Marketplace trends: what you need to know (march 2021 edition)

Each month, we prepare a summary of articles carefully selected to understand the trends of e-commerce with a focus on the marketplace sector.

Amazon: A successful acquisition strategy and a successful B2B marketplace

1. 16% annual growth until 2025

   Amazon has been pursuing a rather aggressive acquisition strategy for the past 7 years: it has acquired more than 50 companies for at least $19 billion. This growth is not about to stop: Amazon will continue to grow by at least 16% every year until 2025, largely thanks to its acquisition strategy, according to Morgan Stanley.

   Cocolabs note: The Cocolabs touch: Faced with the significant multiplication of the number of marketplaces and the success of platforms with specialized verticals, Amazon is adapting by acquiring in various sectors to ensure its domination.

   Read the full article.

   

    

2. Amazon Business, the successful B2B marketplace

Amazon announced in mid-March that its B2B platform Amazon Business had surpassed $25 billion in revenue by 2020. Less known than the B2C marketplace, the business marketplace is now growing more than the latter. Amazon Business is based on a similar UX to the consumer platform with the addition of B2B specific features: wholesale pricing and special payments.

Cocolabs note: Experiencing strong growth since 2017, Gartner predicts that by 2022 75% of purchases will be made through a B2B marketplace. Amazon Business will probably continue its meteoric growth and be deployed in other countries. This growing weight illustrates the crossroads of uses and the need to offer the same quality of service in B2B as in B2C.

Read full article.

Marketplace strategy:

How to validate your marketplace project?

1. Exchange with 5 to 10 targets on both sides of the marketplace: buyers and sellers
2. Create a landing page to get your first potential customers
3. Make a mock up of your marketplace
4. Make an MVP of your solution to test your market

Cocolabs note: The 4th point was actually “fake it”. Solutions exist, such as Hatch, to create a robust MVP. This is the ideal way to test your market without risking to break the trust of the users, so essential on service marketplaces.

Read full article.

The 5 criteria for a successful marketplace according to Forbes

1. Aiming for a large market and an offer that creates value
2. A simple and bi-directional interaction
3. Grow with zero marginal cost
4. Have low levels of regulation
5. Use all the resources at your disposal

Cocolabs note: “Aiming at a large market” is to be nuanced: no need to launch on a large market where a giant dominates, it is better to aim at a particular vertical. For example, misterbnb focuses on accommodation for the gay community and is a great success (more than 310,000 accommodations in 135 countries).

Read full article.

Cocolabs is specialized in the sale of online services, although the digitalization of the service industry is booming, it is still little analyzed. We have written an article to help you understand the world of service marketplaces.