Sellers

The Seller tab within the Marketplace tool allows you to on-board new sellers and add existing sellers to a marketplace.

When a user with the Marketplace Seller or Marketplace Administrator role logs in to the Management Center, they do not see the Marketplace tool in the hamburger menu. They will see the Seller Dashboard tool from the hamburger menu. See Seller Dashboard for more information.

The Marketplace Operator can on-board Sellers from the Sellers tab of the Marketplaces tool. Once a Seller is created, the Operator can assign them to one or more marketplaces which can be updated after on-boarding a seller. By default sellers are in a Deactivated state when first brought into the marketplace, as they do not have catalog, pricing and inventory data ready yet. When the Seller is ready to go live, the Marketplace Operator can set them to the Active state. At that time, any of the seller’s products that are approved and have been pushed to live will appear in the appropriate marketplace storefronts. See Activating a seller for more information. A seller must be Activated to be live within a marketplace and the sellers Store Status must be Online. The Marketplace Operator can Activate or Deactivate the seller. The Marketplace Seller Administrator can change the Store Status to Online or Offline.

If there is a problem with a Seller, the marketplace status can be used while the issue is managed. Sellers can always be put back into the Deactivated state if needed. For example, if a Seller accidentally updated the product price to $10.00 instead of $100.00, and this was not noticed until it went live, the Operator can Deactivate the Seller until they confirm with the Seller that the issue is fixed. The Seller also has their own Online/Offline status that they have control over, which effectively does the same thing as Deactivated, but is managed separately by the Seller. This could be used by a small Seller who is going on vacation for a week, or does not wish to take orders during that time. They can set themselves to Offline, and then their products will not appear in the storefront. They can go back Online when they are ready to start selling again. Both the Deactivated and the Online/Offline statuses are per marketplace storefronts. A given Seller could be up and running, selling their products on one marketplace storefront, while being temporarily deactivated or offline on another. See Deactivating a seller for more information.

Sometimes, Operators will have more serious issues with Sellers. For example, the Seller might not be following the Terms and Conditions of their agreement with the Operator. In this case the Operator may want to shut them down until the situation is resolved. An additional status called Suspend is available for such situations. This allows the Operator to remove the Seller’s products from the marketplace storefront, and it also removes the Seller’s access to the Seller tools. This way, the Seller cannot get on to the system to continue the troubling behaviour. See Suspending a seller for more information.

The Marketplace Operator can Terminate a Seller if the Seller is no longer a part of the Marketplace. This is the extreme step and cannot be reversed. See Terminating a seller for more information.

Note: You can only Terminate the seller if you have deactivated or Suspended the Seller. You cannot Terminate an Active seller.

The Marketplace Seller can further be categorised as a trusted and non-trusted. A newly added seller is never a trusted seller. Their Catalog Updates must be approved before they are promoted to approved content and to the live marketplace. Once the sellers can upload entries without getting an error, then they can be enabled as a trusted sellers.

Note: Trusted sellers does not require approval for updating Catalogs and Seller details.

See Trusted sellers for more information.