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Marketplace Commerce
Marketplace commerce has achieved astonishing scale, fundamentally changing how we consume goods and work. This growth has disrupted many traditional industries as entirely new business models have emerged to address dramatic changes in consumer behavior.
Online platforms are e-commerce merchants at heart: they must build and manage commerce infrastructure, capture and store payment credentials, process payments, monitor for fraud, and other typical activities.
However, platform business models have a range of additional business requirements due to the fact that they must manage both buyers and sellers. Due to this complexity, a seller centric approach is critical to supporting growth.
Seller Centric Approach
While managing payments is an important marketplace requirement, a true seller-centric approach is one where all processes are aligned with the seller profile, from pay in to payout. This provides the critical capabilities needed to support governance, agility and competitiveness in a rapidly changing business environment.
Many solutions in the market today were built for e-commerce and pivoted to support marketplaces. This can limit a true seller centric approach as these solutions lack an open architecture to support diverse business models. Achieving true flexibility and control is all about making your business model the priority.
Implementing A Seller Centric Approach
Implementing a seller-centric approach allows the marketplace to maximize profitability while controlling risks. Seller profiles reflect the different risk levels during the seller journey and speed up the onboarding process. For each profile type and risk level, the business processes follow a different pattern driven by compliance requirements.
Below are some of the key requirements to think about when exploring a seller centric approach.
Seller Account Management
- Ability to create, modify, and change each seller account hierarchy, including financial information, service level plans, clearing plans, billing plans, and payouts
Risk Profiles
- Ability to define sub-merchant risk profiles based on compliance and risk requirements
- Risk profiles should include limitations on transaction activity and payout plans
Payouts
- Ability to manage, approve and perform payouts and withdrawals in a controlled, role based, process
Seller/Buyer Matching
- Ability to dynamically respond to changing market demands, enabling differential offerings by seller profile
- Key options to look for should include: payment methods, billing plans, and payment terms
Want to learn more about “what good looks like” in supporting marketplaces, payment facilitators, and other third-party complex payment models?