We’re willing to bet you’ve bought products or services through an e-commerce platform or website at least once in your life, and if you live in a first world country, it’s probable that you’ve spent hundreds of dollars/pounds on online purchases. E-commerce and online marketplaces are immensely powerful tools, allowing businesses to reach way more customers and take their products and marketing strategies to the next level.
But what exactly is the difference between e-commerce and booking marketplaces? Why is an online product and service marketplace way better than individual e-commerce stores? In this blog post, we’ll dive into the differences and similarities of e-commerce and marketplaces, and analyse why you should use marketplaces as a business or a customer!
e-commerce
E-commerce is broadly anything that is sold online. Usually this means the product pages you can view and buy through on the websites of your favourite stores. They have payment modules and store home pages where you can browse products and services, and place an order.
The benefits of e-commerce stores are that you have your own, separated website where your customers can visit at a unique URL. You can add individual products and run a blog to market your products and drive new traffic and customers to your site.
The disadvantages of e-commerce are that it’s immensely difficult to build traffic to a new site, and it’s a continuing struggle to maintain the traffic and sales. It’s every store for themselves, and you’ll have to get pretty creative to keep the sales coming through the door. The site also is managed by you and your developers, meaning it can be costly, complicated or quick to become outdated.
Marketplace
A marketplace brings together services and products from a broad range of businesses. Here, customers can browse a variety of options and compare benefits, meaning if your business offers something unique which your competitors don’t, it’s way easier for a customer to make a good buying decision and place an order with you!
In a marketplace platform, you’ll have access to way more traffic which is automatically brought to you. You’ll have great leads and a lot of interest from both new and old customers. By switching to a marketplace platform, you can drastically increase your profit margins because you won’t have to spend lots of money on regular, desperate marketing campaigns to bring in traffic and conversions. You can set up your business in minutes, customise your offerings, and provide a range of features and benefits to your customers, so you can spend more time improving your work, products or services and less time on the backend and marketing.
A marketplace is brilliant because it takes both the sellers and the buyers priorities and desires into account. It allows customers to browse their options and find the perfect choice for them, which leads to an overall way better client experience. This, of course, can lead to massively increased customer retention, and if you provide a brilliant service, your customers will be raving about your company to their friends and relatives. That leads to more loyal patrons!
ibooking.co.uk
ibooking is a great example of a platform innovating to provide amazing service to businesses and customers, bringing together many services into one, streamlined place where companies can reach more and better customers, and buyers can filter their options to achieve a stellar customer experience!
With ibooking’s service marketplace, you can find exactly what suits you, place an order super easily, and keep track of your purchase so you get the ultimate experience! And, as a business, you can get up and running right away without paying extortionate prices, and easily market to your amazing customers and reach new buyers with ease.
