To understand how Marketplace Connectors work, we first need to throw light on what is actually meant by Marketplace?
A Marketplace is primarily an online place where goods and services are featured by multiple third parties for buyers and these transactions are processed by the operator.
A typical example of the marketplace is eBay, Amazon, Flipkart and so on. They act as a facilitator between the buyer and the seller to transact for goods and services. The environment is vast, efficient, transparent and trusted. The main feature of these ventures is to provide a platform for buyers to interact with selected number of sellers.
To say so, when you browse and purchase any goods on the above-mentioned platforms or any other platform to the likes of these, you actually buy the product from a registered seller and not these companies directly. The products are not sold by these companies. They are just a website acting as enablers for sellers and buyers to meet at a common ground.
The website can also be termed as a simple and convenient portal for multi-channel e-commerce business which streamlines the processes of online shopping.
The Marketplace is also responsible for processing orders, fulfillment, and delivery. Besides cataloging, order management, and advertisements, platforms like eBay also facilitate auctioning on many of the products. They often charge the selling a ‘post selling’ fee once the item is sold.
The choice for buyers also increases in such marketplaces as compared to the single store due to the collections of a wide range of products. With some marketplaces, you can buy anything under the sun, from household to textiles to electronics. While others are product specific.
Now let us get to know how these work
Assuming you want to open an online store to sell your products. For this either you can make your own e-commerce site or pay to a platform like Amazon, eBay etc, to display your products to the buyers. Some platforms offer diverse packages for different kinds of sellers depending on the quantity of the goods.
Also, there are other options available like Shopify, BigCommerce or Magento to name a few where you can build your own site and highly customize it to reflect your own brand exclusively. They provide you with language preferences and payment gateways and your business go live in no time.
Now, once you have your store in place on either a stand-alone site or any marketplace, your business starts growing. Going forward, you may also decide to sell your products on other sites. With an increase in sales, orders, and customers, inventory also increases and so does other functionalities.
You need to manage your inventory and orders effectively to keep your customers coming. To manage these functions, you may require financial and inventory applications to give you real-time updates on inventory and your profits.
These third-party applications integrate your multi-channel online business at one place to give you clear and crisp information about your business.
Some of these applications serve themselves as services while others are products. However, you have to purchase both irrespective of what you choose for your business. One such service is NetSuite which is cloud-based ERP solution and provides you with functionalities to manage not only your financial and inventory but also customers, orders, billing, shipping details, and refunds. Other than this, it also makes it easy to manage and increase your sales.
WebBee primarily works on integrating NetSuite with several marketplaces that are available in the market as of now. Be it Shopify, Amazon, eBay, WooCommerce, BigCommerce or Magento. WebBee has its own connector to integrate your existing data with the new application without losing any information.
These Marketplace connectors make it easy for sellers to keep their data at one place and get a holistic view of their business. When you sell on different platforms, its becomes a tedious thing to manage inventories and customer details from various source. Also what satisfies a customer other than quality is the timely delivery of the product. When you integrate NetSuite with your existing system or store, it becomes easy to manage large data and bring out valuable information from it as you can get everything on a single dashboard. You need not have several dashboards for your multi-channel business.
Marketplace connectors come with various advantages:
- Synchronized Data for customers, orders, and shipping
- Products are synced and you get the details of all your products on respective of the platforms they are sold on
- Integration automates entire processes of the business in real-time such as inventory, orders, product management, shipping, tracking, etc., effectively saving time and money.
- Simplifies payment, Fraud Management with seamless integration
- View past purchases as well with order history of customers to serve them better
- Creates personalized communication between the seller and the buyers and target specific kinds of customers as per their purchase habits and order history
- Single-point platform with one dashboard reduces the cost of investing in several individual applications for finance, procurement, taxes, employees and so on. This saves on ROI.
WebBee provides you with predictive technology by analyzing the pattern of demand, the total cost of ownership, and transformation cost etc. and then gives you the best possible solution that perfectly fits your business goals and values.
WebBee comes prepared for all your needs and has experts with immense knowledge about marketplace connectors to integrate with Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, Amazon, eBay and much more.
Understanding these platforms in detail is very important for sellers before putting their products for sale. As a buyer, you need to know how you will manage your business. How much growth you can handle in a year. Only then you can assess which platform you require to market your products on. Once you get the understanding, working on the features of NetSuite will become easy.
There are other products as well which give you CRM based solutions and it is perfectly okay to go for them initially. But if you are planning on advancing your business exponentially, then NetSuite is a better fit.
IF you want to save cost on it the WebBee’s customized solution is also on the plate for you to pick. With WebBee, you can choose the features that fit and it’s easy to use dashboard is a cake walk even for the first time users. The advantage with WebBee is that you get the best of both the worlds. Easy to use interface and full functionality of NetSuite.
To conclude, I would say invest in Marketplace connectors or unifiers as many would call them. Some companies have unique names as well for these connectors. It will only increase your sales but also increase productivity as managing accounts, bills, invoices, orders, and shipping will become very easy.
Once you have your operations in not just manageable place but in a progressive state, you can focus on the sales and promotions of your online business.
