On October 7, we hosted a live demo of OroMarketplace. We gave you a short introduction to Oro’s suite of applications, followed by an in-depth live demo of OroMarketplace, and wrapped it up with a questions and answers session.
We were thrilled by the turnout and the interaction during this webinar, and thank everyone who attended and participated. If you couldn’t make it, we recorded the session for your convenience, which you can access here.
We began with various developments in the rapidly-changing B2B marketplace space, how OroMarketplace stands out in the competitive platform market, and the recognition we received from the likes of Gartner and Forrester so soon after the platform’s launch.
Here are the highlights of the event:
B2B Marketplaces and OroMarketplace
While the marketplace space is dominated by Amazon, Alibaba, and other giants we’re all familiar with, the B2B digital commerce environment is undergoing a marketplace revolution of its own. Marketplaces have become a key destination for B2B vendors to build relationships and connect buyers with products. Aside from serving the unique needs of operators, sellers, and buyers, B2Bs look for marketplaces with the following features:
- Corporate account management, request for quotes, personalized pricing, and fulfillment options.
- Powerful workflows to manage seller onboarding, order approvals, negotiations, and checkouts.
- Flexible architecture with robust APIs that accommodate integration with business, payment, or fulfillment systems.
- Built-in CRM to manage operator-seller, operator-buyer, as well as seller-buyer relationships.
- An integrated experience that allows marketplace control using a single solution.
The OroMarketplace Live Demo
As a reminder, we covered the following during the live demo:
- How OroCommerce’s many core elements and B2B capabilities lend themselves to B2B marketplace duty.
- Seller onboarding with Oro’s workflow engine, and how marketplace operators can manage every stage of this cycle.
- Seller admin dashboards, and how operators can customize them according to the individual seller.
- How sellers can manage their brands, business units, and warehouses.
- How operators can set up and monitor the product creation and approval workflow.
- How sellers can utilize the digital assets and CMS to supply product information for approval.
- Operator-facing pricing, product management, and marketplace monetization models (commission-based, margin-based, marketing-based, and more).
- Storefront design and various product display options (Amazon model vs. eBay model).
- Buyer-facing self-service features such as corporate account management with access permissions.
- The buyer’s self-serve checkout experience, split order view and order splitting for sellers.
- Operator-generated payout reports to sellers and how they work with payment processors.
Questions and Answers
Can we flag sellers (performance violations) when sellers break pricing limits, etc?
Yes, Oro’s workflow engine allows you to set up workflows that flag or disable an action or trigger a manual review process in case of a violation.
What was the motivation for choosing PHP and Symfony?
Symfony is an enterprise-grade open-source PHP framework that powers some of the largest web applications on the web. Security, scalability, modularity, and extensive developer tools are some of the reasons for the choice.
Is OroCommerce scalable and deployable on multiple cloud platforms?
Yes, we offer Oro’s cloud-hosted infrastructure, but customers can deploy on both private or public clouds, or a combination of the two.
Are marketplace sellers able to create a self-branded (white-label) front-end that they can deploy using their own URL?
Yes, Oro’s native multiple website capabilities make this possible. Marketplace operators can enable sellers to offer white-label sites and URLs with products pulled from the master catalog.
Is OroMarketplace essentially OroCommerce with a few settings turned on?
OroMarketplace is 80% OroCommerce, but we’ve developed several unique features such as order, payment, and fulfillment splitting. We’re developing more capabilities, such as allowing buyers to set custom shipping terms, for instance.
Does OroMarketplace integrate with DocuSign for vendor onboarding?
Yes. By using Oro’s workflow engine, it’s possible to incorporate DocuSign into the vendor onboarding workflow to securely manage contract documents.
Can sellers integrate with any native inventory system to update inventory in real-time?
This can be done with the help of APIs. You’ll have to design a logic to retrieve data through the inventory system.
Can a product be part of multiple categories and collections?
Yes. Operators can set up product families, and attributes in these families can correspond to different properties of the product.
Thank you for joining our demo and participating. It was fantastic to host so many interesting people from all corners of the world. You’ve asked some great questions in the Q&A, and we were happy to answer some of them. If you didn’t make it, don’t worry – you can watch the demo recording by following this link.
Please get in touch with us if you still have any questions. If you’d like to learn how OroMarketplace can help you realize your marketplace goals, just book a live, one-on-one demonstration of OroMarketplace with one of our sales reps.
