How Marketplace Innovations Will Benefit Your Company

Marketplace Innovations Improve Products and Services for Your Customers

The Shift Toward eCommerce

Marketplace innovations are even more critical now that the COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed how businesses operate. There’s been a huge shift towards eCommerce, which promotes the development of new technologies to support it.

People appreciate marketplace innovations, especially in a time of crisis. Many are accustomed to using digital tools, shopping online, making connections via online platforms, and quickly adapting to new technologies. They accept the need for frequent updates, new products based on social trends, and online platforms for buying and selling products.

These consumers embrace marketplace eCommerce innovation instead of resisting change, and a B2B business needs to cultivate this attitude and keep pace with emerging technologies to succeed.

Think to the Future

The era of the mobile, social, and vertical marketplace platforms has reached an all-time high with an expectation to continue climbing.

A forward-thinking company can leverage next-generation marketplaces to expand its operations, widen its bases, and provide greater accessibility to products and services.

That’s a critical step for a B2B company that wants to get its share of the growing B2B eCommerce market that’s predicted to reach $20.9 trillion by 2027.

Consider What Customers Need

Many people enjoy collaborating with businesses when they support a company’s core philosophy. To develop loyalty and generate sales, though, you need to provide customers with cutting-edge features for your marketplace platform.

User experience, convenience, and access to advanced self-service features take top priority for most customers, even above price.

Adaptability Appeals to Employees

This shift in the B2B marketplace business model affects everything in marketing and sales. A B2B company can’t attract and retain top talent unless it innovates regularly and adapts to new expectations.

With the shift for many businesses to remote work, many employees have found working from home to be preferable to working in an office, while others would say the opposite.

It’s important to get feedback from employees and create a solution that works best for everyone, especially when so many people are quitting their jobs and looking for better opportunities and treatment.

The pandemic reminded us just how much of our lives exist outside of work. A business that has a good work culture and adapted to expectations fared better than businesses that didn’t in terms of employee retainment.

Employee loyalty is no longer given blindly to a business but to organizations that innovate, have forward-thinking HR policies, and provide staff with opportunities for career growth.

Creativity and Innovation Will Win

Given these marketing trends, it’s easy to see how important it is to market B2B products and services across multiple channels, including international eCommerce platforms.

Amazon’s success is impossible to deny because it has about 300 million users, and Amazon sellers make $26,000—$810,000 per year as reported by TechJury.

Amazon’s marketplace features include in-demand services such as video streaming and fast shipping options, which are included in the Amazon Prime membership.

In addition, there are over 200 million Amazon Prime members. Other key statistics for Amazon, according to Backlinko, include:

• Amazon’s Prime Day generated an estimated $11.19 billion in sales in 2021.
• More than 20 countries have access to Amazon Prime.
• The number of US Amazon Prime users was expected to grow to 168.3 million by 2025.

In addition, 66 percent of respondents in a Digital Commerce 360 survey said they shopped on Amazon because they could find almost anything they needed, and 51 percent responded that they could quickly find and purchase what they were looking for.

This shows how important it is to have an optimized search tool within the eCommerce platform. In addition, the availability of the platform itself is important. In the same survey, 34 percent of respondents indicated that they purchased from Amazon because of how available and convenient it was.

Amazon’s marketplace platform pleases its core users by offering a suite of integrated digital tools such as repricing software, apps that manage inventory, and SKUs and programs that assist sellers in meeting stringent FBA standards.

Sophisticated automation algorithms save time and money that sellers can use to resolve issues, explore innovative marketing ideas, and invest in business opportunities.

Regardless of whether a company sells products to businesses or retail consumers, legacy software can fall short. It’s almost impossible to manage multiple sales channels in different tax jurisdictions and foreign markets without full integration of channel management, CRM, and ERP software.

Innovation Endeavors Are Necessary

Many organizations have failed to survive major changes in business practices and consumer trends. Marketplace platforms offer opportunities, but only those companies that cultivate flexibility and agile technologies in their online marketplaces are assured of success.

Blockbuster Video, Digital Equipment Corporation, Montgomery Ward, Polaroid, and Kodak are companies that failed to adapt to changing markets and technologies, ignoring the marketplace innovations right in front of them.

Organizations that succeed—and that are more likely to master marketplace sales—overcome resistance to change by following these practices:

• Implementing multiple projects and selling across multiple channels to develop new market opportunities
• Planning thoroughly on how to respond to various business and marketplace scenarios
• Following business competitors’ actions closely
• Showing a willingness to cannibalize the company’s existing revenue streams to build more lucrative opportunities
• Abandoning traditional practices readily to develop promising revenue streams

THE OPPORTUNITY FOR UNIQUE SOLUTIONS

Extraordinary Marketplace Services

A B2B business that doesn't expand into marketplace channels misses out on some extraordinary sales, marketing, and financing benefits.

Innovative technologies generate new ideas for businesses, which is especially helpful once businesses find their niche.

One example of innovation is our Payment Hub, where we created a solution for the limitations of other payment gateway and point-of-sale systems.

When you offer a unique solution or product, you offer value to your customers. They may have wanted that exact solution, and now they can have it. Others may not have realized what such a product could do for them until they had it, and now they can’t do without it.