With increasingly nimble and easy-to-activate solutions, marketplaces providers are helping retailers and pure-players to keep up with the changes in this very dynamic market. Here is an overview of some upcoming innovations and trends.
However, even for retailers who are well advanced in their omnichannel transformation, operating a marketplace is still more challenging than developing an e-commerce site. To take advantage of this market and avoid its pitfalls, solutions are being perfected by market place specialists and e-commerce service providers. More and more players are positioning themselves. At the beginning of 2021, Cdiscount launched an activity as a marketplace solutions editor in addition to its role as operator. With the acquisition of Atonic in early 2022, Salesforce will in turn internalise this skill.
As the marketplace is primarily a high-volume market, getting into the business means being able to handle the load, being extremely consistent in the various stages, and showing significant marketing and technological maturity. "Even if you are selective about the sellers and their products, the offer becomes so large that retailers who engage in a marketplace logic have to scale up in order to operate successfully. They have no choice but to become programmatic. Sourcing products from other sellers to address 100% of the customer's needs on a given theme is a revolution in organisation and customer experience. Retailers must be careful not to weaken the specificities of their brand in a world where part of the customer experience mechanically escapes them," explains Régis Quintin, Director of Commerce Cloud for Western Europe at Adobe, whose Adobe Experience Cloud platform concentrates front-end e-commerce, data and customer knowledge solutions.
Technology for greater efficiency
For a more rapid connection between third-party sellers and marketplaces, Mirakl is launching several new features this fall, including a FastTrack Onboarding feature, which automates the creation of shops and offers for existing products. "Validating a company's Know Your Customer (KWC) and importing their catalogue to our customers' platform will be a few clicks within our ecosystem. Operators will be able to add relevant third-party sellers even more quickly and recruited sellers will be able to sell quickly on several marketplaces," says Isabelle Bénard, Chief Product Officer at Mirakl. The French unicorn is also investing in the "payment" aspect with a Payout solution that will manage the regulatory and financial complexity for marketplaces operators who have to pay their sellers internationally. On the customer relations side, its new Customer Care Intelligence tool, based on artificial intelligence (AI), identifies critical after-sales requests that require rapid intervention by the operator.
The grouping of numerous brands within a huge catalogue implies precise management of product information and categories. Through its ability to analyse texts and images, AI automates the categorisation of products, for example by matching what one brand would call "trainers" and another "trainers" in the same category. In this world of hyper-offer, quality content is necessary: "Industrial design integrates the marketing and commercial representations of a product very early on. It helps to present several visuals or an exploded view of the product's characteristics, which increases its chances of being sold," notes Grégoire Pauty, Evangelist and Business Designer at Adobe. Amazon uses 3D so that products offer an immersive experience and can be seen from every angle. This constraint imposed in the product repositories is also an opportunity to sell services to companies that want to be hosted on the marketplace. The algorithms that run in the product repository also allow for very advanced analysis of the part of the offer that is not sold...
In this extensive enterprise model, data must flow easily between the brand, the retailer and the marketplace operator so that everyone has secure access to the information they are entitled to consult. "The platform approach in the cloud removes the constraints and allows clear management of the data to understand what is happening with sellers, to work on personalisation and loyalty, and to move towards increasingly complex universes. The technology also makes it possible to opt for marketing driven by product and price or to take a greater interest in the customer through experiential marketing," adds Sébastien Zins, Marketing Cloud Director at Salesforce.
Focus on second hand and BtoB
Marketplaces are following the major trends in consumption and retail. Origami Marketplace, which notably develops second-hand marketplaces, is launching a solution designed with retail expert Proximis before the summer, which integrates second-hand goods into the customer journey with a unified shopping basket. "Second-hand is a new growth lever but some retailers are afraid of cannibalising their new products. The unified shopping basket creates circularity between these two segments," says Antoine Meunier, Growth Marketing Manager for this publisher. When a customer buys second-hand, his loyalty kitty can, for example, be credited with a bonus amount to be spent on the brand's new offer or on products sold under its own brand. It can even be used on other group sites. The unified shopping basket also allows networked retailers to have a global view of stocks so that they can draw on the stock of a shop at the other end of France for a product that is unavailable in the region of the customer who places an order online, or offer to collect an item in stock in a shop near their home by click & collect.
In this high-volume market, great rigour is required to successfully operate and control the customer experience.
A new horizon is opening up in the BtoB sector. "On marketplaces, purchasing departments can compete with different suppliers in the same place, either on the basis of price or on the time it takes to supply the products they are looking for, with a view to speeding up service," explains Régis Quintin. For its business customers in the European Union, Mirakl is launching a central creditor feature that will simplify their marketplace purchases. "Companies do not want to create a seller account in their ERP tools for each player they work with. With One Creditor, the marketplace operator acts as a creditor, the customer retains the depth of choice of the marketplace and the sellers set their own prices," explains Isabelle Bénard. By extending their field of action to the professional sphere, marketplaces remain in the e-commerce universe. They are probably waiting to conquer other worlds, for example in the mobile sector, or to find a place in physical points of sale.
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