The marketplace is an e-commerce platform offering goods from multiple retailers. It provides a central place to connect different offers. Magento is one of the most popular platforms for creating online shops, although it is not the first choice for a marketplace. Why, then, are we talking about them together? Because it turns out that when they join forces together with customization and expertise they can create a very innovative project.
What is Magento?
The marketplace is an e-commerce platform offering goods from multiple retailers. It provides a central place to connect different offers. Magento is one of the most popular platforms for creating online shops, although it is not the first choice for a marketplace. Why, then, are we talking about them together? Because it turns out that when they join forces together with customization and expertise they can create a very innovative project.
What is the marketplace?
But before we tell you about the project on which we collaborated with one of the top e-commerce in Europe a few words of introduction about the marketplace itself. This is a type of online shop in which not only the owner but also many different sellers (often selling a single product category) can offer their products.
What are the benefits of the marketplace?
More and more people are talking about marketplace platforms, not least because they offer many advantages for both the owner and the sellers who decide to offer their products there. First and foremost, the development of an online shop with a marketplace makes it possible to increase the range of products and their availability. On the other hand, it enables a smaller operator to sell more fluently and to reach new customers.
Marketplace implementation – technical preparation
Let’s take a look at our client’s marketplace from the technical side. At the outset, it is worth noting that, like the basic version of the application, it has been developed in Magento. This is undoubtedly an innovative approach, as Magento, despite its extensive tool palette, does not have marketplace-friendly functionality by default.
Magento has, by default, provided the tools needed to place orders, handle shopping baskets and discount codes or log in to the customer base. However, Magento itself is not designed for marketplace sales. Therefore, we had to create a lot of functionalities from scratch, such as support for external shops, handling of sub-baskets, downloading external delivery and payment methods, and configuring them to automatically send orders to other services – explains Piotr Galikowski, Magento 2 Developer, who has worked on the project on behalf of New Digital Street.
You are probably wondering why the marketplace was built in Magento if it is not a dedicated tool. The answer is the client’s individual needs and a tailored solution. By working in Magento, it was possible to maintain compatibility without having to rebuild the entire shop, while making the solution scalable.
The business perspective of the marketplace
Including a marketplace is a milestone for the brand, a nod to its customers, but from a business perspective – quite a challenge. The implementation of new solutions must not disrupt the functioning of the platform for customers in any way. The changes they notice must only be beneficial. How, on the other hand, was the implementation of the marketplace from a business perspective?
The scalability of the solution was important to our client – the ability to implement the marketplace and test it on the Polish market – says Bartłomiej Lewandowski, Managing Partner at New Digital Street – At the same time, their e-commerce in other markets remained stable – it did not suffer any negative effects from the changes while maintaining full compatibility.
Nothing has changed for customers either, except that they now have access to an even larger product base, with better availability. It is only at the shopping basket stage that they see a breakdown of the individual offers and chooses a delivery and payment option for each.
Building the marketplace in Magento, together with the creation of customized functionalities, has another major benefit. In the future, when the company will decide to move this solution to other markets, the implementation will be much more efficient, and faster, and will generate fewer costs.
Summary
The marketplace is an e-commerce solution that opens up entirely new possibilities for business. This project shows that the additional customization of this solution, using the right tools, can be an extremely valuable element in a company’s business strategy.
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