The whole of e-commerce is migrating towards marketplace solutions. If you look at the top-ranking e-commerce sites in France today, you will see that almost all of them are marketplaces. At the end of 2019, the Fevad, which publishes its top 10 based on the number of unique visitors per month, ranked Amazon, Cdiscount, Booking, Fnac, Veepee and Vinted. This trend can be explained by the quality of the customer experience. The very nature of the marketplace, as a platform to make connections, addresses consumers’ new demands for easy access to products, delivery options, insurance, etc. Honesty is crucial. e-traders must understand that there is no one-fits-all solution for every use case.

There is no off-the-shelf marketplace that is suited to their particular case. All the solutions quickly reveal their limits of a framework with no way out.

But we cannot see any reason why marketplaces must remain black boxes. On the contrary, at IZBERG we have adopted a best-of-breed approach. We nurture the notion of a community, by opening up our data and our knowledge. The goal is to federate an ecosystem of integrators or partners using our toolbox. In this way, operators can build their tools themselves, using all the possible software building blocks to develop a made-to-measure solution.

Our transactional project management platform is agnostic. IZBERGS’s customers build applications ranging from retail sites to platforms for organic waste management, e-procurement and booking skiing lessons. All BtoC and BtoB professionals are now concerned. Our customers have fundamentally different needs, and they can add as many components as necessary to our core. We have developed a non-restrictive toolbox with more than 500 APIs (basket creation, order processing, catalogue retrievals, etc.)

Our prospects also have differing requirements in the pre-sales phase and a need for functionality specific to their particular use cases. For example, can the solution be plugged into ERPs? Can BtoB invoicing be managed in this or that country? And so on. A standard model cannot tick all the boxes, which is the reason why the teams at IZBERG have opted for flexibility. IZBERG enables its users to do whatever they want by providing them with an extensible product and teams committed to their success.

But we did not adapt this model straight away. IZBERG is about to celebrate its eighth birthday, and we take care to continually call ourselves into question. By listening to our customers, we have been able to see what unites them and what distinguishes them. Every event, every meeting, from surveys and opinion polls, to demonstrations and new functionality tests, provides us with fresh food for thought. We tell our customers how they can develop their own complete and personalised solution on the basis of our API First core. We supply the base, then we help them to model and expand their solution however they like.

In this respect, we have strong product values that are embodied by our solution - modularity, openness, extensibility - and we try our hardest to be developer-friendly by working hand-in-hand with the doers, and in particular with the developers of our ecosystem of customers and partners. We provide them with a wealth of documentation, tools and top-quality support for their implementation. Finally, all the data managed in the marketplace is accessible to the customer.

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Benoît Guyot - Product Owner of the IZBERG solution