Publicis Sapient

Digital Commerce: Digital Marketplaces

Offering Summary

Facilitate shopping transactions between buyers and sellers and make experiences more seamless for both parties. Expand your online presence and gain immediate access to a large pool of potential customers. Access ready-to-go infrastructure and tools for processes such as listing, payment processing, and customer service.

Solving Digital Business Transformation Challenges

Uniting buyers and sellers in a single platform drives digital commerce revenue. Businesses today need to update their platforms to meet rising customer expectations and incorporate data intelligence and automation to help ensure product availability, optimal pricing, content, and messaging. They must also build user-centricity into their business offerings to be nimble and responsive to shifts in user sentiment and the overall marketplace.

Why Marketplaces Matter

We help you build digital marketplaces that unlock new customer segments and create new revenue streams via commissions, media networks, sponsored ads, subscriptions, and other premium services.

Marketplace Model

Company as Seller/Orchestrator:
- Product sales
- Commission
- Premium features
- Sponsored ads

Marketplace Ecosystem

First-party sellers
Third-party sellers/Peer-to-peer sellers

Operations, Sellers, Buyers

Choosing the Right Digital Marketplace

To decide on the right marketplace model, you need to know how reviews will be managed, how customers will be serviced (for example, via a call center or other support options), whether fulfillment will be happening (via Amazon or a third-party seller), whether the seller systems will need to be integrated with the fulfillment partner, and what rules and processes to follow when a problem arises.

Like any selling channel, it’s important to evaluate a digital marketplace as there are distinct models:

Curated Marketplace: Create a bespoke store where products/partners exist within a larger marketplace and address certain challenges, aesthetics, or specific values.
Channel Partner Marketplace: Sell your products/services through a network of distributors. In this model, the manufacturer has control over their brand and can glean insights from data and analytics across the entire ecosystem. This marketplace can be B2B, B2B2B, B2B2C, or B2B2B2C, etc.
First-party Marketplace: Operate or host your own marketplace where you sell only your products or invite sellers to offer products to buyers on your site.
Peer-to-peer Marketplace: Connect vendors with consumers to sell, buy, or rent from each other directly. Examples include Airbnb, eBay, and Pinterest.
Third-party Marketplace: Access a mega marketplace like Amazon, Walmart, or Alibaba, or a niche market that services specific audiences. These marketplaces provide a space for your offerings, catalogs, search capability, orders, and secure payment services. You manage all aspects of your store, including the product detail pages, and fulfillment can be handled by the platform host or your business.

Ready to Build

At Publicis Sapient, we connect both frontstage and backstage capabilities in an end-to-end approach to help you build a digital marketplace. On the frontstage, this involves the commerce experience—the customer touchpoints, features, and user interfaces that shape transactions. In the backstage, we support marketplace operations such as seller onboarding, order tracking, financial reconciliation, and analytics to allow sellers to see sales in real time.

Through our build process, we address the common challenges of building and launching a marketplace:

Competitive Value Proposition: Marketplaces need to offer an attractive commercial model, customer access, and conveniences to stand out against established marketplaces.
Buyer and Seller Equilibrium: Marketplaces must understand the dynamics between buyers and sellers to attract each group and facilitate matchmaking.
Trust and Control Mechanisms: Marketplace orchestrators must establish trust mechanisms to support and nurture the community of users and the interactions between them (e.g., ratings, reviews, product inspections, troubleshooting).
Marketplace Technology: There are technology choices such as marketplace-as-a-service providers that enable fast time to market, while a custom-build solution can offer increased flexibility and differentiation.

Digital Marketplace Business Value

Enabling quick wins with lean agile teams
Building and scaling the digital marketplace aligned to business and customer value
Establishing data quality and trust
Cultural transformation support through change management
Optimization of commerce operations

How We’ve Made an Impact

Marriott

The imperative for change:

COVID-19 accelerated the trend of guests wanting to stay in comfortable, private spaces
To compete with industry disruptors and online travel agency players, Marriott needed a new approach to customer experience and product management in the short-term rental market

The transformative solution:

Built an evolutionary platform marketplace on a cloud-native, microservices-based architecture
Created the ability to respond to the unique preferences of Marriott’s 140 million+ global customers, applying guest data and machine learning to curate the trip of a lifetime
Used the AWS cloud platform to enable Marriott’s employees to exercise greater agility when creating solutions for guests
Enhanced global monitoring, security, and support for surges in demand

The business impact:

100K+ properties curated across the U.S., Europe, and Asia
2+ features a week and continuous deployment and release
100%+ increase in YoY bookings

Uniper

The imperative for change:

To grow its business, the company needed to reach a global audience with more robust services
They needed to turn 30 years of in-depth power plant data insights and know-how into a differentiated digital product that creates new revenue streams

The transformative solution:

Developed a platform strategy and the Enerlytics brand to bring these out to the marketplace, transforming Uniper’s value proposition
Mapped all the potential customers’ needs and pain points across the operating and buying process and created a prototype based on these insights
Brought legacy applications across key functions onto a single web portal, including design and implementation for the apps and an API built to pull relevant data from Uniper’s backend systems

The business impact:

50% productivity increase with Enerlytics
15-30% coal fuel savings
10-20% reduction in capital expenditure
3% lower CO2 U.K. emissions

Real Estate Trust

The imperative for change:

Provide a truly integrated omnichannel experience that engages customers
Create a digital platform that offers a vast array of products from leading brands online while also increasing store footfall via targeted content
Create a convenient and luxury experience for VIP shoppers

The transformative solution:

Created a digital marketplace where users can shop online, check in-store pricing and promotions, and experience retail brands seamlessly across all channels with a single shopping basket
Enabled the business to create targeted marketing experiences that offer customers personalized trend, style, and promotional content while allowing retailers to remain in full control of their brand’s representation
Built a sophisticated, highly scalable, and fault-tolerant onboarding system for retailers, allowing them to easily get their products and promotions onto the platform without the hassle of having to deploy and manage the solution

The business impact:

23 high-end retailers offering a choice of more than 750 unique SKUs
The website received more than 1.8 million page views in the first month
The platform has enabled the organization to forge an online outlet marketplace venture that is poised to disrupt the $200B off-price online apparel market

What Sets Publicis Sapient Apart?

We develop a composable architecture that uses microservices and APIs for flexible integrations and enables the ability to scale. Our component-based and cloud-hosted solutions are GDPR compliant and built in a way that addresses daily business needs, such as load time, response time, and downtime. We also establish clear data governance structures that allow you to cross-sell and upsell, improve trust in data quality, enable automation innovations, and decrease the time it takes to resolve platform and system errors.

We partner with most commerce technology solution providers, including:

Salesforce Commerce Cloud: Commerce platform trusted by industry-leading brands
Adobe Commerce Cloud: Commerce platform to personalize B2B and B2C experiences
commercetools: Cloud-based headless commerce platform
VTEX: A complete, connected, and composable platform
BigCommerce: E-commerce platform and service

Let’s Connect

For more information, visit publicissapient.com/solutions/digital-commerce.

Why Publicis Sapient

Publicis Sapient is a digital business transformation company. We partner with global organizations to help them create and sustain a competitive advantage in a world that is increasingly digital. We operate through our expert SPEED capabilities: Strategy and Consulting, Product, Experience, Engineering, and Data, which, combined with our culture of curiosity and deep industry knowledge, enables us to deliver meaningful impact to our clients’ businesses through reimagining the products and experiences their customers truly value. Our agile, data-driven approach equips our clients’ businesses for change, making digital the core of how they think and what they do. Publicis Sapient is the digital business transformation hub of Publicis Groupe with 20,000 people and over 50 offices worldwide. For more information, visit publicissapient.com.