Define your marketplace

A marketplace platform is suitable for organizations that need to modernize and manage business complexity across multiple frontends, regardless of buyer, seller, or supplier persona.

Select a platform that mirrors your business structure, allowing you to customize and extend functionality across your entire business domain.

Building blocks

OrderCloud has a very robust model for supporting the most complex organizations. Unlike an overly basic eCommerce platform with only one catalog and a single definition of a user, OrderCloud is ready to mirror the organizational makeup you actually need.

• Marketplace - at the center of any solution is a single Marketplace. It consists directly of users, groups, and addresses (used mainly for shipping calculations), which should be established ahead of product catalogs, buyers, and suppliers.

• Buyers - buyers represent real-world legal entities to which the Seller offers Product Catalogs and from which the Seller receives Orders. Buyers can be set up with their own addresses, users, catalogs, and much more, including Cost Centers, Spending Accounts, and Approval Rules.

• Users - users can be part of the seller, buyer, or supplier setup. They allow you to set up extensive flexibility in setting up a marketplace and coordinating commerce. Additionally, you can set up User Groups that allow you to assign catalogs, permissions, addresses, or other properties.

• Product catalogs - OrderCloud supports publishing any number of variations of your product catalog to buyers and users. Whether you need to offer customized products for sub-segments of your market, or centrally manage catalogs that mirror your global supply chain.

• Suppliers - suppliers are a third, optional type of organization used in indirect supply chain scenarios. Like the Seller, they contain Users and Groups. Once established, Products can be configured to auto-forward to Suppliers when ordered. This will automatically create a new PO, notify the Supplier, and track costs and profit margins if configured.

See OrderCloud building blocks for more details.

Commerce strategies

OrderCloud has a very robust model for supporting the most complex organizations. Unlike an overly basic eCommerce platform with only one catalog and a single definition of a user, OrderCloud is ready to mirror the organizational makeup you actually need.

B2B marketplaces

For organizations that differentiate with a unique value proposition to individual buyer organizations where they expect not only enhanced features over traditional online ordering, but also custom catalog offerings, unique pricing, and a relational model of different user and buyer groups that you and your sales team support.

Key capabilities

• Manage any number of buyers, buyer groups, and user organizations
• Extensible properties allow you to segment and integrate personalization
• Configure catalogs per buyer, with custom category taxonomies
• Manage multiple suppliers, automatically forwarding orders for fulfillment
• Setup personalized pricing depending on the buyer or user group that is ordering
• Extensible payment options for credit cards, purchasing accounts, or B2B credit services
• Optionally extend into B2C on the same marketplace setup

Retail / franchise

While targeting consumers with traditional, B2C shopping experiences is expected, managing the needs of complex retail and franchise operations can require a solution more akin to OrderCloud. Some organizations first tried a simplified, B2C platform and found it difficult to customize their needs for centralized control over all their store operations, requiring customized portals and fully extensible business logic that OrderCloud offers.

Key capabilities

• Unified catalog across different store inventories
• Customized shipment and fulfillment options
• Centralized user and store management for marketing
• Power multiple brands and individual store content off one platform
• Integrate into other social and consumer marketplaces for revenue
• A single view of commerce operations at the corporate level

Direct to consumer

While there may be different motivations for going direct to consumers, depending on if you are a manufacturer, B2B business, or a supplier looking to differentiate from basic online ordering, OrderCloud can provide you with a platform to grow your business through digital channels.

Key capabilities

• Anonymous shopping experience
• Configure unique product variations and specifications
• Erp and 3rd party solution connectivity
• Cloud-scale to integrate with other channels for new business
• Unify B2B and B2C operations into one platform
• Established additional portals to automate operations and reduce costs

Combining strategies with OrderCloud

OrderCloud provides flexibility, allowing you to start with one market strategy and pivot to another within the same OrderCloud instance for your marketplace. Consider the example of a B2B company opening up to other resellers or direct to consumers.

With OrderCloud for B2B, you can set up and control unique Buyers with separate catalogs and pricing, and expose that to users on your B2B commerce experience. You can take one of those Buyer setups and expose the catalog and pricing data to other channels, which can be integrated into other commerce experiences or marketplaces.

All of this can be set up and managed within one OrderCloud instance for your organization with multiple catalogs, buyers, pricing strategies, user groups, suppliers, and custom commerce experiences.

Market segmentation

Effective targeting requires specificity in what and how you target product information and experiences as part of your commerce strategy. You may already have a segmentation strategy and persona library, which you can map to OrderCloud configuration.

• Segments are dividing your customer base into heterogeneous groups, based on submarkets, geographies, or their operational needs to drive how you sell, brand, and market to them.
• Personas are a way to define the types of users you serve within your segments. personas help define the goals, communication style, and workflows required by users of your digital properties.

OrderCloud is highly extensible. The table below describes high-level concepts you can use, but with all of these concepts, you can assign any number of custom properties to support your segmentation and persona strategy that is specific to your business.

Most all of OrderCloud's APIs allow you to query by any segmentation or persona property you assign. This handles use cases such as finding all buyers tied to a sales region or triggering different content or promotions during shopping depending on properties on the logged-in user and their associated buyer account.

CRM integration

To mirror the setup of your CRM and sales operations, you can assign any number of customized properties as mentioned before. An example below might be for a medical manufacturer business running on OrderCloud who wants to tightly manage what products are distributed to what buyer and how those buyer accounts are managed.

With OrderCloud, you can manage your customers in your CRM system and dynamically load or sync them for use in your omnichannel commerce operations.

This may get stored on your Buyer in OrderCloud using XP with any number of custom properties.

{
 "ID": "4304943",
 "Name": "Sunrise Senior Living",
 "DefaultCatalogID": "LONGTERM_CARE",
 "xp": {
 "MyClassOfTrade": "Elderly Care",
 "MySalesRegion": "USNW"
 }
}

See Leveraging XP for more details.

These extensible properties are available for you to use in the websites you develop, and much like your CRM, you can query for all Buyers by any extensible properties you defined.

Filtering buyers using XP

This example will return all your Buyers who are in your 'USNW' sales region

GET https://sandboxapi.ordercloud.io/buyers?filters=xp.MySalesRegion=USNW HTTP/1.1

Authorization: Bearer eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9...

Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8

Bridging headless technology

Being able to unify your segmentation and persona strategy across headless technology is extremely important. It also simplifies the way you manage personalized campaigns across systems.

An example might be targeting a population of 10,000 shoppers who fit the demographic of '65 and older' and 'Resides in the Midwest'. Coordinating multiple, headless systems with 10,000 individual rules or assignments to run that campaign is not scalable or efficient, but simply coordinating over two fields in your segmentation is much more manageable. OrderCloud supports this in any capacity you choose.

Multi-supplier growth

Depending on your marketplace strategy, you may have multiple suppliers who fulfill directly as part of your OrderCloud implementation. Some organizations start with just one supplier, being their own distribution engine, and may start to layer in products from another supplier in the future.

In OrderCloud, a supplier is any system or third-party organization that can fulfill all or part of an order placed by your customers. You can set OrderCloud to route all orders to your ERP or order management system, and that system handles routing to other suppliers (drop ship or non-stock). Alternatively, you can set up suppliers to receive and manage their orders on OrderCloud directly, like a marketplace.

You can use a hybrid approach of managing all orders within your ERP, while also offering suppliers direct access to OrderCloud through a supplier portal to manage supplemental product data entry or capabilities that your existing ERP systems may not offer.

Expand your product offering

By integrating other suppliers directly to OrderCloud, you can expand your product offering to buyers, where they can create a single order which includes products you distribute and ship, alongside products shipped directly from another supplier.

Supplier portals

Advanced commerce strategies not only focus on the buyer experience but also ways to reduce costs and optimize their supply chain with supplier integrations. OrderCloud formally manages the concept of multiple suppliers along with their users.

This means you can stand up a portal for supplier self-service to manage various aspects of your supply chain for your customers. Not all suppliers have systems to automate integration, and considering an online portal may be the best option to consistently manage your suppliers and expectations.

Building a supplier portal, powered by OrderCloud to:

• Setup new products with specifications
• Assign variable pricing to your segmented customer base
• Inventory available to sell to your customers
• Offer promotions specific to their products
• Manage orders submitted through shipment
• Integrate other 3rd party partner services into the experience
• Respond to customer inquiries and support

Supplier fulfillment

Reducing operational costs through self-service portals for suppliers is one option, but more mature suppliers may have ways to integrate their systems directly with OrderCloud's APIs. Because OrderCloud is API-First, you can enable supplier's systems to directly manage all of their product uploads, order downloads, and fulfillment updates. To understand this process better, you can jump to Fulfillment Automation.