Starting an ecommerce marketplace may sound pretty straightforward but actually is quite difficult. Understanding and monitoring listings, handling payment gateways, secure shopping carts, and the list can go on and on. Once you do find what you’re passionate about and see that there is a need for your product or service, you can start building.

It’s exciting to find a theme and coming up with material to display on your website. After you have put your marketplace’s identity and splashed it all over your site you are live!

More on marketplace themes here. 

Even with great customer service, swift checkout and an awesome interface there are some details that many business owners miss. Anand Srinivasan has uncovered a few mistakes many ecommerce stores make and we will be discussing four of them. 

1. Emptying the cart
   We’re all familiar with shopping on a website and putting a bunch of items in the cart to “save for later”. Bigger companies understand this and keep a record of the items you had to save the items for you. Smaller marketplaces may overlook this little detail and it could be the loss of a sale. Customers don’t want to spend their time sifting through all your products only to have to do it all over again.
   
   
2. Omitting price filtering options
   Many shoppers find it more efficient by shopping with the price filters to help stay within their own budget. A common mistake people make is combining the price feature with others like reviews or item descriptions. This is an issue because it can mix up the items that give the user unwanted products on their feed and that could possibly result in a loss of sale.
   
   A solution would be to allow the filters of product attributes first then sorting through price.
   
   
3. What is your page type?
   Depending on the type of marketplace you have will determine what page type you’ll have for your listings. Various social media for instance use infinite scrolling, which results in an epidemic of “Twitter Finger”.
   
   For an ecommerce marketplace your customers already know what kind of stuff they are looking for so setting pages would be best. You can set how many items in a row you want and the number of items on the page. Don’t forget to add a “like” button on each product so your customer can remember what they want!
   
   
4. Leaving out the stock of an item
   Displaying the amount an item has in stock is handy for a couple of reasons: first, your customer will know right away if their item is out of stock or not so they don’t waste their time or emotion invested. Second if an item is at low stock it creates a sense of urgency for your customer which will incline them to make the purchase!

These are all small blunders that can help your business in the long run and make your user’s shopping experience more comfortable! If you’re looking for more ideas check out our 3 tips for startup success here.