Online marketplaces are getting highly popular these days as awareness about their profits to the owners, sellers and customers spreads up. In the marketplace arena, products are sourced from multiple vendors, brands or sellers. The marketplace owner is responsible for marketing of the products to attract customers, the sellers would take the account of manufacturing and shipping the product to the customer. In this way the manufacturer can sell his products directly and easily on a well-established platform, while the owner does not have to stock up the product for selling. Marketplaces take up a part of commission from the sales on any product on their platform. Hence, marketplaces can help their owners gain good revenue from lesser efforts required.
What if, you have an online store?
There lies a splendid opportunity for online sellers to convert their single point ecommerce store to multi-point marketplaces, particularly, if the ecommerce store is based on a platform like Magento. There are Magento multi-vendor marketplace extensions available that can help businesses to make changes to their online store so as to make management of multiple sellers or vendors from within the stores, an easy process. Usually, managing multiple vendors would not be an easy task for the marketplace owners. But, these extensions give vendor management ability to the marketplace owners and enable them to gain a view over the statistics of various vendors, manage their orders and transactions and set up commissions for various products, categories etc. Hence, if you already have a Magento ecommerce store, then establishing a marketplace would not be a tough task.
However, if you do not have the one of its kind for your business, then, you would definitely need to shake up your brains to establish one for yourself, which would require you to ponder over various platforms that are available for ecommerce marketplace development these days.
Let us have a look on what options would be available in front of you, if you are looking to develop ecommerce marketplace for more profits from your business. Let us clearly understand as what could be the best platform to plant your marketplace needs on.
There are many platforms available for marketplace development. However, there are a few on which most of the modern ecommerce marketplaces are based on. Below is the list of those platforms.
Prestashop:
PrestShop is an open source ecommerce development platform which enables developers to build a secure marketplace. Managing online business is really easy with this platform that allows features like inventory management, order management, tracking shipping process and customers’ behavior in real time. One of the good things about this platform is that it allows customer payments to be directly transferred to the ecommerce website owner’s commercial bank accounts.
ZenCart:
ZenCart is just the right solution for those entrepreneurs looking to take their business to global level with a marketplace that supports multiple languages and currencies across the world. Built using PHP, MySQL and HTML, this is a good ecommerce management system for those businesses who are looking for a simple platform to create a marketplace with easy and straight-forward features.
Shopify:
Shopify can offer easy and secure ecommerce solution to your business with an in-built CMS system that ensures complete ease of the process and thereby can lead your business to growth. Statistics suggest that Shopify is one of the top four highly popular ecommerce platforms adopted by the businesses across the globe to develop online stores and marketplaces. The platform comes with built-in SEO feature which makes easier for the ecommerce platforms to establish their identity with search engines as well.
VirtueMart:
This is the trending ecommerce solution said to have crossed the mark of 2.5 million downloads in the recent times. A lot of enterprises have already got their online stores developed on this platforms while are planning to do so. It is an open source platform and enables establishing a store supporting multiple languages and currencies. There are many features in this ecommerce development platform to captivate the interests of the businesses.
Why Magento?
However, the king of all these ecommerce solutions is Magento. Magento is found to be the number one and highest preferred ecommerce platform by the enterprises. According to a report, there are more than two lakhs of online stores today, which are based on Magento.
The reasons for such outstanding popularity of Magento as an ecommerce platform are as below:
• Allows easy and complete customization of ecommerce platform as per a business needs
• Most suitable platform for easy management of huge number of products and categories
• Wide number of extensions available for features enhancement and scaling up of the platform for future needs
• Support for multiple payment gateways and highly secure platform
• Responsive and allows development of ecommerce solution that is compatible with number of devices
• Magento ecommerce website is search engine friendly and will easily rank in the search engine results
Hence, Magento is very popular among the enterprises and is a currently trending platform for those looking to develop online marketplace for their business. With Magento, you can get a competitive platform to support your business needs at present as well as future, because, this is a highly scalable platform that will let you extends your marketplace with next-gen features and extensions available with time.
However, you will need expert Magento developers for help as it is not an easy task to set up an online marketplace. It requires lot of planning and knowledge about the platform, which only experts have. So, if you want to develop Magento ecommerce marketplace for your business, please feel free to contact us.
