Your team is a specific kind of user

As your marketplace grows, so will your team. In particular, the operations, merchant relations and fulfilment teams will likely grow in lock-step with your orders.

They eventually become critical users of the system.

You must treat them as such

Therefore, you must give them adequate attention, and they must have a similar level of product development as your external users.

You must work directly with them and understand the issues they’re facing.

Their efficiency equates to the efficiency of your business. By fixing their issues you’re improving your business as a whole.

If improve the time it takes to ship an order, you can ship more orders per day.

If improve the time it takes to onboard a supplier, you can onboard more suppliers in a week.

If you reduce the time it takes to process a refund, you reduce the cost of refunds as a whole.

If you implement an export that follows the format of a particular inventory management system, your team will be able to spend more time fielding calls intead of doing data entry.

They also have their finger on the pulse

They’re talking to your customers frequently, so their feedback is similar to the customers’.

If they have a dedicated line to product development, they’ll be able to help evolve the product in a similar way to your users, with much less effort.