UX-First B2B eCommerce Marketplace In a Month
Creating an online marketplace prototype—multivendor, multiseller, multistorefront—in a month, with flying colors
PROJECT IN BRIEF
Internal project
Targeted internationally
Industry
eCommerce
Foodservice
Retail
Manufacturing
Services
Research and development
Prototyping
Integrations
Quality assurance
Feature updates
Platforms
Perfect is the enemy of adequate. The statement nails it regarding almost any undertaking, but when it comes to marketplace integration, opting for a flawed tech that requires workarounds can well provoke a cascade of problems.
What if we told you that you could skip the trial-and-error phase, as we’ve survived through this, a gazillion times for you? We’ve walked the path of building and interconnecting multivendor and multistorefront marketplaces, A to Z, removing the potential roadblocks whatsoever.
Behold! A rock-solid foundation for your most disruptive online commerce undertakings, scalable and customizable to no end.
PROJECT BACKGROUND
The need to test the combined tech capabilities
Our team put their heads together to test the waters with an early MVP running on the combined Amitech Group Composable Kit, Marketplacer, BigCommerce and Builder.io platforms. It seemed natural to first showcase a strong tech backbone of a sophisticated composable multivendor marketplace ecosystem and further improve it, customizing it to individual clients’ needs.
TEAM OBJECTIVES
- Research some representative user, buyer, and seller personas, fully adapting the marketplace content and functionality to their needs. That is demo the solution’s boundless potential in customer scenario personalization
- Deliver a technically sound multistorefront B2B marketplace enabling eCommerce clients to shrink time-to-market and quickly scale without any tech-associated bottlenecks
REPRESENTATIVE PERSONAS RESEARCH
Marketplace operator
- Understands the value of MACH architectures
- Aspires to reduce time-to-market, deliver things quickly, and improve non-stop
- Enable suppliers to easily add their goods to the website and track sales reports:
- FEaaS Accelerator App for enhanced marketplace frontend
- Connector App for marketplace platform integration
Marketplace sellers
- B2B foodservice provider operating in the United States and localized for English and Spanish markets (existing business owned by the Operator)
- B2B foodservice provider working in Europeran Union and localized for the English, Spanish, Norwegian (a new business owned by the Operator)
- Non-food eCommerce: chef uniforms seller and restaurant equipment seller
Potential marketplace users
Meet Karen, an experienced chef in a fancy restaurant that’s the talk of the town. Fully booked is the place’s normal state,—it serves hundreds of people day in and day out.
To minimize the purchasing effort and focus on the menu and dining experience improvement, Karen decides to opt for a single trusted supplier. She orders on behalf of her restaurant, thus she follows highly specific requirements in terms of quality, quantity, and price. What’s especially critical for her is the ability to request a quote.
Marcus’s company has been partnering with the same trusted provider for years. Now that they launched a marketplace, Marcus is willing to employ their service, as they’ve always been suggesting highly professional suppliers who never cut corners on assortment quality and deliver strictly on time.
Given that Marcus’s business is a country-wide network of boutique hotels, clockwork logistics is on top of their demand list, alongside price quotes. The company is considering a new location in Norway, as the marketplace is likely to significantly facilitate the doc flow, enable them to build clear company role hierarchies, manage orders within a unified account, and easily delegate jobs to local representatives.
Of all Ching’s responsibilities and tasks, stock fulfillment is by far the most stressful and time-sensitive. Though he orders online from multiple sellers within numerous product categories, the item list is more or less the same every time, so he’d highly appreciate reorder functionality, alongside order guides and quick orders.
Having a barcode scanner by default would be very helpful as well.
Dessi strives to drive flawless content and UX, and thus she’s a huge fan of tools that facilitate routines, get more vision into customer behavior and preferences, and help ultimately personalize offerings.
She’s looking to employ end-to-end analytics and heat maps for better client targeting and segmentation. Dessi’s go-to approaches to polish the B2B commerce experience and timing are A/B multivariate testing and content scheduling.
SOLUTION
Multivendor multilocale headless marketplace
The delivered solution showcases a business growth strategy of an imaginary foodservice distributor, operating globally.
1. Creating an online marketplace
They jump-started their undertaking by launching their very first sales channel, available within the es-US and en-US locales, running on our branded composable mobile-first B2B commerce solution.
2. Starting the second online marketplace
The decision-makers felt like expanding. Next thing, they built another channel in Europe, sticking to pretty much a standard assortment, yet opting for an entirely different branding.
3. Marketplacer and Amitech Group Connector come into play
Crafting another B2B marketplace platform took introducing a couple of new non-food categories from external sellers, alongside more user personas like sellers, marketplace operators, and beyond. Marketplacer handled the task brilliantly.
Essentially, releasing the second B2B wholesale marketplace was: plus another branded storefront, additional BigCommerce channel, and extra UX and design capabilities provided by Builder.io. Also, the team brought in a new custom tech, Amitech Group Marketplace Connector to upload seller data into Marketplacer.
This way, under the roof of a single frontend as a service solution, the team got another branded storefront that served as a separate sales channel.
CHALLENGE
Drive times faster release and continuous improvement
As a pillar of the eCommerce ecosystem, the team used the Amitech Group FEaaS solution powered by BigCommerce, thus dramatically cutting time-to-market from the get-go. The platform’s essential components are:
Guided onboarding that allows users to get their stores going, customize storefronts, and go through simple settings to integrate any third-party marketplace tools by just specifying the keys. All the heavy lifting that’s meant to enable support for highly specific customer needs happens behind the scenes.
Theme editor employs prebuilt content components and directs them to headless CMS, allowing users to customize their storefronts in line with brand book requirements, also providing both the light and dark themes out of the box.
To accomplish even faster release, greater agility, and personalization, we’ve plugged in another integration, Builder.io. It allows users to visually edit the content for certain targeting purposes.
The solution supports a bunch of customer scenarios, producing different content driven by several persona segments within complex targeting.
FEATURE HIGHLIGHTS
Scalability & adaptability
Multistorefront support
Both of the prototype marketplaces natively support the BigCommerce checkout pipeline. One can add as many storefronts as needed with zero risk of damaging operational capabilities
Multiseller products support
Global products are for real! Not only did we introduce Seller as a dedicated category, but enabled the potential marketplace users to choose from multiple sellers and fix the best deals possible with whoever they trust more
Locale-driven content
Depending on locale, the headless CMS aligns content slots with specific user segments, providing different homepages, relevant popular categories, and best-selling products across multiple sellers
Dynamic shipping provider
The solution lets users set up their shipping rules and methods in Marketplacer for every single commerce item. Once they get synced with BigCommerce, accurate costs are visible right away, with individual subtotals, and estimated shipping panels
Open API
To ensure unrivaled freedom in design and UX, the team introduced an open API that smoothly integrates with our FEaaS solution and any other frontend provider. Pick a trusted platform to handle content, collect and sync user data, and customize seller onboarding or anything you want different, any time
Become a seller
By just filling in the essential fields during the onboarding process, one can apply to become a Marketplacer seller. Once they’ve made it through the approval routines, the operator activates the seller status, and the new seller can jump right into the sales process
Customer experience & flexibility
Promotions & discounts
To exercise one’s own Black Fridays, the product hosts can practice seller-specific promos and discounts. They are a no-brainer to build in the Marketplacer seller portal, varying the percentage, including and excluding items,—it all easily syncs with BigCommerce, with zero operator assistance
Quick order pad
Add as many products as you need,—the solution supports a bunch of search-related scenarios, from typeahead to partial item number search, and beyond. Quickly order from prepopulated files, add products secured within category listing pages
Product reorder
Every B2B commerce insider is aware of how critical it is to be able to reorder certain stuff at the click of a button. Done! The superpower is at your service by default. Save your order list and submit it again without manual routines, whenever the need comes
Company role hierarchy
As one adds their company information, they can build complex organizational hierarchies by introducing multiple user roles and dependencies. From buyer to admin, from manager to associate junior buyer, and beyond
Quote management
Well underway, the feature is about to enable businesses to generate and govern quotes for prospective clients in real time. Integrating with their CRM tools, it’s going to unlock the pricing data, allowing the marketplace operators to oversee order statuses and purchases
CAPABILITIES
- B2B bucket with a barcode scanner
- B2B company registration management
- User impersonation capability
- Order guides and quick orders
- Instant BigCommerce-powered checkout
- B2B-specific scenarios support
- Basic B2C functionality
- Enhanced assisted search
- Google Tag Manager support
- Real-time product availability status
TECH UNDER THE HOOD
Enables skipping the from-scratch development phase and scaling under no limits, be it seller ranges, product categories, data feed, or revenue. All of this with zero budget overhead and inventory management grind
A leading partner in tailoring innovation-ready online eCommerce marketplaces that ensure the ultimate shopping experience, ramp up client audiences at a click and give a giant leap to your sales platform performance
Amitech Group branded headless FEaaS solution built in line with the MACH approach. Enables crafting composable multivendor eCommerce marketplaces featuring unparalleled personalization and rolling them out in a matter of days
Amitech Group brand-new middleware to sustain a lightning-fast data exchange across BigCommerce and Marketplacer. The API-based tool syncs a wealth of data to bring up your platform in a couple of minutes and customize any time
Powers the solution to serve different instances, enabling us to target content in line with highly specific goals. Helps drive dynamic content and omnichannel experience like a pro, minimizing effort and design expenses
“The Amitech Group team demoed that we can tackle nearly any business scenario, whatever the client’s vertical. We adapt content, product categories, and recommendations to a wealth of target customer personas. Importantly, we dramatically cut time-to-market, acing it within B2C and B2B, multivendor and multilocale, with unprecedented personalization.”
Results
Up to
4X
Shrunk time-to-market and development expenses
Up to
3X
Higher average order value opportunities
30
days
Creating a full-blown multistorefront online marketplace ecosystem
Minutes
To handle mission-critical operations
Zero
Need in warehousing capacities for the clients
Unleashed
Revenue and range growth capabilities
Automated
Synchronization of heavy data loads
Enterprise-level
Scalability to handle sales channel extension
THE UNDERLYING MASTERY INGREDIENTS
Scalability
Amazon Web Services unleash the marketplace scalability, enabling the system to withstand uncontrolled load jumps
Security
- Role-based access control
- DDoS protection
- Data encryption
- Network traffic control
Team composition
- Software Architect
- Product Owner
- 4 Software Developers
- QA Engineer
Methodology
Scrum
Platforms
BigCommerce, Amazon Web Services, Marketplacer, Builder.io
Programming languages
Go
Frameworks and tools
AWS CloudWatch, Redis, ElastiCache, Google Tag Manager, Amitech Group Open API, Cloudflare
Databases
Amazon DynamoDB
Last updated: September 5, 2024
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Steers the Amitech Group boat through the rising tide, onboarding eCommerce talents and catching every wave to drive breezy innovation and lift fellow vessels.
Democratizes those royally sophisticated tech phenomena by means of concise copy and occasional wit.
Drives the team’s technical excellence like there are no barriers. Gears the race with real game-changing finds.
Let’s build something great together!
Drop us a line and we will contact you to shape our path forward