Winning Strategies for Service Marketplaces

For the marketplace to succeed, the value of convenience it provides must, therefore, continuously outweigh the monetary gain of moving off-platform (ie. not having to pay the commission the marketplace charges).

Service marketplaces must continuously provide value in terms of either discovery, convenience or trust. In line with this, successful service marketplaces tend to be either repeated-discovery, online-first or SaaS-enabled.

The window of opportunity has largely closed, however, this is far from being the case for B2B marketplaces. Whilst consumers are able to order just about anything online, most businesses have not even started transacting online... That being said, I suspect that this category is where the next generation of outliers will be built.

I believe that service marketplaces can only prevail if they fit into at least one of the following categories: repeated discovery, online-first marketplaces and SaaS-enabled marketplaces.

Most marketplaces are not well suited for repeated discovery. To keep their customers engaged they, therefore, need to continuously provide convenience. They can do this by acting as the platform over which the service is delivered (online-first marketplaces) or by building workflow tools to facilitate the delivery of the service (SaaS-enabled mark... See more