. It will include vendor descriptions, contacts, and prices.
2. Enable notifications about new orders, order details via email.
3. Confirm customer orders from their personal accounts.
4. Enable support over the phone, chat or email channels 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Check if the phone number is clickable.
5. Create an FAQ page. This is good for SEO and search engine ranking. It covers more keywords.
6. Create a blog page. Download a video/podcast about your services/products. You increase trust among visitors and vendors.
7. Partner with influencers and place their contacts on your website.

Read more tips for attracting vendors in the tourism area 

Don’t forget about these must-have features of a reliable market:

1. A secured system with two-factor authentication, 
2. User-friendly Interface, 
3. Responsive design,
4. Multiple stores set up, 

Closing

Attracting vendors and looking for manufacturers to your online shop or Multi-Vendor, choose the right team to support your growth. The Simtech Development experts are here for you to empower the technical part of the online store set up.