Marketplace experiences have firmly established themselves within the consumer tech landscape and show no signs of slowing down. A marketplace helps consumers cut through the clutter of overwhelming choices and feel confident that their selections will work—and work together—with other parts of their ecosystem. For some companies, creating or joining a marketplace can be a profitable and scalable business model.
Let’s dive into five questions to ask to achieve a winning marketplace strategy for consumer tech.
To generate maximum value from a marketplace, companies need to assess their business case before building a strategy, identify value pools, and determine the level of effort required to get the marketplace off the ground.
In some parts of the consumer tech industry, dominant marketplaces already exist. Examining the competitive landscape can help determine what marketplace solution is the best fit. This process provides a framework for deciding which model will generate the most value and profitability, highlights associated costs, and assesses the best technology fit.
After deciding on the business case, companies should consider the following marketplace models:
Marketplace operators need to focus on demand generation, attracting buyers and sellers, facilitating transactions, and controlling and managing data. In the consumer tech space, operators must work well with digital shopper-marketing platforms to enable incremental profit and provide more control of discoverability for sellers.
Marketplace buyers want to feel confident that the products they purchase will work within their current product ecosystem. Operators attract buyers by having a reliable merchandising strategy in place and supplying an attractive product mix.
Benefits for Operators: Visibility into competitor data, commission from sellers
Benefits for Sellers: Gain additional product visibility; smaller retailers can establish themselves among bigger competitors
Benefits for Buyers: More product assortment, greater confidence and reliability that the products they purchase will work within their current ecosystem
Sellers look for operators that provide seamless onboarding and manage product information, imagery, and other metadata. Sellers will likely put a premium not only on the revenue and profit they make from a specific marketplace but also on the amount of buyer data the operator is willing to share back to the seller.
Sellers implement their own fulfillment models within a marketplace. Because inventory numbers are visible to buyers, employing a successful fulfillment model is key for maintaining a seller’s brand reputation. Marketplace operators with dynamic pricing, fulfillment options, and flexibility are more likely to obtain and retain sellers.
Providing an experience with minimal friction for sellers to incorporate their products into the marketplace is a win-win-win situation for the operator, seller, and buyer.
As operators plan their marketplace strategy, they need to answer the following questions:
Management consultants who understand marketplace value propositions are a useful resource and can help build out the strategy around operations.
A rapid flow of high-quality data is essential for successful marketplace operations. Retailers creating marketplaces need to operate as Algorithmic Retailers with dynamic, AI-driven tools for buyers, sellers, and managers.
Typically, the marketplace operator owns customer data, including their competitors’ data, transaction data, and behavioral/analytical data. Unless the seller can negotiate a data-sharing agreement with the operator, they may lose the ability to extend that data into better offerings and customer service.
It’s important to have a process for managing product data. Implementing a “test and learn” model with sellers can quickly help operators measure success within their marketplaces. Operators don’t have to buy the sellers’ inventory, so they can swiftly onboard and offboard sellers as they see fit.
If you’re interested in learning more about marketplaces and which model is most applicable for your business, let’s connect!
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RAJ SHAH
Industry Lead, Telecom, Media, and Hi-Tech North America
raj.shah@publicissapient.com
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