Understanding What a Marketplace Is in 2 Minutes Flat!

The world of digital commerce is complex and vast — all the more so because a great many English terms have found their way into it and sometimes prevailed over their French equivalents. Take, for example, local content marketing.

Today, we will explain another English term from the world of digital retail: the marketplace. A term that is all the more complex to grasp in that its meaning has evolved over time.

What a marketplace originally was

Known as a "place de marché" in French, the marketplace was originally a website that acted as a broker between one or more buyers and professional suppliers. It therefore concerned only professional-to-professional transactions (B2B), particularly for responding to calls for tender.

The definition has evolved somewhat since then, extending notably to business-to-consumer (B2C) sales, and even consumer-to-consumer (C2C) transactions.

A meeting point between supply and demand

Today, this is what we call the part of a website where independent sellers — professionals or private individuals — can sell their products online. In exchange, the site takes a commission on each sale made, whether that concerns the sale of a product or a service.

E-commerce platforms such as Rueducommerce, Amazon, PriceMinister, and CDiscount sell products from their own respective brands. But they also provide a brokering service between buyers and private or professional sellers.
So when you buy a book on Amazon, the seller may be Amazon itself, or it could be a bookseller, or even a private individual wanting to resell their copy. In these last two cases, Amazon is therefore acting as a marketplace. Whereas for the portion of buying/selling Amazon products on Amazon, we would simply speak of an e-commerce site.

Greater visibility and autonomous sales

Marketplace sellers benefit from the visibility offered by these platforms, their traffic, and also their e-commerce tools (online payment, etc.). They are also responsible for fulfilment (packaging, shipping, after-sales service, possible product warranty, etc.).

The marketplace operators are there to facilitate the buyer/seller relationship in a secure environment. The orders, however, fall under the sellers' responsibilities, even though marketplaces obviously offer certain guarantees. For instance, when a parcel is confirmed lost, some marketplaces refund the buyer and pay the seller regardless.

In terms of well-known marketplaces, BlaBlaCar and Fnac.com are also worth mentioning.
And mobile applications are no exception — far from it. Indeed, one of the most famous marketplaces is Apple's App Store. Google's Play Store is not far behind.

Marketplaces are therefore everywhere, going so far as to hold a monopoly on mobile applications. It is indeed difficult to offer an application to consumers without going through a Store. On the web, they are well established, and the most famous have become indispensable over the past decade.

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