importance of marketplace in digital commerce
Cloud

Is a marketplace essential for your success in digital commerce?

4 Mins read

The recent transformations in the various industries have been drastic due to the rise of new digital technologies. With many businesses operating offline filing for bankruptcy, following the difficult transition phase of COVID 19, it’s evident that online sales offer a much larger selection and variety to the customers and thus, better opportunities to the businesses operating online, than ever before.

Slowly but surely digital commerce is cornering traditional brick-and-mortar businesses towards their end as they cannot compete on price or service anymore due to heavy costs from procuring, sourcing, security, legal, and vendor management.

Let’s quickly understand the challenges offline businesses face:

What threats do businesses operating offline face?

With the internet giving software companies more exposure and opportunities than ever before, it is no wonder that most consumers are purchasing online. In order to reach a large audience, companies need to create their marketplace and post information about their services. This helps companies to reduce their costs associated with starting a business offline.

Here are some of the offline business challenges:

  • Inability to meet modern customer’s expectations: With new technologies, customers have access to a lot of information. They can find reviews, prices, discounts, etc., online. They want services quickly and easily from the comfort of their homes. Even the most affluent consumers now feel silly to pay full price for most things, which makes it nearly impossible to encourage them to buy without aggressive marketing or providing exceptional value.
  • Inability to reach to a broader set of customers: If you are operating offline, you can just serve the local regions. But with going online with your marketplace, you can go global with minimum investment and efforts and can engage with customers at different touchpoints in their buying journey.

COVID-19 has majorly impacted the way people shop. Shoppers are now much less likely to buy their products offline and instead prefer shopping online as it is more convenient and quick. According to a report, 40% of consumers are purchasing online more than they had done before.

What do businesses need to keep up with the changing times?

Technology has brought a change in the way we do business and there’s no doubt that an online marketplace can help businesses become more successful with digital commerce.

A marketplace can offer an attractive solution for businesses who have been challenged to find ways to increase their reach, build their brand and increase their range without additional stock and middlemen costs.

Now, let’s understand the benefits of selling via a marketplace:

Scale and Faster Reach

Building or selling over a third-party marketplace can offer sellers the opportunity to significantly expand their reach and target buyers in new markets. This gives you access to not only domestic but also international customers, which makes it an attractive option for many businesses looking at scaling quickly.

Better Product Range

With the increased trend of online shopping, businesses don’t have to think about how they can extend their reach. Building a marketplace is one way that empowers companies to showcase all their different products at one place, while  allowing easy access and choice to the customers, without having any physical presence at all.

Convenient Product Delivery

The use of a marketplace integrated with various payment gateways provide a solid can foundation for secure digital commerce. Consumers can order online and get subscriptions to multiple products quickly.

Information Transparency

An online marketplace can serve as an excellent source of information for potential buyers before they make their purchase.. If your marketplace is sturdy enough with integration with a number of your industry-specific applications, it can provide a holistic buying experience to your customers, thus increasing customer satisfaction.

Third Party Marketplace or Managed Individual Marketplace?

With so many third-party marketplaces, software companies have to decide which one is best for them. Should they collaborate with an established company? Or should they partner to get managed individual marketplace where customers can buy their products directly from the website?

Third Party Marketplace Considerations

There’s no doubt that connecting to and selling through an existing third-party marketplace is easier than building a seller’s own marketplace from scratch. This is because a third-party marketplace provides quick access to a large, new customer base.

However, it is crucial to be careful when selling on third-party marketplaces. One bad experience with late delivery, stock unavailability or technical failure can lead not only to negative feedback ratings but also to account closure.

Managed Individual Marketplace for Sellers

Choosing the right partner during this time of change and growth is critical. If a company wants to sell on its own marketplace, choosing a platform partner with a track record of working with similar global companies is a good place to start.

With RackNap, you can publish your offerings via a fully customizable marketplace. Its fully customizable design means you have complete control over what your customers see and how they’re able to purchase from within it. This marketplace helps to attract a large number of customers, gives you the ability to sell wide range of products and keeps your customer acquisition costs (CAC) low with unparalleled self-service automation and monitoring capabilities.

RackNap helps in Ordering, provisioning, and billing of Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure, Acronis, AWS, and many other cloud services from the leading vendors, including the ability to launch your own services. With bundling/packaging capabilities, you can increase customer LTV (Lifetime value). You may also upsell and cross sell offerings increasing ARPU and stickiness thereby reducing customer churn.

Customer can purchase cloud services online, make payments online, receive license details, see their licenses and view/download their orders and invoices.

With a few clicks, your customers can select any cloud service as per their needs and configure it at the checkout. The licenses are instantly provisioned so, you don’t need any IT specialists for the support!

Moreover, your customers can add or remove licenses to an existing subscription while all the related billing and provisioning actions will be executed automatically.

Renewal, Suspension notifications can be set in RackNap. Billing can be done in advance or arrears as per needs and it gives flexibility to the Service providers.

Conclusion

The future of digital commerce is now. Cloud providers can provide a seamless experience and deliver consistent, reliable results across different devices or channels with RackNap.

For any queries related to marketplace, drop us a comment or mail us to [email protected].

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