Marketplaces are potentially wonderful for brands. Get immediate range extension, don't take on the fulfilment and service of the orders and use your brand name and power to help smaller producers. There's some brand reputation considerations: especially with good service from the marketplace vendors. That aside, lots of upside.
For a while the leader in this space for software has been Mirakl. A very mature and strong solution now that is a great answer for those very serious about the marketplace and a good idea in the enterprise space. It does come with a price tag though in terms of license and implementation, so to build a business case, you need serious brand power or really be going for it.
At OSF, we thought we could bring something in for the mid market that brings you a marketplace using Salesforce technologies to complement those who already had the appropriate products. Fast time to market and leveraging all the standard Salesforce objects and data model to fit nicely with Commerce Cloud, Order Management, Service Cloud and so on. We call it TealKart marketplace.
Recently, Salesforce bought Atonit. The folks over there have basically done the same thing that OSF had: a native Salesforce Marketplace solution, all in the cloud. They were a good year or so ahead of us in terms of traction. In the future, we're going to be backing the Atonit product, as it will be launching as Salesforce's official marketplace solution sometime this year.
I'm very excited about this, as I was about our solution, because marketplaces are such a good way for brands to expand their attractiveness, revisit rate and average basket value without too much of the overhead of trying to hold loads of small items in low inventory numbers. Roll on a few months time!
Back to article list