Katerina Petraki explains why early-stage sellers fail to meet SLAs: they're confused, overwhelmed, or don't see the value. Start by listening to struggling sellers, focus on high-potential verticals, simplify onboarding, and use a Power Seller Happiness Program with leads and performance data to keep top sellers engaged.
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Hey, Katerina, thanks so much for that. That was really helpful. I just had a question for you. If you had any advice on how I can run incentives for our sellers to kind of follow through on like a customer service standpoint. Like, I think one thing as a marketplace owner, one thing that we preach and we want to like live up to is like extremely phenomenal customer service. But then some of our sellers are like smaller businesses. We're about 2 years in, so we're still fairly early stage, but some of our sellers are like smaller businesses and like they don't always follow through. And I'm noticing that we've got some like blind spots in terms of them not living up to like our fulfillment SLAs and like things like that. So I'm just wondering if you had any advice for like early stage founders on what types of like incentives we might be able to roll out for our sellers to Do a better job?
This is, no, actually this is a very good question. I don't have a great answer, but I will attempt to answer it because we've had that a lot, right? And I don't know exactly your marketplace, but we're very seller-centric. That's how we originated. That's how we are as a business. So we tend to err more towards kind of like the supplier than the buyer, which is a little bit of a problem sometimes in a transaction. But this is, we see that very often, right? Because our platform is also a little bit hard to operate from both the seller and buyers. We don't make it necessarily easy. Sure, you can name all kinds of like reasons because we try to kind of like answer to a lot of different customer segments, a lot of different geography, a lot of needs. But kind of like some of the things that create a problem very often is exactly what you're saying, like sellers not keeping up with their SLA, not keeping up with what they said they were gonna do. And it starts sometimes with the engagement of the seller, right? Like from one hand side, you want to create a product and you want to create kind of like a customer experience that makes it really, really, really easy for them, right? And what I say by that is like we, for example, started seeing a lot of problems with both the engagement of the sellers and also kind of like how they were performing with buyers. And when we went deep into that, we realized It was really nuts, right? If we hadn't created the right tools for them, it was so hard for them to onboard. It was so hard for them to kind of like come into our platform every time and kind of like connect with different buyers, right? So, so like I would say the first thing is if you can go really deep into the reason why this is happening, right? And like one way to do that is go and speak to your friendliest and less friendly if you can, kind of like sellers out there. and see like what process, what thing they're doing on your marketplace that takes most time, that's the most annoying, that's the most complex for them, right? And see, is this perhaps a reason why they're not responding, right? Another thing that we found out in the process of like trying to kind of like understand why our sellers were not really kind of like adhering to our policies or like performing as well as we wanted, is we had casted a very wide net in the beginning because we didn't know which seller would work, right? So as we try to understand 2 years down the line, which ones were performing better, we were able to kind of like focus on the sellers that we wanted more, right? Like instead of like focusing in the universe of SMB sellers, maybe one reason is, you know, your platform or like the need that you're trying to solve for is more acute in a specific segment, in a specific vertical in a specific, I don't know, type of customer, right? And maybe by focusing more on that instead of the universe of your sellers, you will see like better results. So that's one other thing that we found ourselves. And then the last thing that I would say is it had to do with like the, how we made sure that we make the sellers happy. And I know you asked me about the buyers, but Again, like very often you see the problem being on like making sure that you make your sellers happy before, you know, they transact and they do all the things that you want on your marketplace. So we found, for example, that if a seller hadn't made a sale in the first 3 months of our owner marketplace, their likelihood of renewing was extremely low and they were completely disengaged for the rest of the year. Because our, we had like subscription services. So you buy this for the year. So like for the rest of the year, they wouldn't be engaged at all. Buyers would be writing to them, they wouldn't be responding. Our account teams would be writing numerous kind of like emails to them trying to get them on the call. And really once we like figured out this being the origin of the problem as another one, then we honed in and we said, okay, let's do, let's adjust our targeting strategy. Like we're gonna focus on the general SMB ecosystem of sellers, but we're gonna spend more of our energy on that category that works better and we see them engaging even better with our platform, right? On the product side, we launched specific kind of like banners, specific kind of like we simplified our onboarding process. We added category-specific pavilions, all of these to help promote our high-value buyers to them and show them kind of like the value that they would have by like kind of like responding to them. So a lot of things that don't scale. And then obviously, you know, some of the things that you might be thinking of is very, very targeted account management and seller engagement services, right? We launched a fully managed account service. That was helpful in the beginning, but you have to be careful with that because then you, like, for example, if you have an external partner manage the relation, they're like the site, the storefront of the seller for the buyer. That's good in the beginning as long as they create training for the seller because otherwise you just create this huge ecosystem of channel partners who are managing sellers for you, right? And that's not good for the seller, but that's an example of like something you can do in the beginning. Or we launched a series of kind of like valuable content and data reports, right? Like X customer managed to get X% up in their sales because they engaged with a buyer, you know, in like 10 minutes or what have you. And then we also launched the Power Seller Happiness Program to focus on the segment that we believed could be kind of like the best, right? And we really like kind of like did a number of things for them. Like we send them qualified leads, we send them data reports. We went really above and beyond to make them happy. So, I don't have a great answer, but I guess the answer that I'm alluding to is go deep into understanding why this is happening, right? Because it might be related to the platform, might be related to like the experience that they're having, or it might be simply related to the fact that they don't see the value yet. So once you understand what the problem is, then you can educate them, then you can identify the right services, right? Because at the end of the day, kind of like the most important thing of a marketplace is to drive liquidity, right? But for this to happen, you need to make them happy first. So start small, like make them super happy and make sure that's working before you go, before you go bigger. That would be kind of like one thing that I would say. And it's, it's a very, it's a very difficult topic, I know. So I can, I can speak offline too if that's helpful.
