Category: Non classé

Which sectors have already developed marketplaces and which sectors offer new growth opportunities?

There are still plenty of B2C opportunities but the B2B market has been booming all over the world in the last year or two.

We’re seeing the emergence of lots of new projects that are driven by the circular economy and refurbished products: second-hand sales, but between professionals. Many companies have contacted us about this, particularly in the automotive industry. They recover used materials from garages with the aim of repairing them, putting them back on the market at attractive prices and, most of importantly of all, communicating about this eco-friendly circular economy.

Other sectors including banking, health and industry are also very dynamic.

Marketplaces enjoyed explosive growth in 2021; could the market become saturated in 2022? 

It’s true that e-commerce for B2C clients almost always involves a marketplace. We’re not an afterthought any more. But the market regulates itself as new players emerge: the key difference lies in the service they provide. The companies that last are those that offer fast delivery or payment in three installments at no additional cost, for example, and very large players that benefit from a quasi-monopoly. 

Much remains to be developed with the B2B sector, so saturation is a distant prospect! 

A key aspect to strengthen the marketplace model in the coming months? 

I’d say ensuring the long-term future of the marketplace model! A marketplace is an ecosystem that involves a number of different parties. IZBERG is the nucleus of the platform. In addition to the back office that we provide, the operator needs a payment service provider, logistics professionals and a whole range of other players to create a marketplace. That’s why we provide an ecosystem of partners to anticipate our clients’ every need. Technology, payment management, logistics: we already offer all that but we could also provide our clients with a catalog of sellers!

And of course, the user experience is key when it comes to creating a marketplace that stands out: simplifying the customer journey, offering one-click payment, etc. It’s vital to prioritize our clients! 

Before we say goodbye to 2021, let’s take a look back!

2021 was an action-packed year for e-commerce, with all things digital receiving a real boost. In Europe, e-commerce sales accounted for €843 billion, up 11% on 2020*. 

There was an even more marked increase for marketplaces: +16% in 2018, +14% in 2019 and +27%(!) in 2020. Marketplace turnover has exploded as a result of the pandemic, as Fevad (the French Federation of E-Commerce and Distance Selling) pointed out in August**.

The marketplace model has become increasingly widespread in both B2C and B2B. Why? Because professionals have switched to using the web too: 34% believe that the pandemic has encouraged them to order more online and 70% say that they will continue to do (Fevad).

The marketplace has become almost indispensable for all companies: SMEs, intermediate-sized enterprises, major groups. Gartner estimates that 75% of B2B purchases will be made via a marketplace by 2022.

2021 was more than just “Covid + 1”.

It was a year in which differentiation has been key: faced with this explosion in supply, it has become vital to stand out, often by adding services. Chat and video conferencing have become popular tools for customer relations.

2021 also put “the cloud at the heart of things”, as the French government announced in May. Any new project in the French public sector must now be designed for the cloud.

It was a year in which augmented reality could no longer be ignored: Mark Zuckerberg announced a planned launch of a parallel (and 100% virtual) world. A few weeks earlier, Snapchat said that it wanted to become the first augmented reality marketplace.

2021 also saw increased consumer demand for local and green products. Second-hand commerce (sometimes called recommerce) expanded, starting online, of course.
The boom in circular economy marketplaces is proof of this; in France, for example, the second-hand digital platform Label Emmaüs turned five this year.

This online marketplace is an extension of Emmaüs’ bricks-and-mortar charity shops and is therefore available to all French shoppers. But that’s not all: having created Label Ecole to provide e-commerce training for people who have struggled to find jobs, the team has come up with trëmma.co, a “charitable Vinted” – each sale finances a committed project. The next step is to open regional logistics platforms.

Lastly, new European rules have also had an effect with changes to e-commerce VAT entering into force on July 1. The marketplace becomes the “presumptive merchant” for VAT purposes and must therefore declare, collect and pay VAT in certain cases, instead of the seller. In addition to its obvious impact on the internal logistics of a marketplace, these new rules are leading operators to rethink their pricing strategy.

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