Customization Is the Future and the Growth Driver for Online Marketplaces

Marketplaces have proven their value over and over again by bringing consumers a wider variety of offers at better prices than they can find almost anywhere else. 

In the next stage of development, they will build on those capabilities by adding customization that will present each customer with the best possible offer for them. 

“Tomorrow, I think, what the consumer on the marketplace will want is, ‘Show me what matters to me. Show me what I am more likely to be interested in,’” Eric Heurtaux, chief financial officer at Mirakl, told PYMNTS. 

Avoiding Channel Conflict 

Heurtaux joined Mirakl in April. The company, which is an enterprise marketplace subscription-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, expanded its suite of solutions to include customization by acquiring eCommerce personalization vendor Target2Sell in April. 

In addition to pursuing that next stage of development, another challenge for marketplaces to navigate arises when they are facilitating business-to-business transactions. In these cases, they need to ensure there’s no channel conflict between sellers on the marketplace and brands’ own networks. Fortunately, marketplaces can prevent this conflict by onboarding all the brand’s dealers so they can provide the best possible offer to the end customer. 

Continuing Demand for eCommerce, Beyond the Pandemic 

Speaking of the declines in the stock price of many publicly traded eCommerce sites and marketplaces, Heurtaux said this was an exaggerated correction to the end of a pandemic that supported eCommerce so well, driven by investors thinking the channels’ sales volumes will shrink. 

In fact, the volume of sales on Mirakl’s own marketplace has continued to grow, as has the number of merchants it’s onboarding. In 2021, Mirakl signed 80 new customers across industries worldwide and launched 66 new marketplaces on its platform for organizations. 

Now, more than 300 customers operate on operating Mirakl-powered marketplaces — amounting to 50,000 sellers on the marketplaces and more than $4.3 billion transacted last year. 

“So, you can imagine that our revenue, our volume of activity, keeps on increasing,” Heurtaux said. 

Delivering More Performance for Each Marketplace 

Mirakl has a mixed model with both recurring fees and variable revenue associated with the performance of each marketplace it powers, so to an extent, it sees itself as a participant in their success. 

“The better it performs, the better we receive as revenue,” Heurtaux said. “We are in a win-win model where we try as much as we can to improve and deliver more performance, more revenue, for the marketplace, and in turn it generates a positive incentive to us.” 

In his new position, Heurtaux’s priority in the short term will be to do everything he can to boost sales, improve pricing and provide the best way to onboard new customers. 

“I want it to continue to grow,” Heurtaux said. “This is definitely a growth story — this Mirakl development — and so if I have to summarize it in one word, it would definitely be ‘sales.’”