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Sellers cannot contact buyers after making a purchase on the marketplace?!

Theindependentbabyshop
Edited

This will be very relevant to you if you are a retail marketplace.

There has been a lot of issues whilst setting up our marketplace, some small, many huge. After we get over one big hurdle (mainly because we are working with such a fantastic developer) we seem to find so many more.

The biggest few recently are the following:

- Not being able to generate our own marketplace invoice for the seller to put into their product to the buyer... We are still trying to figure out a work around for this.. mad to me that this hasn't been a feature on the market place. The last thing you want as a marketplace is customers thinking it is a good idea to go to individual seller websites instead of buying for the marketplace when repeat purchasing. But then how can you expect that to happen if you can produce an invoice with the market place logo on it?

- The payment selection saying Stripe? No customer knows what stripe is... this needs to say debit/ credit card

- Not being able to run any discounts or sales on any products because this doesn't exist in the price feature.

There are more...

These although annoying we figured, with some very time consuming, lengthy, costly coding we may be able to figure out a far from ideal, but worthwhile solution. Some we haven't been able to, so have just had to accept for the time being.

The other day we came across a huge problem that unless there is some kind of solution from Acradier, there will absolutely be no work around and we will finally have to give up on this platform after hundreds spent in development.

Sellers cannot contact customers after the customer has made a purchase on the marketplace. The customer has to direct message the seller for ANY communication to take place on the marketplace. 

Why would a seller need to contact a customer after purchase?

Often customers write in the wrong delivery details by accident, missing out letters/ numbers. What if the customer ordered something custom and didn't give enough detail? What if the delivery will be late for any reason? There are SO many reason why a Seller may need to contact a customer after a purchase.

Now, you could think a solution to this is the seller emails the customer off the platform? NO WAY, the whole point of a marketplace is that all communication is kept on the platform or the next time the customer purchases it will be directly from the seller and not through your marketplace.

We thought if we made sign in/ registering compulsory for the customer before they purchased, this would then be ok because SURLY the seller could then contact the customer on our platform... So our developer did this... nope still no way to contact a registered customer on the platform. No way to do this... You can try going to the message center and searching the customers e-mail... you'll have no luck. There is certainly no obvious button on the order that says contact customer...

Or I could be completely wrong? I desperately hope I am wrong , maybe I just can't find it? (which is concerning at best as if i can't find it after hours of searching, doubt my sellers will be able to). But we wouldn't know because no one from Arcadier has given me an answer to this that has made any sense all week. 

We were so excited when we came across this platform, in terms of personalisation and look, it stood out a mile from the rest. Unfortunately the platform still has a long way to go to being the ideal functioning marketplace. I understand the process of building something new and me and my business partner are understanding in that and happy to work with the Aracdier team to help the development of their business. The frustration comes when you don't get replies to your problems (the longest response time so far... 13 days) and when you do get a response, it is extremely unclear and rarely offers a solution, just simply confirms what you already knew and that they 'might' add this to the road map in the future.

The second is that, if you are building something that is not yet a functioning product, how can you justify the price point of $145 a month?! This is the other catch, to access the API's you need you will need to be on at least the Growth subscription but you don't really figure this out until you have bought into the lower levels of the subscription and because you have already invested you catch yourself going up one more then one more.

I love the idea of this platform, it is genius, but unless customer support can get better and more reactive to actually putting vital change into the platform in motion, regardless of how much we want to make this happen for us, our persistence can only go for so long until these massive barriers make it impossible for us to launch.

I have sent 3 e-mails about sellers not being to contact customers with no reply... so hopefully someone from customer support can get back to me on here?

Thank you,

The Independent Baby Shop Team

4

Comments

10 comments

Date Votes
  • C. SMITH

    This has been one of many huge issues for us as well. 

    1
  • C. SMITH

    As I said here, I was told that the service template has this ability. Why can't they port the code?

    https://support.arcadier.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360004584233-Unlock-ability-for-sellers-to-initiate-a-message-to-a-buyer-in-the-Retail-template

    0
  • Arcadier Support
    Edited

    Hi The Independent Baby Shop Team, 

    John here from Arcadier! Thank you for explaining the issue and we definitely value the feedback from all our users including yourself. We would firstly like to apologise for the delay in the replies as we face huge volumes of tickets on a daily basis and are doing our utmost to constantly look at ways that we can improve our response times. 

    This particular feature was previously put in place to protect the interests of the buyers. We have noted previous feedback similar to yours, and have been considering means to enhance the user experience for both buyers and sellers.

    Arcadier is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that aims to build a marketplace platform that enables everybody. As such, we enjoy hearing feedback and feature requests from our users. While each feature request contributes to a better Arcadier for you, we seek your understanding that features take time to be developed.

    Our team is constantly monitoring the community feature requests before evaluating them based on which features have garnered the most votes to add onto Arcadier. We understand that there are certain features that you may feel are essential and wish to expedite the addition of these features onto the platform, to do this simply add and upvote these requests within the community. 

    We understand that there are certain issues that you have raised which I would be answering below: 

    1. Lack of marketplace logo in the invoice produced to the seller upon a successful purchase

    At the moment, an automated invoice with the marketplace logo is displayed at the top of the invoice.

    If you're referring to the ability to create a brand new template for the invoices generated from the marketplace, it is not a feature that is available on our off-the-shelf solution at the moment. To see this feature become available on the platform, you can create a feature request and upvote this! 

    2. Editing the Stripe text to Debit/ Credit Card

    It is definitely possible to change the text that reads Stripe to Debit/ Credit Card which is more widely understood as you have mentioned. You can easily achieve this with custom codes by either getting your developer or any of Arcadier's custom coders to do the necessary changes. 

    3. Discount Codes 

    The ability to use discount codes is something that is currently unavailable in the retail template. This is something that our team has been working on and is being built by our team at the moment. I am unfortunately unable to give you a fixed date as to when this feature would be available. You can keep up to date with the latest news on our product updates, from either our newsletters or even clicking onto this link to find out more!

    4. Access to APIs

    API access is indeed only applicable for Growth plans onwards. The list of features for each subscription tier is shown clearly in the pricing page as well as when hitting the 'Subscribe' button in the admin portal. 

    Hope this helps to clarify and provide you a clearer picture of the issues. If you have any further enquiries regarding the platform, feel free to submit a ticket! 

     

    0
  • Theindependentbabyshop
    Edited

    Hi John,

     
    Thank you for your response - I do understand the volume of issues you must be dealing with and as a new business I completely understand there are teething periods, my frustration with this process is in no way a frustration with yourself, it is a frustration with the fact they Arcadier as a company has launched a platform and not provided the staff necessary to deal with the user uptake yet it still charges as if it has. I feel sorry for all the customer service team having to deal with the negativity due to an overload of work. 
     
    My frustration is that we are paying a lot of money a month to get very slow responses, the longer it takes for me to build the platform, the more it is costing us. The answers to a lot of my questions are always that there isn't a solution to the problem and we end up having to figure it out ourselves.
     
    We are a new business too and for as long as we cannot launch, we take on the monthly cost ourselves but I cannot launch with a sub par platform. We had intended to launch weeks ago but we are still weeks away from even getting sellers onto the platform. 
     
    Please understand my issue:
    I do not want any random seller to be able to contact any random customer. I only want the sellers to be able to contact customers that have purchased an item with them. The buyer therefore wouldn't need protection from a seller they have already bought from.
     
    This is why it is needed: 
     
    1) What if they have written/ made a mistake on the delivery address?
    2) What if they haven't provided enough information on a custom order?
    3) What is the delivery will be late?
     
    This is a feature that already exists on your other platforms (not your retail marketplace). All you have to do is make it a function on the retail marketplace. No additional development nothing.
    Please see the attached screen shot of what I am asking for sent from another one of your customer service representatives.
     

     
    Did you know I have had a number of your customer services representatives tell me this is possible with retail? With screen shots of other marketplaces (not retail) that have this feature? The problem at the moment is that the customer service team themselves don't know what you can and can't do on your own platform. That is a big issue.
     
    The whole purpose of a marketplace is that communication stays on the platform or you do not have a business. It is vital. So really, you don't have a functioning marketplace without this feature.
    I cannot launch without this feature. I will not be continuing to use the marketplace without this feature, because it would literally be a waste of money and time. This is really vital not for just me but for every other retail marketplace you will host.
     
    Please do have a word with your management team about this today. Please don't send me a generic answer, a polite - we can't help you. Because someone I know must be able to, I know this feature exists already on your other marketplaces.
     
    Thank you,
     

    The Independent Baby Shop Team

    1
  • Theindependentbabyshop
    Edited

    Hi John,

     
    Thanks for getting back to me it is really appreciated.
     
    We can't launch without this feature... and if you don't have a timeline as to when this is going to be completed, can you advise on what you suggest I do? 
     
    My biggest concern without having this feature is that it encourages owners of marketplaces to step outside of the current GDPR guidelines.
     
    This would be a complete infringement of the new GDPR laws of passing information. 
    What the platform is actually asking, or at least what you are expecting owners of the marketplace to do is transfer customer data to the seller via e-mail? So if the seller spots a problem with one of their orders which they need to speak to the customer about, they contact me, and then I am meant to? I can't send them the customers contact via e-mail because the seller would then have to get in touch with the customer via their personal business e-mail - which the customer didn't giver permission for the seller to do, they gave permission to the marketplace. I would also not be able to transfer any customer e-mails to sellers via our email, again complete infringement of GDPR law.
     
    Am I wrong? Because this literally would be the only way I can see solving this problem if it arose? Unless you expect the marketplace owners to deal with each individual issue themselves again via e-mail? If you have 100 sellers on your platform... think of the e-mails the marketplace owner would have to send out?! Again via e-mail off the platform...
     
    So please advise me, how do you expect me to get in touch with a customer or how do you expect my sellers to get in touch with a customer in this specific situation. What is your current solution to this that would mean I am still able to actually use this platform not infringing any laws?
     
    Please detail exactly what I would do in the situation.
     
    Thank you,
     
    The Independent Baby Shop Team
    0
  • Arcadier Support

    Hi Scarlett, 

    Thanks for the reply! 

    John here, the current workaround at the moment would be for your sellers to reach out to the buyers via their personal emails specified within the notification email that is received when a buyer purchases an item from the seller. 

    By default, the automatic email generated via the marketplace to the seller upon a successful transaction would include the buyer name, contact number as well as email address (see screenshot below). 

    Arcadier also has a new feature which allows you to use the HTML email editor to customise email templates that are automatically sent to their merchants and their consumers. With this, you can add additional information into the email that you feel would be essential for your marketplace users, or removed as well. 

    As the marketplace admin, you wouldn't need to manually transfer any information at all as this is done automatically via the automatic emails sent. We are right now following eBay's flow of sharing buyer information with a seller and you can enable this as default by putting this in the email as mentioned above or you can hide it and wait for them to contact you. 

    We consider this transactional or service data as it allows the sellers their duty to inform buyers of necessary changes to their orders. GDPR considers that information can be used to send transactional or service emails because these are different from commercial emails used for marketing. You can specify that the information has been provided to the seller for such purposes. If you are concerned about that issue, you have the option of removing the email and being the mediator for such disputes as well. 

    We understand the urgency to get this feature out there, but do bear with us as I assure you that the team will be looking into this and how they can add this as soon as possible not just for your marketplace but for the rest of Arcadier's users as well. 

    -1
  • Theindependentbabyshop

    Hi John, 

    Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. 

    As I said we removed this feature of having the customer e-mail coded into the e-mail sent to the seller for very obvious reasons.

    1) If you give your sellers all your customer e-mails then the seller can include all these customers on their own e-mail lists, killing all repeat purchasing power for the marketplace. A lot of the time sellers sell items cheaper on their own site because of fees, naturally customers will go for the cheaper price.

    2) We are completely unable to monitor any conversations between seller and customer

    3) This completely defeats the point of a marketplace.

    So until this is sorted you suggest I sit tight and keep paying monthly until this feature (at an unknown date) is in place? Considering I just signed up to your 12 month package this leaves me in a sticky situation...

    I would say this feature is more than urgent and you have agreed. Yet the feature is unable to have a deadline as to when it will be available?

    Thank you,

    The Independent Baby Shop

    1
  • Arcadier Support

    Hi Scarlett,

    We are unable to provide a deadline for this as Arcadier currently has a bunch of features that is currently being built. At this stage, our feature roadmap is packed, and adding this to the upcoming product enhancements would be attempted, but we cannot promise that it will happen! We do seek your understanding in being patient for it to be added. We can only build features when we have the resources for it, and though it looks simple, it actually involves quite a bit of code changes.

    We understand that you had the intention to subscribe for the annual Growth plan but we have held off this at the moment as per your request. If you would prefer not to use Arcadier because of the lack of this particular feature, we'd totally understand because you've mentioned it is a crucial feature for you. We wish you the best either way!

    -1
  • Theindependentbabyshop
    Edited

    Hi,

    Thanks so much for your response, this is all we needed to know. 

    We totally understand that these things take time and things seem so much more simple than they are. All we needed was for this feature to be acknowledged and put in place at the next possible opportunity. That was a clear and well explained answer. At the end of the day, it is of the users benefit to help you work and improve the platform, that is what the early stages for any company are. So much can be avoided by a simple acknowledgement of the problem and a reply that answers the question at hand so thank you!

    I have e-mailed Jake recently with an update on our plans moving forward, if you or he could get back to me on this today it would be really appreciated.


    Thank you for your time.

     

    0
  • C. SMITH

    This thread is so painful to read. 

    "3) This completely defeats the point of a marketplace" gets a response talking about "...the lack of this particular feature".

    It's not a feature!  It is a core functionality that without it literally makes Arcadier and our businesses pointless.  I really wish you guys would stop calling things that are fundamental to marketplaces but missing in Arcadier as "features."  And if your road map is full, you need to seriously re-evaluate it to prioritize the basics of what makes a marketplace work long term.

    1

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