Marketplace fundamentals for digital optimisation: identifying common causes of inefficiency
Marketplace fundamentals for digital optimisation: identifying common causes of inefficiency.
From farmer’s markets to stock exchanges, marketplaces act as intermediaries between buyers and sellers, bringing them together more efficiently than if no marketplace existed. Ideally, this efficiency creates value for buyers, sellers, and the marketplace to be located in a specific physical space — remained constant even as marketplaces developed in complexity over centuries. However, that limitation is gone. Technology and the internet have freed marketplaces from their geographic restrictions, and marketplaces are increasingly switching to digital. Companies realise the opportunity to reduce costs and increase volume by digitisation.?They understand that in addition to overcoming the inefficiencies of geographical separation, digital marketplaces have the potential to resolve numerous other inefficiencies that prevent optimal marketplace performance.?McKinsey reports ?that companies are three times likelier now than before the pandemic crisis to say that at least 80% of their customer interactions are digital in nature.
Common characteristics of an optimised digital marketplace
The efficiencies to be gained with a digital marketplace will vary based on industry, business strategy, marketplace size, and other factors that differentiate marketplaces. However, certain characteristics are common among successful marketplaces, and understanding these attributes is essential in envisioning optimisation for any digital marketplace.
“To determine how to reach optimisation, you need a clear vision of what optimisation will look like for your marketplace.”
1. Thick
There are enough transactions available at one time — the sell-side of the marketplace has been properly “seeded” with attractive inventory, and the marketplace attracts buyers. Efficient matching of buyers to list allows sellers to sell more quickly, thereby increasing the transaction volume of the marketplace, which in turn increases the fees recovered by the marketplace.
2. Ease of Use
The marketplace has low fees and price transparency that makes it easy to participate. It also has customer-friendly features such as:
The aim is to build a digital marketplace with all of these characteristics, as well as characteristics necessary for efficiency, given a marketplace’s particular situation. Sadly, the vast majority of digital marketplaces are falling short of that goal. At this stage in the evolution of digital marketplaces, almost all of them have some inefficiencies to remedy.
3. Secure
Secure Participants feel it is safe to participate and reveal their preferences. Information is secure and features such as seller ratings, transparent pricing, trade clearing, and settlement services allow participants to feel comfortable transacting on the platform
4. Uncongested
There is enough time for offers to be made, accepted and rejected. The marketplace matches buyers, sellers and inventory to optimise transaction prices and volumes. It also has a choice of trading mechanisms, automated trade matching and offers comparison tools.
5. Scalability
The marketplace has the strategy and the resources to continue growing and maintain momentum. The “network effect” spans across the platform - more sellers attracting more buyers, who attract more sellers, who attract more buyers, and so on. Each new participant grows the marketplace and makes it more valuable.
6. Adaptable
Marketplaces change over time as they mature, and the marketplace design needs to keep pace with this. The marketplace should track the behaviour of buyers and sellers to optimise pricing for everyone, identify opportunities for sellers, guide buyers to inventory, and adapt to future market conditions which can be expected.
7. Auditable
This is a key consideration, particularly in regulated markets where transaction records may be required. Return on investment (ROI) can also be quantified and improved by tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), including:
”The vast majority of online marketplaces are inefficient.”
5 Steps to successfully scale your digital marketplace
Growing a marketplace is an iterative process, and a large part entails regular reviews of tools, processes and user behaviour to assess what is and isn’t working. There is no silver bullet that can magically entice people to move forward into a totally new buying and selling environment, but there are some useful ideas:
Generate awareness?
While that might seem obvious, users need to be aware of the marketplace and the benefits for both buyers and sellers.
Seed the supply side?
Make sure you have attractive inventory available when you go live. Partner with a supplier, buy the product, underpin the pricing – whatever it takes to ensure you have a fully stocked platform for launch. Without inventory, there is no marketplace.?
Allow for some degree of anonymity?
There is a long history of buyer and seller communities wishing to remain anonymous. You can enable this with private seller and buyer-owned markets, feeding anonymous transaction data into an aggregate market price, which benefits all market participants.
Overcome vested interests?
Brokers and speculators who have an interest in manipulating the bid/offer spreads will initially oppose transparency, but their attitudes change quickly when they are better informed about underlying physical product price movements.
领英推荐
Understand user behaviour
Using heat maps to understand how users interact with the system is one way you can optimise the experience for them. For example, if you find your users are spending a lot of time on a listing page examining attributes of listings, you might consider expanding this area of your offering.
13 Reasons that can cause inefficiency in a marketplace
Many marketplaces suspect they have inefficiencies in their marketplace, but they aren’t sure what exactly these are. While each marketplace may have unique inefficiencies, there are common ones that can plague any trading venue, and all marketplace owners should be aware of them. They are the flip side of the characteristics of an optimised marketplace. See these typical inefficiencies outlined below.
1. Overly complex user interface
An overly complicated user interface will deter participation, making it difficult to find products or execute a trade. Stick to the ‘KISS’ model (Keep it simple, stupid). A simple, intuitive interface will help ensure “discoverability” so buyers can easily navigate and locate items of interest.
2. Opaque pricing
The take rate is the percentage of a market’s Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) that the marketplace recovers in fees. When market participants aren’t sure how much the take rate is, they are less likely to participate and become loyal.
3. Undetermined price points
When the marketplace is trading items with unclear values, many opportunities exist for buyers, sellers, and the marketplace to lose out. Everyone is ‘shooting in the dark’. Fine art is a prime example of this, as interest does not necessarily translate to a consensus price point. Christie’s adds value to their clients by providing their provenance service as part of their auction fee.
4. Non-current pricing
When pricing mechanisms don’t stay current with market conditions, a fair exchange of value isn’t taking place, a situation almost certain to eventually displease both buyers and sellers. With this in mind, a benchmark price provider is key in ensuring buyers stay faithful to a marketplace. Depending on its transaction model, the marketplace is also exposed to the risk of lost revenue.
5. Low liquidity
When buyers and sellers can’t quickly sell or buy, a marketplace won’t reach its potential transaction volume, thereby lowering the marketplace’s revenue. However, there are markets that work very well despite the perceived lack of liquidity – “Request for Quote” (RFQ) is a platform for interaction amongst market participants who wish to negotiate transactions amongst themselves.
6. Not optimised soft factors
Examples of these factors are:
7. Highly concentrated seller base
When there are only a handful of sellers in a marketplace, they have the leverage to lower the take rate.
8. Buyers who are loyal to sellers
When buyers will seek out a seller outside of the marketplace, the seller will seek a lower take rate than if that loyalty didn’t exist.
9. Infrequent purchasing cycles
Without enough transactions being conducted in a marketplace, take rates won’t sustain it. When buyers don’t buy often, transaction volumes obviously suffer, which hurts the marketplace and makes it difficult to attract and retain sellers.
10. Limited geographic reach
Even digital marketplaces can be limited geographically due to a lack of market penetration in certain areas.
11. No real-time trading insight
Marketplaces are fluid, and to be efficient, they must be capable of adjusting pricing and volumes as quickly as the market moves.
12. Inability to predict buyer behaviour
Analysing the behaviour of participants, we can understand the pattern of how they will act in the future, but many marketplaces don’t have the technology to read these signals and proactively meet the needs of both buyers and sellers.
13. Insufficient scalability
Marketplaces need help in growing, but plans for scalability (e.g., support for power sellers) are often not formalised and acted upon. The reality is that many marketplaces suffer from a combination of these inefficiencies. However, before they can be fixed, they must be recognised.
With all those factors in mind, how do you correct inefficiencies once you’ve identified them? What’s involved in turning those inefficiencies into an optimised marketplace?
Taking action to scale successfully
To remain competitive, organisations should meet users where and how they interact and develop sustainable marketplace strategies as part of a broader strategy to scale successfully.
In order to be successful, every marketplace has to establish itself as an effective intermediary between sellers (supply) and buyers (demand). But first, you must increase your brand's awareness to stand out from your competitors and help drive adoption. The challenge is to find the right combination of internal and external resources to address each aspect. You need a particular, hard-to-find combination of auction, business, and technological expertise.
At NovaFori, we have a proven track record of designing digital marketplaces in various industries. To find out how we can help you reach new customers, optimise pricing and gain real-time trading insight.
We adopt a collaborative and hands-on approach, combining our B2B marketplace expertise with your industry knowledge and business requirements to design the right platform for you. We provide businesses with a flexible, scalable and modular platform solution, designed with a B2C user experience and complex product attributes of the B2B world in mind to ensure your marketplace is a seamless extension of your business and your ambitions.
Interested to learn more about marketplace digitalisation? Subscribe to our newsletter to stay up-to-date on industry trends, innovative technologies, and business growth and success ideas.
Talks About - Business Transformation, Organisational Change, Business Efficiency, Sales, Scalability & Growth
2 年I do enjoy your posts Rodrigo??