All the success stories inspire us to do better every day. But behind its curtain, every successful entrepreneur or online marketplace owner has to go through a number of hardships and struggles that no one could see. Almost all those marketplace owners need to learn from their mistakes.
And it's a universal thing, even if you are an aspiring marketplace owner or want to become one, you need to keep learning from the mistake you make in life. As every mistake, you make out there teaches you countless lessons and those lessons can inspire, motivates & teach thousands of others in the process.
At weDevs, we are working with a lot of individuals or companies to build their dream marketplace with Dokan. In this endeavor, we also had the privilege to come across a number of exciting stories behind these successful people's achievements with their multivendor online store around the globe.
And today we are simply going to highlight some of those top inspiring lessons shared by some of the successful marketplace owners.
8 Aspiring Lessons to Learn From Successful Marketplace Owners
So we have sorted out some of the most helpful lessons from those stories of successful marketplace owners. We are certain that you will find all of them handy and helpful towards the journey of your fruitful entrepreneurship. Keep reading.
1. Do You Know Completely What You Are Doing?
‘Knowing what you are doing'. It's the first and foremost thing you should consider before starting your online marketplace. For example, if you want to produce baseball bats, what should be the case?
One day, a friend of yours tells you to produce baseball bats. Then you will sell them as souvenirs or supply professional demands. It will make you a lot of money. Though it gives you a sudden excitement, should you go on with it?
Well, it requires certain things to understand. Are you a baseball fan or love the game? Do you have a keen sense of the equipment it needs while playing? Which woods or metal makes the best bats, and how this industry is doing over the years?
If all the answer is affirmative, then you are all set to get the deals. But if you know nothing about the chances of profitability of this business, then your ship is bound to sink really deep.
All the experts and eCommerce entrepreneurs put all their efforts into things they understand better. A successful online store owner knows completely what he is doing.
Ask him about his business process and risk factors. Or ask him about profit margin, marketing catch, or the biggest emotional drive aka pain point of the target customer, he will answer just about instantly.
So, if you are going to become a successful online entrepreneur, you should know your industry, your business process, chances of failure, or flourishing. Therefore, you need a passionate mindset to pursue whatever you are trying to do.
2. Top Online Marketplace Owners Do Trial and Learn from Mistakes to Find the Best Ways
Trial and error refers to the process of verifying that a certain choice is right (or wrong).
Brilliant
Most of the business owners forget this simple lesson. They often want to skip through many minor or major steps making their business plan that stands upon a shallow base.
Suppose you want to run a social media campaign for your special skin toner. You advertise that your product is best, natural, and lucrative. But you forget to mention what different results this beauty product brings compared to the existing brand in the market.
That's just a tiny example anyway. But all the successful online store owners try to experiment with the odds. They find out several ways to accomplish a goal, then apply them one by one as a trial basis. Out of ten experiments, they will find the most logical and valid solutions eventually.
This lesson descends directly from the first one which is understanding your business from all the directions. Hence, before you hop into your investments, you should find out the answers to these questions below –
- Why do you want to do a particular business?
- What is your goal to choose this special investment?
- Do you know the possible challenges that may occur during the process?
- What purpose does your business will serve?
- What is your elaborate marketing plan?
- Do you really want to satisfy your customers?
All these questions will lead you to find the hidden point and experiment with them. Like, you can try different marketing approaches or your ability to solve impending challenges, etc.
In this regard, American entrepreneur and author Tim Fargo once said,
Never give up your right to be wrong, and be sure to give others that right too.
3. Successful Online Marketplace Owners Know How to Cope up With the Changes
Here is the story of Dominique Deutzmann, a German entrepreneur. He used to work for a corporate firm as a supply chain manager. Along with a regular job, he has a passion for aqua-cultured corals, and their protection too.
In 2017, he initiated his company CommunityCoral. It aims to help passionate coral aquarists and farmers who actively take an interest in the protection, survival, and propagation of aqua-cultured corals.
But doing business in a local store was of a great limitation for him. Since the trend for eCommerce become popular all over the world, Dominic thought it's high time he creates an online marketplace for Coral lovers. This had helped him to establish an online community among like-minded people as well as doing business with more openness.
So he found Dokan Multivendor as one of the most popular names in the global multivendor community, and we helped him to build his dream marketplace. Right now, CommunityCoral is doing great.
Hence, it wouldn't have been possible if Dominic would have failed to understand the changing nature of the business. E-commerce and online presence were already an established way for most of the modern entrepreneurs by then. And Dominic just answered the call.
Despite this success story, the most successful online marketplace owners also love to cope up with the challenges.
For example, the eCommerce marketplace controlled by customer satisfaction. According to SEJ, more than 91% of young customers love to read reviews before buying specific products.
If you want your marketplace to become popular, you should really help your customers more than you do before. Thus your review and word of mouth about your business, products, or services will be good.
But its also true that you might not always get the desired outcome. If that happens, you need to stay calm and analyze to make a new decision.
4. Ability to Maintain Tough Supply and Demand Situations
Experts called it the bottleneck situation. It often happens to the most online marketplace. Demand increases to a tremendous number due to your goodwill so much that it exceeds the number of your resources.
If you take orders and fail to deliver them in time, what would be the result? Not only it leads to customer dissatisfaction but also it forces them to leave with a bad impression of your shop. Now, this leads to negative reviews. Which eventually causes a bad dent to your eCommerce store's reputations.
Hence, successful marketplace owners always have plans to fight bottlenecks. Or whenever they find such situations, they invent the most effective strategy to solve these issues.
Here are some expert tips that may help you to reduce bottleneck situations
- Target the exact audience for your product.
- Are you showing more benefits than you can deliver? If so, forget it. Always make those promises that you can fulfill.
- Don't sell any product blandly.
- Share your brand-story before showing your product to customers.
- Engage your potential customers with information and ads. In the meantime focus more on your resources.
In our findings, top online entrepreneurs tend to break bottleneck into short-term goals and try to merge them with elaborated business strategies.
It's all about the idea of dieting. People who maintain a balanced diet tend to have a sound physical condition than those who eat more than their body can afford.
5. Marketing Leaders Are Leading the Way in E-commerce
If you are going to be a successful online marketplace owner, there's no other way than generating innovative & smart marketing ideas. According to WPForms, there are an estimated 12 – 24 million eCommerce sites around the world. And only 1 million of those sites earn more than $1k a year.
This shows us that the number of online marketplaces are increasing every day. But success is limited to fewer people, and surely you can be one of them if you have the right idea in place at the right time.
Many online marketplaces failed to sustain because they weren't able to emphasize in their marketing process. Unless you let your target customer and vendors know you are here to help, why should they do business through your multi-vendor shop?
Two of the most successful online store Amazon and Alibaba are fabulous in their most marketing campaign. Their online ads and social media appearance can't be unnoticed. They are on tv, they are in online streaming services, they are in educational apps, and most presumably everywhere.
Therefore, most of the online marketplace owners comprehend the very importance of marketing trends and advertisements. They not only appear before your eyes. They appear with a good message in an attractive way about your online shop.
6. A Successful Entrepreneur Become the Face of the Company
The success of business very much depends on public relations. The more you claim your position in your industry, the more people get to know you. However, you don't need to become a new-age Jack Ma or Jeff Bezos, so don't put up so much pressure on yourself.
Suppose, you have a tiny antic shop in Maricopa, let's make sure that most of the townfolks know the address. If anyone needs a 100-year-old Sumerian knife, they should at least think about coming to your place first.
So, you can publish blogs in your online store, build a section on your website if you don't have it already. Engage with the customers in social media live or YouTube videos. Join trade fair or make & share speeches. All these things are going to boost your business brand and overall marketing activities.
7. Be a Playful Innovator and Thinker for Your Online Marketplace
I found myself more removed from direct interaction throughout the entire consumer journey and I wanted to gain that, without losing my opportunity to innovate on the Research and Development side.
Naomi Furgiuele, Executive, Johnson & Johnson
Only an innovative mind can fight difficult situations and the ever-changing behavior of the business environment. All the successful marketplace owners are big-time innovator and love to face challenges in their way.
They never stop learning from their mistakes. Even they learn from the success of their competitors, try to find the most logical and cost-effective way to bring a change in the business process.
We can share the success story of Todo a Mano with you in this regard.
In Ecuador, there are a lot of native people who create innovative handmade items. These handicraft items mostly sold in local exhibitions or through social media. However, most of the year, they are not available because of the lack of production and marketing.
The entrepreneurs of Todo a Mano thought this could be an opportunity. And they know that a large chunk of talented artisans of Ecuador doesn't have any online store.
Then they build a multivendor marketplace with Dokan and then invited all the handicraft artists to sell from their platform around the country. And this is how Todo a Mano began its inventive & successful multi-vendor marketplace journey with Dokan.
So, if you are innovative like the rest of the successful entrepreneurs, it is very likely that you can overcome every hardship and obstacle towards the success of your online marketplace.
8. Try to See the Big Picture and Be a Trendsetter
Seeing the bigger picture of a business is the toughest thing to do. It is a hidden strength of an online marketplace owner. It is even near to wisdom. Most of the people are too concerned about the current outcome rather than to see the long-distant visionary image of a project.
But what exactly is seeing the bigger picture in anything? It's a process to make assumptions of a near or distant future through a set of tools. What are these tools? Information, an inventive mind to comprehend them, understand the history and the present situation your industry is in, know well-enough of the people's perception of a product or business, and many more.
However, here we have listed a few tips that will help you to understand this lesson –
- Give yourself time to think
- Find out the possible business opportunities
- Share and discuss your ideas with people you trust
- Find out specific goals to achieve
- What should be your first step? Find it and examine the possibilities.
- Keep inventing or generating new ideas.
- Have a keen sense of learning and an open mind to see through other peoples opinion
All these might look heavy at a first glance But being a successful online marketplace owner and entrepreneur is a gradual outcome. You can achieve your goal with one step at a time. To do that, you need to follow the leaders throughout the industries, read motivational books, analyze expert interviews, attend seminars, etc.
And most of all, it needs a lot of courage to become a trendsetter.
Final Thoughts – Dream Big To Get Big
Some people just dream big & some do only the latter. But success in life depends on both dreaming and doing. This is valid for your online marketplace too.
All of these lessons we've mentioned above were gathered from the people who have never stopped dreaming and working hard to make their big dreams come true. They know this secret well-enough: ideas are only valid to you when you make them work.
And so even you can dream big and put your big ideas into place to become a proud & successful marketplace owner just like all the others mentioned here.
So, tell us, which lesson seemed most intriguing to you? Do you think you have it in you to become a successful marketplace owner one day? Do share your views and thoughts in the comments below.