The enterprise marketplace SaaS platform, Mirakl, recently launched its 2022 edition of the Enterprise Marketplace Index. This report presents the current state of marketplaces and analyzes the keys that drive their growth using a year-over-year analysis based on sales data in the same marketplace.
For the second consecutive year, during 2021, marketplaces achieved a growth rate of 25%, doubling e-commerce sales for the second consecutive year, which grew by 12%. Matching the growth of digital commerce in 2020 was not an easy task, but the data shows that the trend that emerged with the start of the pandemic has been consolidated, and the marketplace model is preferred by both consumers and sellers. In 2021, the number of businesses that started selling with this tool increased by 46% over 2020, with marketplaces overall achieving a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 49.7% over the past two years, while that the CAGR of e-commerce overall was 22.2% during that same period.
A year of challenges and opportunities for ecommerce
The past year has been a real roller coaster ride for retailers, facing issues such as strained supply chains and rising customer acquisition costs, as well as stagnant organic traffic.
Marketplaces have positioned themselves as a source of solutions for the sector, by offering a greater variety of products and making it easier for buyers to find everything they are looking for in one place and at a more competitive price. The offer of products available in all marketplaces increased by 38% in 2021. But in addition, by having different sellers that offer similar products, the risk of possible out-of-stock is minimized, obtaining better prices and increasing the level of customer satisfaction. buyers, who have adopted the marketplace model as their preferred model for their purchases.
In 2019, 42% said they buy exclusively or a lot from marketplaces, a figure that rose to 57% in 2020 and remained unchanged at 57% in 2021, despite the reopening of physical stores.
On the other hand, marketplaces can also help boost business margins. In a context in which e-commerce has reduced its margins due to inflation and problems in the supply chain, the contribution of marketplaces to sales rose 29% thanks to growth compounded by the increase in GMV and the general increase in commissions. Mirakl’s report provides a revealing fact: the top 25% of marketplaces by GMV reach an average of more than $40,000 per seller, which underlines the transformative scope of the marketplace model to respond to the highest ambitions of retailers.
