Nowadays E-Commerce is taking over major part of trades. We can easily see that lots of E-Commerce stores are getting online each day and it’s becoming really difficult to stand out. So, how to make the business and its products stand out in a competitive environment? New niche marketplaces, as exemplified by Etsy, are bringing exciting new opportunities for growing businesses.

You might be thinking “How Multi-Vendor Marketplace Store differs from E-Commerce Store?” Let’s figure out the basic difference between E-Commerce store and Multi-Vendor Marketplace Store:

• Investment aspect: in general, an E-Commerce website demands a larger investment, as you need to invest significantly on products to maintain your inventory. You can start a Marketplace with a low investment where your sellers are responsible for the inventory and you just provide them with the storefront to carry out the business.

• Inventory aspect: for E-Commerce website, you may have to maintain a large inventory in order to offer your clients more choices. Since you own the products in your inventory, you may come across the issues related to unsold goods and may have to throw stock clearance sale to get rid of the unsold stock. But the Marketplace offers you a more flexible choice: you can just deactivate the products that are not selling for a long time, and you never pay a cost to maintain your stock in a Marketplace.
• Marketing aspect: Marketplace has marketing benefits, it allows sellers to market their products individually and which adds to the promotions of the Marketplace itself. On the other hand, E-commerce stores rely on Google Adwords and promote specific product categories where the competition is fierce among different e-commerce players.
• Technological aspect: while there are many solutions available for creating E-commerce website, building a Marketplace often requires more comprehensive efforts (for example, quality of the search algorithm and the intuitiveness of the navigation of Multi-Vendor Marketplace Store are critical to delivering value). Since a Marketplace has to handle more number of transactions, it needs to focus more on the automation. Marketplace comes with large range of add-ons which not only make it efficient but also makes it more flexible in terms of e-commerce features. Each and every Marketplace module has its own capability and can be used to improve the functionality of the store.

ADVANTAGES OF MULTI-VENDOR MARKETPLACE OVER E-COMMERCE STORE:

• Online Marketplaces are a great way to connect buyers and sellers. Many producers sell on the same platform, there is a broader diversity than in a regular online store with a small set of brands.
• For the Customer: Marketplaces give them a much better ability to compare shops. 
• For the Marketplace Owner: drop shipping allows a zero stock policy, you don`t have to manage logistics.
• For the Vendors: ability to focus on product development and not on the selling platform.

Hence, everybody wins and Multi-Vendor Marketplace achieves:

• More Traffic
• More URL’s
• More Products
• More Sales
• More Revenues

So, Multi-Vendor Marketplaces do not replace E-commerce but they do appreciable augment the offering, and we can surely claim that future lies with Online Marketplaces.