At the beginning of 2020, many companies were not (fully) prepared for a strong digitalisation of their operating methods in such a sudden context.

Difficulties in recruiting sales forces lead to new customer acquisition methods. It therefore becomes very attractive, against a few hundred euros per year, the promise of boosted visibility and potential sales. Yet marketplaces* have a negative impact on your company’s business in the long and medium term.

Beware of the ideal solution: do marketplaces threaten your business?

Marketplaces* have never been so present in the daily lives of Internet users. They have radically shaken up the consumption or information habits of end customers, particularly for professionals in the graphic arts and digital printing industries.

This craze for marketplaces is not new, but there has been a clear spike in growth recently. While marketplaces offer many advantages for end consumers who are looking for more choice in offers, attractive prices and irreproachable services, they do not always offer as many advantages for e-merchants who use their services and the notoriety of marketplaces to develop awareness of their products or services.

If you have the opportunity to be present on such a  platform, it is tempting to take advantage of its audience to increase your sales volumes, but this visibility will not guarantee you fortune and may even cause the opposite effect depending on the platform you choose.

In practice, marketplaces have 2 economic models:
– obtain a commission relative to the selling price of the item to which a monthly subscription will most often be added.
– Positioning yourself as a referencing intermediary against a monthly or annual fee including internal ranking services or promotional content editing.

In this series of articles, we would like to weigh up the pros and cons and analyse certain risks that are often little-known and that can put the “magic” of marketplaces into perspective.

Do marketplaces threaten your business?

• Do marketplaces threaten your business? Article 1/5
• Your ideas, their clients – Article 2/5
• Dependency and costs – Article 3/5
• Visibility and SEO Strategy – Article 4/5
• Tips and recommendations – Article 5/5

*Marketplace: in this series of articles we will use the term marketplace, which refers to a market place whose objective is to become a digital vector between supply and demand, has many synonyms. We speak of a sourcing platform when it is only an intermediation without sale. Generally speaking, we are interested in commercial intermediation sites, whether they carry out the act of sale or not, and present a multi-seller model.D