E-commerce focuses its efforts primarily on selling its products, or selling products through its stores, thus measuring its success based on how many products it sells via its stores. Instead, the marketplace focuses its efforts on how many products third-party stores sell on top of the marketplace. Therefore it measures its success based on the transactions on the platform from third-party stores.
Business Model Element
E-commerce
Marketplace
Similarities
Differences
Competitive Advantage
Customer Segments
Individual consumers, businesses, B2B, B2C
Individual consumers, businesses, B2B, B2C
Both target a wide range of customers, including individual consumers and businesses, across various industries.
E-commerce may focus on selling products directly to consumers. Marketplaces facilitate transactions between multiple sellers and buyers.
Variety of products/services, options, comparison shopping
Both offer convenience and a variety of products/services. E-commerce focuses on a wide product selection and competitive pricing. Marketplaces emphasize the ability to compare products from multiple sellers.
E-commerce may focus on its own products and services. Marketplaces bring together multiple sellers offering a diverse range of products and services.
Website, mobile app, physical stores (if applicable)
Website, mobile app, online platform
Both operate through websites and mobile apps. Some e-commerce businesses may have physical stores as well.
E-commerce may sell products directly through its own platform. Marketplaces connect buyers and sellers within their online platform, facilitating transactions.
Direct Sales (E-commerce), Facilitated Transactions (Marketplace).
Both maintain customer relationships through direct sales and customer support. E-commerce may handle returns and collect feedback from customers. Marketplaces facilitate transactions, encourage reviews and ratings, and offer dispute resolution services.
E-commerce manages customer relationships in-house. Marketplaces foster interactions between buyers and sellers, handling transaction-related aspects like reviews and dispute resolution.
Both engage in procurement, inventory management, and order fulfillment. E-commerce businesses handle these aspects for their own products. Marketplaces focus on seller onboarding, maintaining the platform, and facilitating transactions between multiple sellers and buyers.
E-commerce businesses procure, manage inventory, and fulfill orders for their own products. Marketplaces provide a platform for sellers to list products and engage in transactions.
Direct Procurement (E-commerce), Multi-Seller Platform (Marketplace).
Key Resources
Inventory, distribution centers, online platform
Online platform, seller network, user reviews
Both rely on online platforms as a key resource. E-commerce businesses require inventory and distribution centers for their products. Marketplaces rely on a network of sellers and user-generated reviews and ratings to build trust among buyers and sellers.
E-commerce businesses need inventory and distribution centers to stock and deliver products. Marketplaces build trust through user reviews and ratings, leveraging a network of sellers without owning inventory.
Sellers, payment processors, third-party service providers
Both collaborate with payment processors to facilitate transactions. E-commerce may partner with suppliers and logistics providers for the procurement and delivery of products. Marketplaces partner with third-party service providers to enhance the seller and buyer experience.
E-commerce businesses form partnerships with suppliers and logistics providers for the procurement and delivery of their products. Marketplaces rely on sellers to provide products and partner with third-party service providers to enhance the platform’s functionality.
Supplier and Logistics Partnerships (E-commerce), Third-Party Service Providers (Marketplace).
Revenue Streams
Product sales, service fees, subscriptions
Transaction fees, commission, advertising
Both generate revenue through product sales and may offer subscription-based services. E-commerce may charge service fees for additional services. Marketplaces primarily earn revenue through transaction fees from sellers, commission on sales, and advertising opportunities.
E-commerce businesses primarily rely on product sales for revenue and may charge service fees. Marketplaces earn revenue through fees related to transactions, commission, and advertising services to sellers.
Transaction Fee-Based (Marketplace), Diverse Revenue Streams (E-commerce).
Cost Structure
Inventory costs, distribution costs, technology development
Both incur costs related to technology development and marketing. E-commerce businesses have inventory and distribution costs. Marketplaces focus on platform maintenance and marketing to attract buyers and sellers.
E-commerce businesses bear inventory and distribution costs, which are often substantial. Marketplaces prioritize maintaining and marketing their platforms, which may involve lower operational costs compared to managing physical inventory.
Jeff Bezos explains the difference between e-commerce and a platform
Back in 2019, in Amazon’s shareholders’ letters, one of the last ones from Jeff Bezos, as CEO of Amazon, he highlighted:
The percentages represent the share of physical gross merchandise sales sold on Amazon by independent third-party sellers – mostly small- and medium-sized businesses – as opposed to Amazon retail’s own first-party sales.
Third-party sales have grown from 3% of the total to 58%.
To put it bluntly: Third-party sellers are kicking our first-party butt. Badly.
The statement above, explains the key difference between e-commerce and a platform!
E-commerce measures its success based on how many of its products it sells directly on its own stores.
A platform, by converse, measures the success of other stores, on top of the existing e-commerce infrastructure!
Imagine in the physical world, a retail shop, selling products (of his own) and a commercial shopping area, where there are shops of many kinds, selling their products.
In the former case, the retail shop will be concerned primarily about its revenues, and product sales. In the latter, the commercial center needs to make sure within it has a set of thriving shops, which attract as many people as possible. Only with that setup, it will be successful over time.
As Jeff Bezos further highlighted, back then:
And it’s a high bar too because our first-party business has grown dramatically over that period, from $1.6 billion in 1999 to $117 billion this past year. The compound annual growth rate for our first-party business in that time period is 25%.
But in that same time, third-party sales have grown from $0.1 billion to $160 billion – a compound annual growth rate of 52%. To provide an external benchmark, eBay’s gross merchandise sales in that period have grown at a compound rate of 20%, from $2.8 billion to $95 billion.
He also analyzes the context, to understand what made up Amazon’s success in attracting third-party stores, and he posed a few questions:
Why did independent sellers do so much better selling on Amazon than they did on eBay? And why were independent sellers able to grow so much faster than Amazon’s own highly organized first-party sales organization?
Jeff Bezos emphasized:
There isn’t one answer, but we do know one extremely important part of the answer:
We helped independent sellers compete against our first-party business by investing in and offering them the very best selling tools we could imagine and build. There are many such tools, including tools that help sellers manage inventory, process payments, track shipments, create reports, and sell across borders – and we’re inventing more every year.
In short, a successful platform incentivizes third-party stores and e-commerce to compete against the first-party stores, and it offers them a set of key tools to manage inventory, payments, track shipments, and reporting.
As Jeff Bezos further highlighted:
But of great importance are Fulfillment by Amazon and the Prime membership program. In combination, these two programs meaningfully improved the customer experience of buying from independent sellers. With the success of these two programs now so well established, it’s difficult for most people to fully appreciate today just how radical those two offerings were at the time we launched them.
The combination of fulfilled by Amazon and prime membership, improved the customer experience, of buying from independent sellers, thus making it as good as buying from Amazon itself.
As Jeff Bezos, highlighted, those two programs (now widely successful) were not guaranteed to succeed:
We invested in both of these programs at significant financial risk and after much internal debate. We had to continue investing significantly over time as we experimented with different ideas and iterations.
In fact, while those make sense now, and seem obvious, in hindsight, it took a lot of mistakes, failures, and iterations, to get there:
We could not foresee with certainty what those programs would eventually look like, let alone whether they would succeed, but they were pushed forward with intuition and heart, and nourished with optimism.
Customer obsession goes beyond quantitative and qualitative data about customers, and it moves around customers’ feedback to gather valuable insights. Those insights start with the entrepreneur’s wandering process, driven by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and a builder mindset. The product discovery moves around a building, reworking, experimenting, and iterating loop.
The Amazon Flywheel or Amazon Virtuous Cycle is a strategy that leverages customer experience to drive traffic to the platform and third-party sellers. That improves the selections of goods, and Amazon further improves its cost structure so it can decrease prices which spins the flywheel.
Difference Between E-commerce and a Platform: Key Takeaways
E-commerce vs. Platform: The fundamental difference between e-commerce and a platform lies in their focus and success metrics. E-commerce primarily measures success based on its own product sales through its stores, while a platform measures success by the transactions of third-party stores on its platform.
Jeff Bezos’s Explanation: Jeff Bezos, the former CEO of Amazon, highlighted this difference in a shareholder letter. He pointed out that e-commerce measures its success by its own first-party sales, while a platform’s success is based on the growth of third-party sales on top of its infrastructure.
Third-Party Sales Growth: Bezos explained that Amazon’s third-party sales had grown significantly from a small percentage to a substantial share of total sales. This shift indicated that third-party sellers were thriving on the platform.
Platform Analogy: Bezos used the analogy of a retail shop (e-commerce) versus a commercial shopping area (platform). The former is concerned with its own product sales, while the latter’s success depends on the thriving shops within it, attracting customers collectively.
Tools for Success: A successful platform offers third-party stores the tools to manage inventory, payments, shipments, and reporting. These tools empower third-party sellers to compete against the platform’s first-party sales.
Incentivizing Third-Party Sellers: Successful platforms invest in tools and programs that benefit third-party sellers, making their offerings as attractive as first-party sales. For Amazon, Fulfillment by Amazon and Prime membership improved the buying experience from independent sellers.
Customer Obsession: Customer obsession is central to the platform’s success. It goes beyond data and feedback, incorporating intuition, curiosity, experimentation, and iteration to continuously improve the customer experience.
Building a Flywheel: The concept of the Amazon Flywheel involves leveraging customer experience to drive traffic to the platform, which benefits third-party sellers. As the selections improve and costs decrease, the flywheel spins, further enhancing the platform’s success.
Key Takeaways:
E-commerce focuses on its own product sales, while a platform’s success is tied to the success of third-party stores.
Successful platforms provide tools for third-party sellers to compete and offer a positive customer experience.
Customer obsession and continuous improvement are core principles of platform success.
The flywheel effect is integral to a platform’s growth, where customer experience drives traffic and benefits all participants.
A platform business model generates value by enabling interactions between people, groups, and users by leveraging network effects. Platform business models usually comprise two sides: supply and demand. Kicking off the interactions between those two sides is one of the crucial elements for a platform business model success.
A marketplace is a platform where buyers and sellers interact and transact. The platform acts as a marketplace that will generate revenues in fees from one or all the parties involved in the transaction. Usually, marketplaces can be classified in several ways, like those selling services vs. products or those connecting buyers and sellers at B2B, B2C, or C2C level. And those marketplaces connecting two core players, or more.
A network effect is a phenomenon in which as more people or users join a platform, the more the value of the service offered by the platform improves for those joining afterward.
In an asymmetric businessmodel, the organization doesn’t monetize the user directly, but it leverages the data users provide coupled with technology, thus have a key customer pay to sustain the core asset. For example, Google makes money by leveraging users’ data, combined with its algorithms sold to advertisers for visibility.
In an asymmetric businessmodel, the organization doesn’t monetize the user directly, but it leverages the data users provide coupled with technology, thus having a key customer pay to sustain the core asset. For example, Google makes money by leveraging users’ data, combined with its algorithms sold to advertisers for visibility. This is how attention merchants make monetize their business models.
The wholesale model is a selling model where wholesalers sell their products in bulk to a retailer at a discounted price. The retailer then on-sells the products to consumers at a higher price. In the wholesale model, a wholesaler sells products in bulk to retail outlets for onward sale. Occasionally, the wholesaler sells direct to the consumer, with supermarket giant Costco the most obvious example.
A retail business model follows a direct-to-consumer approach, also called B2C, where the company sells directly to final customers a processed/finished product. This implies a business model that is mostly local-based, it carries higher margins, but also higher costs and distribution risks.
A B2B2C is a particular kind of business model where a company, rather than accessing the consumer market directly, it does that via another business. Yet the final consumers will recognize the brand or the service provided by the B2B2C. The company offering the service might gain direct access to consumers over time.
The term “crowdsourcing” was first coined by Wired Magazine editor Jeff Howe in a 2006 article titled Rise of Crowdsourcing. Though the practice has existed in some form or another for centuries, it rose to prominence when eCommerce, social media, and smartphone culture began to emerge. Crowdsourcing is the act of obtaining knowledge, goods, services, or opinions from a group of people. These people submit information via social media, smartphone apps, or dedicated crowdsourcing platforms.
While the term has been coined by Andrew Lampitt, open-core is an evolution of open-source. Where a core part of the software/platform is offered for free, while on top of it are built premium features or add-ons, which get monetized by the corporation who developed the software/platform. An example of the GitLab open core model, where the hosted service is free and open, while the software is closed.
Open source is licensed and usually developed and maintained by a community of independent developers. While the freemium is developed in-house. Thus the freemium give the company that developed it, full control over its distribution. In an open-source model, the for-profit company has to distribute its premium version per its open-source licensing model.
The freemium – unless the whole organization is aligned around it – is a growth strategy rather than a businessmodel. A free service is provided to a majority of users, while a small percentage of those users convert into paying customers through the sales funnel. Free users will help spread the brand through word of mouth.
A freeterprise is a combination of free and enterprise where free professional accounts are driven into the funnel through the free product. As the opportunity is identified the company assigns the free account to a salesperson within the organization (inside sales or fields sales) to convert that into a B2B/enterprise account.
In a franchained businessmodel (a short-term chain, long-term franchise) model, the company deliberately launched its operations by keeping tight ownership on the main assets, while those are established, thus choosing a chain model. Once operations are running and established, the company divests its ownership and opts instead for a franchising model.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
