Online Marketplace Technology: Find Your Next Tool

What is an online marketplace?

An online marketplace is a website where multiple vendors can sell their products. For some marketplaces, you’ll need approval to add your products to the site. On others, almost anyone can create an account and start selling as long as they meet a few basic requirements.

The most popular online marketplaces

Some of the most popular online marketplaces include:

• Amazon
• Walmart Marketplace
• Target Plus™
• Sears Marketplace
• eBay
• Etsy
• Alibaba
• Rakuten
• Facebook Marketplace for Business

Online marketplace technology trends

Online marketplaces center around technology and make it a key part of the shopping experience. Some of the top trends in online marketplace technology include:

• Mobile devices: Mobile is now a substantial part of shopping online, with mobile ecommerce bringing in over 70% of ecommerce sales in 2024.
• Personalization: Online marketplaces show shoppers personalized recommendations and ads based on their past shopping history, demographic characteristics, and other factors.
• Advertising automation: Sellers can integrate automation into their online advertising campaigns to drive more sales through marketplaces.
• Detailed reporting: With tools like MarketingCloudFX, sellers can automatically track the details of their online marketplace performance and even get artificial intelligence-powered recommendations for improving their digital marketing.

Now, keep reading to learn about the best online marketplace tech!

Online marketplace tools: Ecommerce platforms

Not looking to sell on a marketplace? These platforms will allow you to sell your products via your website and take care of listing items, collecting payments, and more. Even if you sell on an online marketplace, an ecommerce store can help expand your online presence.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce, an online marketplace software, will help you better leverage your online profile.

You can use it to sell products on your website, Amazon, eBay, and even Instagram.

This software gives you all the tools you need to build, launch, and drive traffic to your online site. A significant benefit to BigCommerce is that it doesn’t charge any transaction fees. A downfall includes limiting your subscription options by your number of sales.

Shopify and Shopify Plus 

One of the most flexible online marketplace software is Shopify and its enhanced version, Shopify Plus.

Shopify helps you make sales everywhere you do business, online or in person. Shopify allows you to make as many sales without limitation based on your subscription choice. However, Shopify does charge a transactional fee.

WooCommerce

Another online marketplace tool includes WooCommerce, a WordPress plugin. WooCommerce is completely free, but it only works on sites managed by WordPress. You also have to download, install, and set it up by yourself.

Wholesale Suite

Wholesale Suite is an extension of WooCommerce that adds a wholesale feature to your store. This extension helps with wholesale pricing, order minimums, payment options, and more.

Online marketplace tools: Order fulfillment

Making a sale is only part of the hassle with online sales.

Once you make a sale, you have to ship the product to the buyer’s address. This can be a time-consuming process. These tools can help you streamline product delivery and help save you valuable time.

ShipStation

Another great online marketplace technology includes ShipStation, a shipping software.

It allows you to generate shipping labels, compare carriers, send shipping updates, and process returns from any device. It essentially automates your shipping process and helps you improve turnaround for order fulfillment.

ShipWorks

ShipWorks offers an alternative to ShipStation.

This online marketplace software integrates with most major ecommerce tools, and it allows you to create custom labels, batch processing, and compare carrier rates. One disadvantage to ShipWorks involves the fact that the software is only offered to Windows users.

Desktop Shipper

Another online marketplace software centered around shipping includes Desktop Shipper. Features include automation, real-time shopping, discounting, and batch processing. It also has a responsive support team that can help you navigate through the shipping software.

Online marketplace tools: Accounting

Unless you’ve taken an accounting course, this part of your business may seem hard to manage. With these software programs, however, the accounting process can be simplified.

QuickBooks Desktop or QuickBooks Online 

As an easy accounting solution, QuickBooks is a valuable tool for the online marketplace.

This software allows you to accept payments, track your income and expenses, run reports, minimize tax liability, and pay employees on time. QuickBooks also integrates well with other online marketplace tools.

A2X

If you’re looking for another accounting software to use for your ecommerce business. Try A2X. A2X automates accounting for Shopify, Amazon, Etsy, Walmart, and more! It can connect with QuickBooks too.

Webgility

Webgility also offers accounting support to online businesses. This online marketplace software syncs data from your sales channels, updates your books, and helps file taxes quickly and easily.

Online marketplace tools: Analytics

Website analytics can prove to be the key when unlocking your online strategy. These tools can help you discover data patterns and help you to increase your online sales.

Google Analytics 

Google Analytics holds the key to understanding your website’s traffic. With this tool, you can see your conversions, sessions, who is coming back to your site, and so much more. If you’re ever wondering more about your website data — check Google Analytics.

DataHawk

DataHawk is an analytics and optimization that helps you increase sales on Amazon. Use DataHawk to get sales reporting, advertising analytics, product monitoring, product alerting, and more.

Teikametrics

Teikametrics is another online marketplace tool that centers around data collection and analysis. This software focuses on Amazon and Walmart and connects advertising, inventory, and more into one place.

Intentwise

This online marketplace technology allows you to increase your return on your Amazon advertising spend by automating tasks, providing data connectors for Google Data Studio reporting, offering campaign optimization recommendations, and more.

Earn more revenue from selling online with WebFX

Understanding and utilizing online marketplace tools is critical if you want to improve your customer’s experience on your site and increase revenue for your company. However, if you aren’t sure where to start or what tools to use, WebFX can help.

With a team of over 500 marketing experts, we can help you choose the online marketplace tools for your ecommerce site to drive results. We’ve driven over $6 billion in revenue for our clients and managed over 14.9 million transactions in the past five years.

Ready to increase revenue for your business? Contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist one-on-one about our ecommerce marketing services!