Marketplaces attract every day more and more Internet users. We’re talking about more than 16 million unique monthly visitors on Amazon, and some 10 million on the Fnac. These are all potential buyers who might be led to discover the products of small e-retailers who don’t have such a digital power.

The benefits of a marketplace

For a retail website, integrating a market place offers many benefits, including:

• to benefit from the marketing power of the marketplace: its visibility on search engines, its audience, its reputation;
• to increase its chances to reach out to new customers, who would perhaps never have discovered these products otherwise (knowing that some marketplaces are rather general, others rather specialised);
• to improve its sales (in 2015, 32% of internet users had already made at least one purchase on a marketplace);
• to master its acquisition costs: marketplaces only receive payment when and if an actual sale occurs. This saves you from putting aside a marketing budget and keeps you from spending money in web development;
• to control its risks: marketplaces set up protections against the risk of unpaid bills, fraud and disputes, etc.
• to take advantage of storage and delivery services offered by some marketplaces (e.g. “Shipped by Amazon”);
• last, but not least, to open new international markets, including via marketplaces that offer matching products by EAN (European Article Number) code, allowing automatic translation of product references.

Furthermore, it is possible to multiply one’s chances by integrating multiple marketplaces. Thanks to all these advantages, these platforms have become an interesting tool to acquire new channels of traffic for retails sites.