There are more and more options on the Internet when it comes to setting up businesses. And in terms of sales, there are two that take precedence over the others: eCommerces and marketplaces. But what are the differences between eCommerce and marketplace?
If you haven't thought about it, or don't have much of an idea, what we want to tell you below may help you learn more about these two forms of business. We start?
What is an eCommerce and what is a marketplace
Before letting you know what the differences are between eCommerce and marketplace, we find it very interesting that you are clear about the concepts of both types of business because they will help you see the differences much better.
Un eCommerce is characterized by being a web page in the form of a virtual store in which a company or brand offers its products or services for sale.
Meanwhile, one marketplace It is not really a virtual store, but a set of virtual stores that use the same online platform to sell their products or services. In other words, it is a platform where you can buy products from different companies or brands.
A more practical example: the online store quesos.com would be an eCommerce because it sells its own cheeses. On the other hand, a platform like Amazon, in its cheese section, can sell those from quesos.com but also those from its competition, from other cities and even from other countries.
En general, an eCommerce is a smaller website while the marketplace is a "conglomerate" of several stores that have a common website where they sell their products.
Differences between eCommerce and marketplace
Once we have made the concepts of eCommerce and marketplace clear, it is time to talk to you more specifically about the differences between the two. And in this sense we have several:
Intellectual
Just as we have defined eCommerce and the marketplace, In the first, the products may be unique to the company or not. What is clear is that it is this company, this online store, that takes care of the entire sales process, from putting it on sale, to customers purchasing it, to transportation and delivery to the customer.
However, in the case of the marketplace, in the vast majority it acts only as an intermediary. It is a platform in which there are multiple sellers who have a sales channel, but they are the ones in charge of sending the products to customers (with exceptions, of course).
Control over the brand
Another difference between eCommerce and marketplace is the control over the brand. In an eCommerce, this control is 100% because you can control all aspects of this, including the user experience regarding the purchases they make from you.
But the same does not happen in a marketplace, where sometimes it is the platform that controls some of these aspects (by giving you more or less visibility) and also the user experience can cause the perception of other clients to be not good and they do not choose you. to buy the products there (and go to the competition).
Variety of products
An eCommerce is focused on a type of product, either from one brand or several. But what is clear is that it is limited to its suppliers. That is, you cannot sell anything else.
In contrast, In a marketplace, being a set of stores, it allows you to have a larger catalog of different and varied products. These products are even repeated and then play a war on prices, quality, etc. to get to sell. This prevents buyers from having to purchase different products in different eCommerce stores because they could find everything in one place.
Consumer Relations Platform
When you set up an eCommerce, you know that one of the first aspects to take into account is the domain, that is, the url. And this must match the name of your eCommerce.
On the other hand, in the case of a marketplace, The domain will be that of the marketplace itself, becoming the name of each company that participates, a kind of subpage to sell your products. That is, they go to second place.
Visibility
Although an eCommerce allows you more customization and control, the truth is that it takes a long time to achieve visibility, something that, In the case of a marketplace, you gain visibility because the investment they make is much greater and by offering so much variety it positions itself much faster and in higher positions than small or individual online stores.
Interaction with customers
One of the biggest differences between eCommerce and marketplace is, without a doubt, the interaction with customers. In the first case, there is total control because you are responsible for serving users and to resolve doubts and problems so that customers are satisfied.
But the same does not happen in the marketplace. In this case, the first option is to resort to the marketplace itself to solve the problem, and it may or may not act as an intermediary. That is, he can solve the problem himself and then deal with it internally with the companies; or pass the problem to the seller himself. Additionally, the credit for doing well often goes not to the companies, but to the platform, so positive comments sometimes focus on the platform, and not on the individual companies that are part of it.
Scalability and growth
Finally, another difference between eCommerce and marketplace is its scalability. For an eCommerce to be scalable, it would have to increase its capacity to sell a greater variety of products, manage inventory, logistics, etc.
But In the case of a marketplace, it is scalable in the sense that, by adding more sellers and more products, you already achieve more growth. And this makes it easier to do because the platform itself doesn't have to do anything.
As you can see, there are many differences between eCommerce and marketplace, but all of them are usually included in a larger one, the fact that an eCommerce is for a store and a marketplace is for a set of stores (competing or not). Has the topic become clear to you?