Online Marketplaces - a 2025 Update

The rapid increase of consumers' buying online is a well-established trend. The big global winners such as Amazon and JD have relied on Marketplaces.

Single listing vs Multi listing marketplaces

In physical retail the key goal was to occupy shelf space. And ensure that this was correctly executed at retail. So teams of merchandisers would have a planogram that was agreed (and often paid for) by the brand and retailer and would assist the store to rack the product on shelf.

"We used to hire dedicated people in key stores over Christmas to delve into the warehouse and pull out the stock. The stores were just so busy with so much going on that managing the store like this was the best way to win sales."

Lost Buy Box

Single listing marketplaces end with a single 'winner' of the buy box. 99.8% of all consumers will not look beyond this buy box and click buy. So winning a buy box can make a significant difference to sales.

Amazon: two different categories

Amazon has two different types of category listings. The most used is based on the taxonomy tree in the left-hand side bar. This is shown contextually by Amazon. In addition there is the Amazon 'Bestseller' category list. Our research shows this to have usage less than 2% of the contextual taxonomy.

There is some indication that visits to the bestsellers have a high conversion rate and that it's a great place to support that initial journey to establish a particular model as the item to buy for a customer.