How to make sellers fall in love with your Marketplace

Acquiring and retaining sellers on a marketplace remains a challenge for any marketplace. As new marketplaces emerge, seller churn becomes greater concern everyday. So what do sellers value and how can marketplaces achieve quality while increasing good sellers.

Transparent policies: Having “Terms and Conditions” in a checkbox doesn’t educate sellers. A good marketplace should have a T&C page where policies are published and updated real-time. Long policies can be made easy to read by the policies listed as per areas of business addressed. A dropdown paragraph for each policy with a heading should ease understanding. 

A link to this page should be placed at the top/bottom of every seller interface page for ease of search. 

Listing management: Ideally, listing of a product should be as easy as changing a social media profile page. The best I have seen is Linkedin where you can see how profile looks for the viewers. This can be emulated for each product. For sellers with multiple products, a single point dashboard where they can change frequently changed items such as price and headings is required but providing the seller ability to see and edit each product page is invaluable.

Needless to say each change should undergo quality check automatically for compliance with T&C.

Performance management: Visibility of performance of a seller has a great value for a seller. Attribution of performance increases it even more. Again a feature of Linkedin where week on week profile views are shown with the actions taken in the week seems ideal. Having a dashboard where sellers can see their action vs performance goes a long way in seller improving his performance.

A cherry on the cake would be if the platform can provide tips based on category analytics.

For eg: “ Doing X has been seen to improve sales by 1.3x for your category”

Such tips shall educate sellers on how to improve their sales while providing positive WOM among sellers 

Warning & Delisting: When a seller breaches T&C about listing, there needs to be a clear mail saying with which part of T&C he has violated with a link to T&C page. Also the mail can have a calendar link to integrate the deadline(by which listing should be amended) in the warning mail. A calendar alert goes a long way in attracting seller attention and eliciting compliance.

To summarize, transparency and customized support for sellers do make sellers fall in love with the platform.