Tips to alleviate common third-party seller challenges on marketplaces

Both buyers and sellers are responsible for any online marketplace platform’s growth. Listing on marketplaces increases the discoverability of third-party products, and a large proportion of online sellers sell on these platforms. But each marketplace is unique in its functioning, so you need to focus on providing adequate support to third-party sellers to deftly navigate challenges so as to maximize your platform’s success. 

Here are some insightful tips to enhance your seller support for a mutually beneficial partnership:

1. Provide ready-reckoners to ensure complaint product listings

33% of sellers have trouble optimizing their listings. They are often bogged down when their products are either not appropriately listed or their listings have been rejected by the marketplace. Brand name mismatches, duplicate listings, and other discrepancies translate to lost time to market, allowing their rivals to get ahead of them. For many new sellers with no prior experience in creating digital catalogs, catalog management, or enhancement can turn into a nightmare.

Here’s where marketplaces would do well to provide a consistent stream of learning resources through short, jargon-free, walkthrough videos, and FAQs to educate sellers about the platform. Employing support to catalyze this process right from handholding them in uploading their products correctly, identifying missing attribute values impacting their rankings, rectifying size variation anomalies and more, can ultimately help minimize return rates.

Also, 33% of third-party sellers find it challenging to identify relevant and high-quality keywords for their products. By providing external support for in-depth keyword analysis, and best practice-packed sample templates to help ensure keyword optimized, high-quality images and product information, marketplaces can promote healthy competition. With a robust quality audit process, sellers can even re-list rejected products by aligning them based on your platform’s current guidelines and experience renewed conversions. This, in turn, boosts their marketplace satisfaction.

2. Offer seller platform orientation and coaching to ensure a seamless experience  

Sellers are the fabric of any marketplace. Therefore, to deliver unparalleled customer experiences investing in recruiting and training quality sellers is crucial. Plus, more sellers mean you can cater to a broader customer base by offering a wider range of product options with more order fulfillment opportunities. This study by Forrester provides helps reason why coaching your sellers to ensure a consistent customer experience is so crucial.

Savvy marketplaces are empowering their third-party sellers to overcome common challenges by educating and training them via online platforms. Through these platforms, they tutor them on product uploads, easy and intuitive ways of understanding the latest platform guideline updates, seller panel walkthroughs, and more. Marketplaces should also consider providing sellers with business mentorship and guidance via blogs to help them stay success-ready on and off their platforms.  

3. Train them to manage seller panels, especially to gain timely performance insights

With many first-time sellers entering the market, online marketplaces would do well to ensure an interactive, user-friendly orientation to their seller panels and how they work. From promptly and professionally responding to buyer messages to managing returns and more; these efforts help sellers feel more in control of their business and help increase customer satisfaction levels as well. 

Besides this, you can even help your third-party sellers with challenges like where to look for and how to evaluate their performance based on your business report metrics. This will give them a perspective into how best to stock, price, and showcase their products to maximize future profitability. Providing chat and voice support will further enable them to get prompt answers to their panel-related queries, especially on the reasons behind their account status updates.

4. Address specific third-party seller challenges through a robust help desk process (chat + voice)

Establishing a business is challenging, and it requires a great deal of skill and knowledge across different aspects. With a majority of marketplace sellers being sole entrepreneurs or small businesses without large teams, they are incredibly pressured to acquire these skills on their own.

For instance, 31% of third-party sellers often find it challenging with monitoring their expenses, revenue, and other financial metrics. 42% of sellers need help with managing their Pay-per-click (bids). Therefore, having a robust team of experienced seller support executives allows you to assist sellers by asking the right questions to get an accurate understanding of what they aim to achieve. This way, as a marketplace you can offer relevant answers to their concerns, thus promoting a lasting business relationship.

As new sellers get onboarded almost every day, support systems will need expansion to ensure seamless processes and experiences for both your sellers and customers. To maintain their business standard cost-effectively and without hampering quality, winning marketplaces are seeing value in outsourcing certain aspects of their seller support process.

Some of the world’s leading marketplaces have partnered with Netscribes for their seller support needs in English and different lndian local languages. We ensure quick turnarounds on third-party seller grievances, offering marketplaces complete transparency and performance measurement into our voice and chat process quality. Our integrated seller support solution allows us to audit every call for quality, and relay the insights received to refine our seller interactions and help marketplaces forge stronger seller relationships. To know how we can help strengthen your seller support efforts, contact us.