Learn About Commerce Marketplace
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe Commerce Marketplace.
- Learn why you should create a Marketplace.
- Explore the advantages of using Marketplace.
What Is Commerce Marketplace?
Commerce Marketplace is a suite of technologies for Salesforce B2C Commerce customers that personalizes the shopper experience by extending your storefront to include other sellers.
The Commerce Marketplace solution includes:
- Commerce Marketplace app: A Lightning app used by the marketplace operator to manage third-party sellers.
- Seller Portal: A digital experience built on Experience Cloud, where sellers manage what they sell.
- Marketplace Integration Toolkit: A tool used to connect a Salesforce org and a B2C Commerce instance.
- Marketplace Seller Integration API: A REST API for sellers to build custom tooling for managing their items within Commerce Marketplace.
Marketplace offers functionalities that strengthen your Commerce portfolio.
- Operate digital sales channels for B2C Commerce customers.
- Manage seller onboarding, catalog integration, order routing, payouts and compliance.
- Invite third-party sellers to sell products directly to shoppers on your own commerce site.
Why Use Marketplace?
While dropship and marketplace solutions both use third-party inventory, the marketplace solution increases profitability, speed, and scale. It expands value to our business customers and partners by:
- Starting and scaling faster.
- Expanding catalog with minimal risk.
- Reducing inventory risk.
- Owning the customer relationship.
Business buyers make 87% of their business purchases on online marketplaces. 72% of all companies that built a marketplace on our platform saw market share growth over the past 2 years as a result.
In general, marketplaces can be expensive to integrate. Doing so requires a solid strategy, and many businesses don’t know how to proceed. Will you innovate fast enough? And what happens if you change your mind during the integration process? For these problems, Salesforce has an innovative solution.
As a marketplace operator you can:
- Extend your catalog: Fill gaps in your product catalog with products from other companies.
- Engage new customers: Attract new audiences with your expanded catalog.
- Expand your reach and revenue with new sellers: Sell more and monetize your audience with assortments and offerings that span categories.
- Be a one-stop shop: Offer your customers a unified channel where they can find everything they need, in a single buying process.
- Learn more about your customer: By increasing the assortment, you create more opportunities to understand the needs of your customers, and key insights for your business.
As a marketplace seller you can:
- Reach new channels: Sell products in marketplaces to reach new channels and audiences cost-effectively.
- Increase your exposure: When offering your products within a popular channel, you can take advantage of their larger customer base and trust relationship with the customers, increasing your revenue.
- Reduce costs and complexity: Tech and marketing costs are handled by the Marketplace, allowing you to focus on what’s important—operating your sales.
Advantages of Commerce Marketplace
Commerce Marketplace allows you to take full advantage of giving the product a try without making a huge investment in starting over. Onboard and test in a fast and affordable way that’s also scalable. Salesforce is the only Enterprise Commerce platform with built-in Marketplace capability.
Advantages for Existing Commerce Customers | Advantages for the Commerce Cloud Portfolio |
---|---|
Expand catalog breadth while reducing inventory, specifically dropshipping—an order fulfillment method that doesn’t require a business to keep products in stock. Instead, the store sells the product and passes on the sales order to a third-party supplier, who then ships the order to the customer. |
Increase customer GMV through broader SKU coverage. |
Reduce procurement, selling, and fulfillment costs. |
Provide customers with native capabilities. |
Test combinations of new products, categories, and geographies before adding them to a catalog. |
Create more value for large brands with extensive reach. |
Experiment with new business models and revenue streams. |
Harness the success of new products sold on “entry-level” commerce platforms. |
Marketplace Architecture
The Marketplace architecture contains four separate layers, each offering a key advantage to help maximize the Commerce platform experience for both customers and shoppers.
Marketplace Architecture Layer | Key Advantages and Features |
---|---|
Marketplace Storefront Components |
Developed on Commerce Cloud to enhance Commerce Cloud storefront components. |
Seller Portal |
Dedicated control panel for the seller. Built on Experience Cloud. Offers features like catalog management, order management, and customer service. |
Marketplace Center |
Lightning app for managing third-party sellers. |
Platform for Growth and Scale |
Only marketplace built from the ground up on the world’s #1 CRM. Launch quickly and scale to meet the needs of your customers. |
The end result is packed full of revenue for all of your Commerce platform needs.
Let’s Wrap It Up
You learned about the benefits of Commerce Marketplace and how it can bridge the gap between you, customers, and third parties. Now, take the leap and give Commerce Marketplace a test drive!