Seconds Deals: The Online Marketplace Powered By Magento 2
Client: Seconds Deals
Industry: Dropshipping
Location: Australia
The fast-paced world of eCommerce is characterized by the ever-changing rules for selling and buying. To navigate this dynamic landscape, eCommerce businesses must adapt to seize opportunities and overcome challenges.
In this context, Seconds Deals, an Australian startup, swiftly recognized the common difficulties that sellers face when dealing with new products that may have minor aesthetic imperfections. While these products maintain their functionality, they present difficulties for sellers who must meet the exacting quality standards demanded by Australian consumers. Moreover, when hindered in finding ways to consume these flawed products, sellers encounter inventory management and cash flow issues, as well as diminishing product value over time.
To address these challenges, Seconds Deals partnered with SECOMM, a trusted technology partner specializing in eCommerce solutions. Together, they embarked on the journey to create an online marketplace using Magento 2. The Seconds Deals platform acts as a central hub for sellers seeking consumers interested in purchasing new products with minor aesthetic imperfections and for buyers in search of quality products at competitive prices. This collaboration between SECOMM and Seconds Deals not only brings numerous advantages to both sellers and buyers but also plays a vital role in promoting the sustainable growth of eCommerce.
Seconds Deals is implementing a dropshipping business model for their eCommerce marketplace. In this approach, Seconds Deals does not invest in purchasing and stockpiling inventory. Instead, sellers maintain their products within their own storage facilities. When a successful purchase transaction takes place on the marketplace, the customer’s payment undergoes processing through the Seconds Deals system. Subsequently, the funds are directed to the seller’s account following the deduction of commissions and associated fees.
SECOMM’s primary mission, in this regard, is to propose the most effective technological solutions for building the eCommerce marketplace. This marketplace is designed to offer not only an intuitive interface, ensuring an excellent shopping experience for customers but also to assist vendors in efficiently managing their business operations on the marketplace. Furthermore, most of the sellers already own and operate their eCommerce websites. The crucial question is how to facilitate the seamless synchronization of products from their eCommerce websites to the Seconds Deals system, achieving the utmost efficiency and time savings.
In pursuit of an optimal user experience, SECOMM employs UI/UX design based on the concepts proposed by Seconds Deals. This ensures all essential elements of simple, intuitive, and user-friendly UI/UX design are fully expressed by SECOMM:
In response to the given task, SECOMM recommends Seconds Deals to build their online marketplace using Magento 2. This choice is the result of a thorough evaluation of the platform’s advantageous features and performance capabilities, aligned with the client’s budget considerations. Moreover, SECOMM has seamlessly integrated various third-party extensions, enriching the process of building the eCommerce marketplace on Magento 2. These extensions introduce enhanced functionalities that significantly contribute to the development of the Seller Portal and the Admin Portal within Seconds Deals.
Even the Seller Portal, skillfully designed by SECOMM, ensures user-friendliness, simplicity, and an intuitive interface, allowing sellers to easily manage their business activities on the marketplace.
To sell on Seconds Deals, sellers must register a seller account. Upon successful registration, sellers gain access to the Seller Dashboard and are seamlessly redirected to the Seller Portal, where they can:
By integrating extensions into the Magento 2 backend system, the Seconds Deals admin can perform various operations, including:
SECOMM has developed an import/export module and a connector module to assist sellers in synchronizing their products from their eCommerce websites to the Seconds Deals eCommerce marketplace.
Sellers’ eCommerce websites can be deployed on various platforms. However, as of now, the Seconds Deals system prioritizes providing support for synchronizing products from websites operating on the Shopify platform.
This approach enables sellers to export their product data from their Shopify eCommerce website in Excel/CSV format and subsequently import it into the Seconds Deals marketplace. Sellers can select specific data fields for export, such as SKU, product name, descriptions, images, and prices. The generated Excel/CSV file is structured to house this data in a specific format (columns and rows).
SECOMM opted to develop the import/export module due to its widespread usage in synchronizing product data from eCommerce websites to the Seconds Deals system. This method offers several prominent advantages:
Nevertheless, this approach retains several disadvantages. Manual tasks can be time-consuming, particularly for sellers with extensive product inventories, potentially resulting in inaccuracies.
To avoid these unwanted risks and facilitate time-saving product data synchronization for sellers, SECOMM has developed a connector module as a faster, more user-friendly, and highly effective alternative.
The connector directly links the seller’s eCommerce website with the Seconds Deals system. This connection allows for the automatic and seamless synchronization of product data, enabling sellers to efficiently manage their products on both platforms.
The connector module offers several distinct advantages, including:
Offering both synchronization methods concurrently has created flexibility that allows sellers to choose the approach that best aligns with their preferences and requirements. Sellers with smaller product inventories may find the manual synchronization method through import/export to be a suitable choice. Meanwhile, those with extensive product listings who wish to streamline the data synchronization process can opt for the connector module developed by SECOMM. In the upcoming development phase, SECOMM plans to broaden the functionality of the connector module to extend support to sellers on various eCommerce platforms, beyond just Shopify. This enhancement aims to attract brands from diverse industries, regardless of their scale or technology platform, to register to sell on this eCommerce marketplace.
Seconds Deals is truly a visionary startup that knows how to seize its opportunities in the competitive Australian eCommerce market. With its unique idea and the development of an online marketplace based on the dropshipping model, Seconds Deals has helped sellers market new products that may have minor aesthetic flaws, addressing a long-standing issue in the business world.
Moreover, the brand name ‘Seconds Deals’ reflects the startup’s significant commitment to the sellers collaborating with them. Separating the words ‘Seconds’ and ‘Deals’ signifies successful product transactions happening within seconds on this online marketplace. Also, Seconds Deals is also the place where buyers can find high-quality products at very reasonable prices.
By building an online marketplace on Magento 2 and integrating third-party extensions, along with the development of import/export and a connector module, SECOMM has made a significant contribution to realizing Seconds Deals’ vision of a robust and reliable eCommerce system. This provides favorable conditions for sellers to offer their products and ensures an optimal shopping experience for buyers.
The synergy between Seconds Deals’ innovative concept and the technical support and development offered by SECOMM has led to the successful introduction of Seconds Deals in the Australian market. Looking ahead, Seconds Deals holds immense potential to revolutionize the way Australians engage in eCommerce and consumerism.