Online Marketplace Consulting Services - Your Retail Coach
Online marketplace platforms are doing well in Africa, especially in South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya in Sub-Saharan Africa. These are proven but also highly-competitive markets. Countries marked by increasing urbanization, steady economic development, improving income levels, improving internet and smartphone penetration, logistics and technological developments, growing acceptance of online shopping among the masses, and a pro-business environment will also pick up fast on retail eCommerce and hence, also constitute prospective markets.
If you are a businessman who is thinking of starting an online marketplace platform, you must be well-versed with the entire process of going about it and the challenges involved. Discussed below are some of these challenges.
Challenges in Setting up an Online Marketplace Model
Decoding a market
Every businessman realizes the importance of market assessment in order to estimate and increase sales. But what one should be able to derive from it remains vague for many. Without definite objectives, market assessments are not going to be fruitful. For an online marketplace business, a market needs to be studied from the perspective of both retailers and customers.
The next difficulty is carrying out primary research that is an enormously resource-consuming task. Sitting in another country/region also becomes a logistical nightmare.
Then there is the element of domain expertise which creates difficulties in identifying the informational requirements, expert analysis and assessment, and deriving meaningful insights.
Building a Distinguishing Brand
There are already many well-performing online marketplace platforms in many countries of Africa. So, in a competitive scenario, a new marketplace brand must be able to establish its unique identity with the right competitive stance. This brand identity and UVP (Unique Value Proposition) needs to be established for both target retailers and customers. Apart from a solid business model, an online marketplace platform also needs to develop the right business strategies and build a strong operational framework. And one must also bear in mind that it is the brand of the marketplace that customers experience; the brand name of the retailers hardly ever comes to the notice of the customers.
Assessing the Commercial Viability
To assess whether the business is going to be commercially or financially viable or not, a detailed and comprehensive volume of financial forecasting and assessment is involved. A number of variables need to be taken into consideration for this purpose. These are all projections, but their accuracy matters a lot and therefore, the estimations have to be practical.
Mapping how the business will work
It is only when the different functionalities work perfectly in itself and in cohesion with each other that a business model will work as intended. From core processes to support functions, well-planned strategies are required. This includes planning and strategies for managing infrastructure, supply chain and logistics, operations, HR, etc. For an online retail/ marketplace, various steps are involved like product listings, managing inventory, order processing, logistics, and shipping etc. Online Marketplace Management Services provide all the services in order to assist you to grow your online marketplace.
Last-Mile Delivery
For an online marketplace platform, the last-mile delivery is the make-or-break point. Apart from the efficiency of the logistics partners, the service levels meted out to customers by the delivery team becomes the face of the marketplace platform. Online Marketplace Solutions helps to solve the logistics problem for your eCommerce business.
Keeping a tab on product quality
The price of a product could be 1 penny but when 1000 customers buy it and find it poor - that hurts the brand of the online marketplace. With countless listed products from all price ranges, quality control becomes a humongous, continuous task for online marketplaces.
How YRC can help you through its Online Marketplace Consulting Services: a glimpse
Your Retail Coach (YRC) offers a comprehensive range of consulting services for helping businessmen and entrepreneurs set up their online marketplace platform from ‘concept’ to ‘implementation’. Our online marketplace business consultants for Africa will assist you throughout this journey with expert and professional guidance. Here is a quick picture of what we try to deliver through our Online Marketplace Management Services and Online Marketplace Solutions for Africa.
We deliver thorough and comprehensive market research with the ultimate goal of providing you with actionable insights through our Online Marketplace Solutions. Good or bad, our endeavour remains to present you the market realities with facts and figures.
Our Online Marketplace Management Services consultants will help you identify and define your business’s UVP so that a strong business model could be developed along with the strategic framework of the value chain and internal capabilities required to deliver the intended value.
Running an online marketplace platform involves all business functions working in great shape and sync. In business strategy development, we help you formulate and integrate the various functional strategies to make your online marketplace platform perform non-stop and consistently deliver the intended value to retailers and customers.
We undertake a set of planned, comprehensive, and systematic methodologies to project and assess the financial viability of new business projects. Our Online Marketplace Solutions includes end to end consultation from assessing set up expenditures and operational costs to profit and loss projections and ROI analysis, we seek to ensure that you remain in clear sight of your business’s financial terrain.
In SOP development, our endeavour is not only to hand over the process manuals that help in establishing the operational routines and maintaining consistency in performance and achieving the desired output but also to make businesses process-driven from the inside and growth-ready for the future.
We are a boutique retail consulting firm. To know more about our online marketplace business consulting services for Africa or if you have any query for our online marketplace consultants, drop us a message, and we shall get back to you.