In this section you will find:
market place – what is it and how does it work? Overview of the most popular marketplaces possible alternative spaces
We see our customers as guests invited to a party, and we are the hosts. Our job is to improve every aspect of the customer experience every day.
Jeff Bezos
Although many consumers are unaware of it, e-commerce is much more than Amazon and eBay. These are the giants, but there are many successful marketplaces that meet specific consumer needs.
Oliver Prothmann
A marketplace is a website that connects sellers and buyers allowing them to carry out a commercial operation. On this type of platform,sellers and buyers remain in the technical and commercial context of the marketplace until the transaction is completed. Putting itself as a sort of guarantor, the marketplace therefore favors the sale and purchase agreement between buyer and seller and ensures that the transaction takes place under the best conditions. The marketplace can be horizontal, i.e. operating with multiple categories of products and services – such as: Amazon, Ebay, Alibaba – or vertical, i.e. organized around a specific category of goods or services, such as Etsy, Justeat or Booking.
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This is the text that Prestashop uses to present its marketplace: “it provides companies with bulletin boards, shop windows or real virtual stores ready for use, communication tools, order management, customer care and above all a pool of potential customers already members and loyal to the platform “.
The marketplace scene is certainly dominated by Amazon and eBay, but in Europe there are interesting alternative or complementary realities that are worth knowing, exploring and on which sales can be planned.
To get an overview of the most visited sites in the world you can consult the Alexa site (a subsidiary company of Amazon.com that deals with Internet traffic statistics). The site also allows a search by country and by category. For a comparison and a graphic visualization, we present an image taken from the research of the Federal Association of Online-Trade “Marketplaces across Europe”.
Amazon is the most well-known online marketplace and sales platform in the world. Founded in 1995, Amazon began as an online bookstore, but soon began expanding its product range. Starting in 2015, Amazon is the world’s leading e-commerce retailer, as well as the leading retailer in the world.
To find out how it works and have a go at //services.amazon.co.uk/?ld=ELITSOA-learning.me-commercer.eu
When you arrive at the homepage, you will find not only special offers and featured products, but if you have been to Amazon.com before, you will also find some recommendations just for you. Amazon knows you by name and tries to be your personal shopper.
The embedded marketing techniques that Amazon employs to personalize your experience are probably the best example of the company’s overall approach to sales: Know your customer very, very well. Customer tracking is an Amazon stronghold. If you let the website stick a cookie on your hard drive, you will find yourself on the receiving end of all sorts of useful features that make your shopping experience pretty cool, like recommendations based on past purchases and lists of reviews and guides written by users who purchased the products you are looking at.
The other main feature that puts Amazon.com on a different level is the multi-leveled e-commerce strategy it employs. Amazon.com lets almost anyone sell almost anything using its platform. You can find straight sales of merchandise sold directly by Amazon, like the books it sold back in the mid-’90s out of Jeff Bezos’ garage — only now they are shipped from a very big warehouse. Since 2000, you can also find goods listed by third-party sellers — individuals, small companies and retailers like Target or Toys ‘R Us. You can find used goods, refurbished goods and auctions. You could say that Amazon is simply the ultimate hub for selling merchandise on the Web, except that the company has recently added a more extroverted angle to its strategy.
In addition to the affiliate program that lets anybody posting Amazon links earn a commission on click-through sales, there’s now a program that lets those affiliates (Amazon calls them “associates”) build entire websites based on Amazon’s platform. They can literally create mini Amazon websites if they want, building on Amazon’s huge database of products and applications for their own purposes. As long as any purchases go through Amazon, you can build a site called Amazonish.com, pull products directly from Amazon’s servers, write your own guides and recommendations and earn a cut of any sales. Amazon has become a software developer’s playground.
