What is Amazon in the world of e-commerce nowadays? Selling more than 12 million products (not including media, books, and wine), Amazon has 310 million active customers. With the numbers continue to rise and impress, Amazon may become a great role model and the target for creating your own successful multivendor website.
Where to begin
The history of the e-commerce giant started with a minimum viable product, however, at that time Amazon was a single-vendor online store. Having a limited budget at the beginning of the marketplace development, MVP is a good place to start as it can help you attract the first buyers and sellers to your website.
Features to include into your marketplace
To raise the popularity of your marketplace, it has to meet the clients’ requirements that have grown recently. SapientPro development team created a list of the essential features we strongly recommend you to add to your website:
- Product catalogs
Product listings are what people are used to. It is important to add detailed product descriptions, photos and even videos showing the item. Besides attracting customers’ attention, it makes the purchasing choice easier.
- Payment gateways
What shopping can be carried out without money? Make sure you provide your customers with various payment methods. The more the better. Remember to ensure that all the transactions are secured. On the market, you can find a lot of payment gateways to implement into your e-commerce website.
- Notifications
Update your customers with recent discounts and promotions. Also add notifications about orders, shipment and payment statuses. This way you will decrease the cart abandonment rate.
- Ratings and reviews
When the shoppers receive a product they want, feel satisfied with it, let them rate and leave a review. Good things should be heard of. The same goes for the goods of poor quality. Customers’ reviews can also help prevent fraud.
- Sellers and buyers profiles
When registered, buyers and sellers provide their personal information so they don’t have to fill it in again when ordering something. The chances the frauds wish to register on your marketplace are lower.
- Customer support
To improve customers’ satisfaction and trust in your website, don’t forget to implement customer support into the marketplace. In order to resolve any issues and answer clients’ questions, you can provide professional technical support via phone, e-mail, chats. You may also regard adding the messaging option to enable communication among buyers and sellers.
- Search
People always know what they aim to buy (almost always). To save their time – add an advanced search bar with filtering according to different categories.
Choose the right technology
The right technology stack affects the success of your website by determining loading speed, scalability and request downtime. You should pay a lot of attention to that issue.
In case you have decided to start with an MVP, be sure that the technology you choose allows you to add more necessary functionalities to your website in the future.
Besides, unless you are a professional developer, you have to ask the experts for advice. We recommend you to hire a team of reliable developers, who can help you choose the right programming language and technology stack due to your business’s needs.
Stages of the marketplace development
In the development process of any e-commerce website, there are many steps, aspects, challenges. When it comes to a whole marketplace, much more time, attention, funds, and people are needed to create it. You have to go through the following stages to reach the final destination – launching your own, ready-to-use, online marketplace:
- Preparation of the technical project
- Creating a prototype
- Creating a Design Pattern
- Layout
- Development
- Testing and debugging the site
There is one more important thing you have to bear in mind. Amazon has been earning its popularity on the market for almost 25 years, that’s why to repeat its success you need to do an immense job. But such an investment is really worth it.
