webinars5-types-of-ecommerce-marketplace-businesses-chapter-1 Chris Reddick (President and CEO of Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing) begin their discussion of the five types of eCommerce marketplaces. Part 1 of a 4-part series RON: Morning. Chris, how are you today? CHRIS: Hi, Ron. Doing great. Looking forward to diving in on the eCom marketplace types that we're going to be talking about today. For a lot of folks, they hear these acronyms all the time, Ron, and some of them don't make sense. They may know what they technically mean, but they don't have great examples. So we're going to spend just a few minutes and give everyone some detail about these different types of marketplaces in today's discussion, as well as a B2B eCommerce definition. RON: Sounds great. So first off, let's go ahead and define what an eCommerce marketplace is, because there's quite a few different types, right? We're going to answer the question, "what is a marketplace," then I'll turn it over to you and [let you do] your thing. A marketplace is where we allow more than one person as a seller, like a flea market, right? That's a marketplace. It's no wonder people want to create a marketplace website for a niche market. You got a whole bunch of different people selling their wares. Amazon, you've got millions of sellers up there selling. That's a marketplace. Ebay, that's a marketplace auction site. Everybody up there selling their wares. So for me, the marketplace is just an eCommerce or some types of auctions that allows more than one seller. RON: Now, there's a lot of different nuances to that, and that's what the different types of coverage. Is there anything else you want to add to the definition before we dive into all the types of B2B auctions? CHRIS: I think that was great, and I would just throw one note out there, as far as a percentage. The percentage of total online sales is substantially marketplace-based, especially if you include some of the different B2B auction sites like you mentioned with eBay. The overall online eCommerce marketplace is somewhere around 60- to 70-plus percent coming from marketplace sites. So if you hear the phrase marketplace integration eCommerce and you think, “Oh, that's a nice little segment, oh, that's cool,”—it's actually the vast majority of online sales are going through marketplaces. So just think about that and let that resonate. And that really edifies why we want to go into the different marketpalce auction types so we can clarify around these, sort of put some meat on the bones with some examples of these types of marketplaces. RON: Let's talk about the obvious one, since we've already mentioned Amazon. So we'll talk about the [Amazon] seller marketplace. And sometimes we call this C2C, consumer-to-consumer. So I could go on Amazon if I wanted to, and I could sell Pokémon cards and Chris could buy them. And that would be a consumer-to-consumer transaction. I'm not really a business, I'm a consumer and I'm selling to you. So Amazon is both a C2C and a B2C marketplace, right? Because businesses are also selling a lot on Amazon to consumers. And then there’s some B2B there too. I mean, I know Clarity is a business and we buy a lot of our stuff from Amazon. So Amazon is one of those types of seller marketplaces where the sellers could be consumers or businesses selling to businesses or consumers. What else do you think about seller marketplace eCommerce? CHRIS: I think this is really interesting, because you can have scenarios where you get really high-dollar seller C2C-type of scenarios, but it's a lot less common. We’ll talk about this B2B eCommerce type of scenario, but typically with C2C, it's going to be lower cost, higher frequency, and in many cases physically proximate to each other. Otherwise, there has to be a lot of logistical coordination. Companies like Etsy and Amazon do this quite well as a B2B marketplace platform, but it does require a lot of governance whenever you have that in place. So I think those are great examples. I would just include the nuance that it tends to be self-restricting because of that reason. RON: Right. Amazon, to be fair to my example, wasn't really fair because it's not directly seller. Like you said, sellers are mostly C2C. The second one on our list here, the vendor marketplace, Amazon even has Vendor Central, right? And they've even got a whole section for vendors and vendors uploading their products and managing their orders and things like that. So Amazon is a hybrid of a seller and a vendor marketplace. The eCommerce marketplace is more about the B2C and the B2B and that's where the vendors are going to go in there and do that. And we've done a number of these. Go ahead and talk about those, Chris, [about] a couple of the projects that we've done and your thoughts on the vendor marketplaces. Continue to Part 2 to learn about vendor marketplaces.
Chris Reddick (President and CEO of Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing) begin their discussion of the five types of eCommerce marketplaces. Part 1 of a 4-part series