Marketplace

A Marketplace is an online platform where different brands, companies or stores can sell their products or services. In other words, a type of online shopping mall. This business model is not new, nor is the concept itself, since a marketplace is simply an intermediary between sellers and customers. 

Online buyers can access these marketplaces to consult the catalog of various brands, search by product type, price and a multitude of keywords. The key to marketplaces is that they are mainly used to make quick comparisons from the same web page. For a brand or company, having a marketplace means having an online sales channel, reaching customers from anywhere in the world. 

There are several ways to classify the types of marketplaces. Depending on the kind of products that we can find, we have the generalist or niche Marketplace: 

• General Marketplace is a platform where we can find any type of product, without distinguishing by category. Again, an example of this type of Marketplace could be Amazon or Mercado Libre
  

• Niche marketplaces are focused on the sale of certain products. An example of this type of Marketplace could be Bnext, since it has a financial marketplace where you can find loans, mortgages, accounts, deposits, currency exchange, etc. 

Another way to classify the types of marketplaces is by the way they are organized. In this way we can distinguish four groups: 

• Managed Marketplace: sellers advertise on a platform, which oversees managing the sale, customer service, all the logistics part of the shipment, etc. It can be used to reach the end customer or other companies (B2C and B2B). 
  

• Marketplace on demand: it is a more popular type of marketplace for the service sector, where the customer is served at the requested time.
  

• Community-driven marketplaces: This type is like the managed marketplace, with the difference that in this case it is the sellers who oversee customer service, shipments, etc. But there is a company that manages the platform, unlike the following case. 
  

• Decentralized marketplaces: there is no third party that manages it. This type of channel is called P2P (Peer to peer), that is, it is a peer-to-peer vein.