Marketplaces: why UX is twice as important
45% of French people* (almost one in two) leave a website or mobile site after viewing one page. And a single second’s delay in loading leads to a 16% drop in customer satisfaction**.
If customers are king, then UX is their crown! By improving the quality of the customer journey, customers are more likely to want to stay on a site.
UX comes into play as soon as the customer accesses the homepage and extends well beyond the purchase process, including the after-sales service. It’s a key way to stand out, particularly in saturated markets.
For marketplaces, this issue is twice as important, simply because you need to attract two different types of customers: sellers on one side and buyers on the other, both of whom are equally important!
UX is a demanding discipline, but it pays dividends: the efforts you make yield immediately measurable results. Another positive: you can take a progressive approach, making changes wherever you need to.
Helping sellers to sell
As marketplace publishers, retailers see us as partners: we’re here to help them create an efficient platform.
The first step is to provide the basics in terms of service: focus on offering seamless product listings and tracking to ensure successful sales.
This involves very specific tools, particularly when it comes to invoicing and payment. These tools are at the heart of the marketplace model! At IZBERG, we’ve added a module that enables B2B sellers to edit a quote and invoice directly in the marketplace.
But how can you give these sellers an additional helping hand? By providing them with marketing tools, for instance, or by enabling them to push payment facilities or insurance themselves.
We firmly believe that an API-first approach is needed to develop a modular marketplace; in this way, administrators can add additional features, as their market evolves.
And remember… it’s about more than just the online world! Move away from screens and ensure that staff are easy to contact, responsible and attentive to sellers: it’s vital to create a dedicated team to recruit sellers when the marketplace launches and encourage their loyalty in the long term!
Provide buyers with great service
The challenge for any marketplace is to maintain the delicate balance between buyers and sellers. When it comes to buyers, marketplaces must play a role as a trusted third party, providing reassurance and reliability without overlooking the importance of “pleasure” in the online shopping process.
Some features have become essential, such as fast delivery, the importance of which cannot be overstated. There are other features that users expect to find on marketplaces: payment in installments and free returns, for instance.
Other features are beginning to emerge, particularly with regard to reducing customers’ carbon footprint: delivery by bike is one such option.
Other services make it possible to really stand out, as with the “Ask Your Father” button that we deployed for Dott, a Portuguese rival of Amazon. Young people can use this feature to ask their parents to pay for their order. Dott sends an email to the chosen person, with the ATM reference for payment.
Talking of millennials, they’re particularly keen on customer care and expect a personalized service. Picking up on the importance of this, Mano Mano readjusted the objectives of its customer relations center: with an 80% pick-up rate in under a minute, most customers wait no longer than 60 seconds before speaking to an employee. As for its CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), the company aims at a score of 90%***. Mano Mano has also created a community of “Manodvisors”, knowledgeable DIY fans who are paid to encourage purchases by providing Internet users with advice****.
The marketplace La Beauté Française is another example; it offers its (professional) customers the option to customize their selection, based on their region (local products), criteria that are important to them (cruelty-free, artisanal, zero-waste products, etc.) or their desired profit margins. In this way, the marketplace demonstrates that it’s focused on its customers’ priorities.
Delving a little deeper, a website’s scroll rate is a good indicator of UX performance. The higher it is, the better! To date, the average scroll rate across all industries is 54%*.
(*) Source: ContentSquare, Digital Experience Benchmark 2022
(**) Source: Aberdeen Group
(***) https://www.relationclientmag.fr/Thematique/techno-ux-1256/Breves/ManoMano-et-Diabolocom-une-relation-qui-s-inscrit-dans-la-duree-370235.htm#
