What is a Marketplace?
A marketplace is perfect synchronisation of B2B and B2C interactions. Marketplace acts as a bridge between Multiple suppliers/sellers and customers. In traditional e-commerce websites, single seller can sell his products whereas marketplace provides a business environment to gather all the sellers together and provides them an opportunity to list their products, inventories and offer desirable pricing. On other end a customer can search product from N number of products listed by different sellers to get the best deal.
Why OfBiz as Marketplace?
OFBiz being a potential driver on ERP domain, served the industry from years.
The positive user traction helped OFBiz in becoming a big success. As the industry is growing, OFBiz do have the necessary architectural/infrastructural level support that can be used to take the OFBiz eCommerce website to next level i.e Marketplace.
Feature Plan:
We will have three main actors as Customers, Sellers and Marketplace Operators in the system. Here are actions/operations that can be performed by these actors.
1) Marketplace for Customers:
- Customer should be able to see different sellers selling same product and prices offered.
- Customer should be able to purchase product from range of sellers.
- Customer should be able to see all offers and promotions by sellers and best offer with lower price or promoted seller on marketplace should be on top.
- Customer should be able to see shipping rates and return policy of the seller.
- Customer can see seller profile with following information.
- Launch Date
- Return and Warranties
- Shipping
- Policies
- Rating
- Products (Other products sale by seller)
- Customer can purchase products from different sellers in single order.
2) Marketplace for Seller:
- Seller profile registration.
- Seller profile approval or listing process,
- Seller can add other users to access account like Catalog Manager, Order Manager etc by permission.
- User permission management.
- Manage Seller Profile
- Product Management
- Add product new/existing.
- Inventory management.
- Price management for product.
- Activate and deactivate product listing.
- Add promotion to products.
- Manage Order
- Approve
- Cancel
- Shipment Management
- Ship by marketplace flow
- Ship by seller flow
- Inventory Management
- By Marketplace
- By Seller
- Manage Return
- Issue refund for the cancel order by customer. That means get shipped product back if not accepted at customer end due to some reason.
- Receive item and issue refund amount. On receiving the item tell marketplace to issue refund.
3) Marketplace Operator:
- Manage sellers listing approval process.
- Manage global catalog.
- Manage seller performance.
- Marketing campaign.
- Manage commission setup etc.