Why the Success of Your Online Marketplace Depends on the Strength of Your Seller Ecosystem
Third party sellers are the lifeblood of any online marketplace or dropship initiative.
Organizations drive more value – and with it a better customer experience – by supplementing their first-party inventory with products from marketplace sellers and dropship suppliers. By opening up their online eCommerce platform to third party sellers, companies can easily deepen their assortment in a way that would be otherwise impossible, all without the burden of purchasing, storing, and shipping additional products.
In order to truly reap the benefits of welcoming third-party sellers to their website, a business will need to partner with hundreds, if not thousands, of suppliers. This has huge operational implications, which is why it’s vital any company operating a marketplace put in place the right strategy, team, and tools available to automate the process of finding, onboarding, and nurturing those suppliers.
Building the optimum seller strategy for a successful eCommerce marketplace
A successful seller strategy should take into account:
How to find the best possible sellers to meet assortment goals
How to efficiently onboard those sellers to a marketplace
How to streamline seller operations so that the marketplace can grow
To support marketplace operators in achieving these 3 pillars, we created Mirakl Connect, a powerful networking tool that provides marketplace operators with access to an established community of more than 10,000 high-quality pre-vetted sellers and marketplace partners around the world.
Every seller is vetted and quality checked by a Mirakl expert before access to Mirakl Connect is granted, and once selling on Mirakl-powered marketplaces, our team monitors their performance.
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To make it even easier to source and onboard sellers, we have created Mirakl Connect’s Seller As a Service where we take on the heavy lifting, so that marketplace operators can focus their time on growing their online business. We provide an end-to-end, tailored approach to seller recruitment and management, from finding the best sellers so the marketplace operator can fulfill their assortment goals, to taking care of suppliers’ store creation and KYC validation, catalog mapping and product creation.
Once the suppliers are up and running, the Mirakl seller support team is on hand to manage them and optimize their sales strategies to ensure they keep bringing the value needed to the marketplace. The result for marketplaces using Mirakl Connect’s Seller As a Service offering? A 75% reduction in top seller churn for marketplaces.
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On the up: revenue generated by marketplace sellers increases 42%
Acquiring new customers continues to become more expensive. Retailers and brands are continually searching for new cost-effective ways to get in front of more shoppers and retain their loyalty. As a result, the network of enterprise marketplace sellers and dropship suppliers has also grown significantly over the past two years.
According to a Mirakl survey of 1,500 retailers and brands worldwide, 53% of businesses said they are selling on more marketplaces this year than a year ago and 62% say they’ll sell on more channels in the next 12 months. Their number one reason why? To reach new customers.
So how do third-party suppliers feed the bottom line? Well, commissions are the fundamental source of revenue contribution for a business operating a marketplace, and a key driver of profitability. In 2022, the average commission fee on enterprise marketplaces was 14.1%.
In addition, brands on marketplaces and dropship platforms are selling more through those channels, with GMV per seller reaching $146,016 in 2022. For marketplace and dropship operators, that means the average amount of revenue generated by individual sellers increased 42% year over year, reaching $20,647 in 2022. Melior, for example, is a UK-based company that specializes in environmentally safe cleaning products. Initially, it connected with many of its customers on eBay’s marketplace, but is now finding growth on multiple Mirakl marketplaces.
Are you looking to expand your supplier base? Let’s talk about how you can use Mirakl Connect to get sellers up and running to sell on your marketplace in moments, rather than months.
