Omnyfy is making a global push after successfully closing a Series A round of funding. Having a strong market position in Australia, the company is aiming to focus on building its presence in the US, South-East Asia and Europe.

Omnyfy’s technology allows businesses and enterprises to create a multi-vendor e-commerce marketplace, similar to Ebay, Amazon or Etsy. For shopping centres and retail precincts this means they can now create an identical digital twin of their shopping mall, where all products and services in physical stores are available for purchase online through the marketplace. Retailers and startups, on the other hand, can use the technology to launch a multi-vendor e-commerce marketplace and leverage a drop-shipping model to rapidly scale their businesses.

“Marketplaces continue to be one of the fastest growing sectors of e-commerce – online retailers have realised how profitable this model is. The physical retail, on the contrary, hasn’t yet grabbed on to the opportunity presented by multi-vendor commerce”, said Fabian Rebeiro, CEO of Omnyfy.  

Established in 2017, Omnyfy has seen rapid growth and now boasts clients in 10 countries and a global partner network in 16 countries. Its client base includes major Australian businesses like Australia Post, Melbourne Airport, South Melbourne Markets, Mirvac; global organisations such as Changi Airport, Danaher Group and a large and expanding mix of marketplace upstarts. 

With a wide range of applications for its marketplace technology, Omnyfy is seeking to capitalise on the opportunities within the retail sector as the industry seeks to re-open and find new ways to address dropping sales, visitor numbers due to COVID restrictions and the convenience of online shopping. “For two decades now, shopping centres have been under significant pressure from increasing levels of online commerce – we provide retail asset owners a way to recapture these lost consumers and, at the same time, participate in the value that marketplaces create from data and analytics through to significant retail sales”, said Mr. Rebeiro. 

Omnyfy’s Series A round of $3.3m included investments from long-term backers Sturt Capital Partners, Taronga Ventures and private investors.  

Taronga Venture’s RealTech Ventures Fund, is an institutional venture fund investing into globally scalable entities that will enhance or challenge the way real estate is designed, procured, financed, developed and managed across all sectors. 

Mr. Jonathan Hamman – “We identified Omnyfy as a business with the right mix of technology, experience and capabilities to deliver a truly innovative solution to retail precincts that desperately need a technology to help them innovate.” 

Mr. Rebeiro added, “Having Taronga Ventures back Omnyfy, and being part of the RealTechX program has definitely been a boost for Omnyfy, and a confirmation of our vision, and has put us in front of some of the world’s largest asset owners, giving us the opportunity to grow the business globally.” 

With over 50 clients using the platform today, 35% of which are international, Omnyfy has established itself as a serious player in the e-commerce marketplace platform globally, being featured by Gartner in multiple marketplace technology provider reports. Mr. Rebeiro added, “I’m proud of what we’ve achieved in just a few years, to not only have our technology being used by major organisations in Australia and globally, but also to be consistently competing with companies far bigger than us in marketplace deals”. 

About Omnyfy

Omnyfy is a PaaS Multi-Vendor Marketplace Platform that enables marketplace owners and operators to rapidly create, launch and manage large scale, global marketplaces. Established in Australia in 2017, Omnyfy has quickly grown to be a reputable brand name globally, for multi-vendor marketplace platforms, with solid technology review ratings and recognition from Gartner as a key provider of turnkey and headless marketplace platform solutions. The platform is trusted by global businesses, including successful startups and large enterprises.

About Taronga Ventures, the RealTech Ventures Fund and RealTechX

Taronga Ventures, through its RealTech Ventures Fund, is a technology and innovation investor focused on innovation for the built environment. The Fund is an institutional venture fund that invests in globally scalable entities that will enhance or challenge the way real estate is designed, procured, financed, developed and managed across all sectors. The Fund is focused on developing a diverse portfolio covering sustainability, design, materials and software and provides capital, mentorship and global networks for those companies in which it invests, as well as first mover advantage for the leading global real estate institutions that are the investors in the Fund. Taronga Ventures has extensive experience across global markets and asset classes and is supported by strategic and institutional partners across Asia, the Middle East and Europe. RealTechX is Asia’s first government supported, industry-focused independent scale-up program for companies impacting real estate and the wider built world.

About Sturt Capital 

Sturt Capital Partners is a privately-held advisory, asset finance and investment business. It specialises in providing quality outcomes for its clients, across a range of disciplines including – asset finance, advisory and investment: sourcing, arranging and management of niche investment products for private and small institutional investors. Sturt Capital and its partners will generally co-invest in such opportunities, alongside its clients.

One of the instant benefits for the consumers is that Online Shopping Centre Marketplace provides an opportunity to get their usual shopping done online, under one umbrella bringing more convenience and optimising delivery time and costs.

“The success of a marketplace comes from the ability of the marketplace to offer buyers and sellers something unique, a new way of exploring, engaging and transacting, that improves the experience for everyone. Omnyfy offers a turn-key marketplace platform with extensive customisation capability and flexibility to create any marketplace you want “, said Alexis Susser, GM Sales and Marketing at Omnyfy.

Learn how Omnyfy helps retailers, shopping centres, airports to build an online distribution channel by creating a multi-vendor digital marketplace.

Successful marketplaces such as Etsy, Airbnb, and Fiverr, prove that the marketplace platform is highly scalable and flexible to any business industry and niche. One of the reasons behind the rapid growth of online marketplaces is that retailers do not need an inventory list. With a collaborative economy, retailers can develop a booming business without spending a lot of money to purchase initial inventory which involves many risks.

We will continue to see more innovation when it comes to building and running online marketplaces. With today’s technology, anyone can launch their marketplace in a matter of weeks. However, the launch is just a start and more factors need to be considered for marketplaces to be successful. Among those factors are platform functionalities that vendors and businesses look out for. Let’s have a closer look at the criteria you should consider when choosing the best marketplace platform provider for your business.

1. Seamless vendor onboarding

Wide assortment provides a competitive advantage to the marketplace and often becomes the main reason why customers prefer to shop from your multi-vendor e-commerce platform. That’s why the success of your marketplace largely depends on the number of high-quality vendors and products you manage to acquire.

However, the vendor acquisition process is often not as easy as it seems. Successful vendors with a good range of competitive products usually don’t have an urge to joining additional distribution channels, especially if getting on your marketplace requires a lot of time or resources.

To remove this entry barrier, it is highly recommended to make sure the vendor onboarding process is simple and fast. Integration with third-party e-commerce software allows your marketplace to seamlessly fit into the vendor’s existing business ecosystem. With such integration, the marketplace owner and vendors won’t have to spend hours or days manually uploading their list of products, updating pricing and inventory levels. Instead, they will be able to simply pull all the products from their existing online store (e.g. Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento). Such a seamless onboarding process is one of the key factors, if not the main one, for getting more vendors on the platform and allowing the marketplace to scale.

2. Vendor order management

We believe that a powerful marketplace platform must also be easy for Vendors to use. A good marketplace software should provide you with tools, to make vendor order management seamless and efficient.

For example, Omnyfy offers a comprehensive management interface for Vendors to receive and fulfil their orders with complete control over the pick-and-pack process. Vendors receive notifications via email or through the Omnyfy Closer Vendor app every time a new order comes through. They can print out pick-and-pack slips for individual items or the entire order. Meanwhile, customers receive notifications at every stage of the fulfilment, staying informed throughout the process.

On top of that, thanks to the integration capabilities, vendor-owned stores (e.g. Shopify) get automatically updated with the marketplace orders, pulling in the orders from the marketplace, automatically updating the fulfilment status and adjusting inventory levels.

3. Vendor payout management

Payout refers to disbursing or paying out of funds received from a customer to Vendors. The ability of the platform to accommodate multiple fee types (commissions, fixed disbursement fees, transaction fees, transaction fee surcharge, category commission) is key to organise an effective vendor payout process. The flexible fee structure at an individual vendor level is also an important factor, especially for the marketplaces that want to tailor the fees and charges for individual Vendors based on negotiated rates.

4. Multiple shipping options

When a vendor sells a product or service on a multi-vendor marketplace platform, the business will take part in its fulfillment. 

When building a marketplace, owners must make sure platforms have the ability to integrate courier services to provide flexible fulfilment options. This ensures that vendors have a seamless experience when fulfilling orders for their customers. By identifying target vendors, the marketplace owner can come up with a list of necessary shipping options. The drop-shipping model and centralised delivery are the two most popular variations of the fulfilment model, however, if the marketplace platform can support a combination of both – that is the best scenario.

It’s also good to note what couriers the marketplace will support. Not all courier services will serve the user’s immediate vicinity of the proximity of the ideal customer base. Providing logistics services in the provider’s area or at least offering a way to inject a supported courier into the process is highly beneficial.

5. Comprehensive product management

Offering great product management features such as advanced search, should be a priority to help vendors and customers reach their goals with ease.

A sophisticated, multi-layered product catalogue is a must for any e-commerce store and marketplace. Advanced marketplace-specific catalogue features can help navigate site visitors through multiple vendors and hundreds or even thousands of products. For instance, Omnyfy’s marketplace catalogue allows a customer to compare products across different vendors based on defined product attributes and comparable values, which enables the marketplace to provide an excellent customer experience and help buyers find exactly what they are searching for.

Another thing to consider is product pages. Sellers on your marketplace should be able to quickly and easily create new product catalogues. Make sure that your sellers include descriptions, images, and details including availability, variations, delivery information, and more.

6. Multiple payment options

At the heart of e-commerce is commerce – and commerce cannot happen without an exchange of value. That puts a premium on payment gateways and payout terms, which is one of the main considerations when finding the right e-commerce software for vendors.

The preferred payment method of global online shoppers is eWallets, with 36% using this form of payment. Setting up a marketplace that supports multiple payment options, like a credit card, PayPal, or bank transfer, is a must.

In case the marketplace is in the business of selling subscription-based products and services, providing recurring payment systems can be a great solution. It enables automated payments so that the marketplace operator does not have to bill clients manually every month or so.

7. Scalability

One of the biggest challenges in developing an online marketplace is figuring out which business model works best for a particular business. Hence, if a marketplace owner needs to spend more time learning and improving their business, they can start with a Minimum Viable Platform. A lot of marketplaces choose to start small, while refining their unique value proposition, designing their transaction flow and expanding their vendor network.

However, it is important to think long-term and not get trapped in this initial stage. Once the business passes through the Proof of Concept Stage, the growth stage begins. It is extremely important that technology doesn’t become a constraint. The platform should be flexible enough to allow the business to build on functionality, pivot, and even branch out into other markets or geographies.

To make it possible, a marketplace owner should consider the flexibility of the platform at the start to make sure the tech has enough features to support all the possible scenarios the business may adopt in the future. 

8. Platform maintenance

There are a few other aspects of the platform that are hard to account for at the planning stage. However, such invisibility can sometimes make or break the marketplace.

One aspect is platform maintenance and sustainability. Before locking your business with a particular marketplace solution provider, it is important to explore how easy is it to operate and make changes to the marketplace after it is launched. You should ask yourself – how much can I do with the marketplace without involving the entire team of developers. This often comes to specific details on the platform. Can you do product-based marketing? How detailed can be SEO optimisation of vendor stores and product pages? Can you manage the content, e.g. update text or images on the marketplace by yourself, without engaging the tech team?

Here at Omnyfy, we see an increasing number of requests from businesses with already existing marketplaces. Only after the launch of a newly created marketplace, they discover that their marketplace platform has significant limitations or is difficult to manage. Sometimes, in this case, building a new platform with the right provider is easier and even cheaper than carrying monthly maintenance costs of a non-flexible marketplace technology. A lot of these businesses eventually decide to write off their marketplace as a sunk cost, while investing in a new one with more granular functionality. 

To avoid such waste, spend more time upfront, going through all the possible scenarios of your business, learning about the technology you are planning to use, its capabilities, risks, and limitations.

9. Security

Platform safety and privacy are important criteria, especially for larger companies and enterprises. This aspect depends on the technology provider’s internal policies, as well as the environment each marketplace uses. With SaaS marketplace software, all marketplaces are built on a shared environment. This means that any minor change to the platform may affect all clients and their marketplaces. While PaaS model provides each marketplace with its environment, ensuring the maximum level of security, privacy, and a lot of room for customisations.

There are a lot more criteria to consider when choosing between SaaS and PaaS model marketplace platforms. Read one of our articles to dive deeper and decide which one works best for your business.

10. Technical support

It’s always safe for us to assume that any technology will require technical support at some point. Therefore, the software you sign up for must have good customer support. Check reviews from other users to ascertain a marketplace platform’s level of responsiveness and level of technical support.  Doing this small but significant task will help you avoid anxiety and save you a lot of time in the future.

11. Pricing

Sometimes expensive does not equal quality. Quality of the platform versus the price point varies across the industry based on the business model and the strategy of the technology providers. Depending on what the marketplace provider’s go-to-market model is, your price might include huge markups passed from sales and marketing, while the platform itself might not satisfy your needs. To get the best value for money, look for product-focused companies that are constantly investing in their marketplace technology, adding new features and capabilities and, improving user experience. The right platform will provide you with a solid basis to build a successful and scalable marketplace.

If you have a marketplace project or would like to learn more about Omnyfy’s marketplace technology and its applications, reach out to have a chat.

The Project Bidding Module with milestones payments functionality is a vital addition to any professional services or procurement marketplace. This powerful add-on module allows marketplace customers to post a project and connect with multiple vendors and specialty contractors that meet their requirements.

The Project Bidding Module is perfect to accommodate any tender process. The module allows customers to post a detailed project brief, find and invite suitable vendors to participate in the bidding. Vendors, on the other side, are able to accept the project and send their proposal, with the scope divided into milestones if necessary. Once both sides get involved in the negotiation process, the module is able to maintain the communication and support all future transactions between the parties.

Such functionality is a must-have module for almost any professional services marketplace. It ensures a great customer experience and enhances the transparency of all communications and transactions. This helps marketplace owner to establish their reputation and build trust within their industry.

The module was first launched with Poligage – a professional services marketplace that helps businesses find and engage with government and commercial policy advisors.

Project Bidding Module Benefits

• Connects project owners with vendors and service providers in the clear and transparent manner
• Allows to manage different parts of the project, involving multiple vendors
• Allows project owner to choose, compare and negotiate with multiple providers at the same time
• Enables millstone-based scope management and payments

The report outlines market trends and directions, draws the differentiation between core digital commerce and marketplace functionality and cites representative vendors that enable enterprise marketplaces.

Market Trends

Gartner states, “Developing an enterprise-grade marketplace is a complex undertaking that often involves fundamental business model changes. As a result, many of the vendors have relatively few enterprise clients. “

According to Gartner, “by 2023, 30% of enterprise marketplaces will transition into a third-party  seller model for better profitability.” Such a model allows the organisation to expand product offering and achieve better profitability by enabling third-party sellers to sell directly to the end customers through the marketplace.

Marketplace Technology

A Marketplace Operations Application (or Marketplace Platform) enables enterprise marketplace functionality that includes seller onboarding and management, combined product catalogues, order routing and management, seller payouts and more.

Gartner states that “Marketplaces must have multiple sellers, an assortment of product categories, and a larger number of SKUs…Operators will need functionality such as seller onboarding, product mapping, product deduplication, offer management, seller monitoring and alerting.” Omnyfy is one of few vendors that provide such features out-of-the-box, along with standard marketplace functionality.

Omnyfy

Omnyfy supports both turnkey native shopping cart functionality with a direct-driven front-end as well as fully headless API based marketplace capabilities. Omnyfy is a native Magento 2 marketplace solution but with our integrated ETL software, Omnyfy Fuse, is able to convert virtually any eCommerce platform into a Multi-Vendor Commerce Marketplace.

Omnyfy is currently integrated with Shopify for In-bound (Vendor inbound) integration for product and order sync and also supports Neto, to convert Neto into a fully multi-vendor marketplace enabled platform.

Omnyfy Marketplace provides marketplace operators with advanced vendor management capabilities designed to offer full control over the on-boarding, management and administration of marketplace vendors at every level. The marketplace operator can review and deny/approve vendor registration requests, make edits to vendors and perform tasks on behalf of vendors, have control over vendors’ stores, their categories and products. Vendor subscriptions are available to enable a marketplace owner to monetise the vendors on their platform by charging a monthly fee to use the platform. Subscription plans can be created with different plan frequency, value and entitlements.

Omnyfy also supports a basic product listing workflow that enables the marketplace owners to approve/reject products submitted by the Vendors, with the ability to add notes if a product has been rejected.

Choosing Marketplace Technology – Omnyfy’s Recommendations

Marketplace goes far beyond technology deployment, it is actually the entire business model that may require a lot of additional considerations such as the relationship with sellers, managing new products and categories, modifying customer experience and more. It is important to make an informed choice of the technology that supports the needed functionality, allows future growth and manages the complexity of a particular business model. Here are top 3 decisions to make, when deciding on a marketplace software:

• Marketplace operator should decide if they want to deploy an integrated solution or build an extension to an existing commerce platform.
• Marketplace owner should decide on the vendor onboarding process, the shipping model and payments early on to make sure all criteria are met when choosing a marketplace software.
• It is important to forecast the scale and the future expansion of the marketplace to choose the right technology that accommodates all the needs and provides additional functionality.

Market Guide for Marketplace Operation Applications, February 2021

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

View the full Webinar Recording

Here’s an overview of the Webinar.

Online retailers today are seeing record growth in online sales driven by Covid-19. There is an increasing appetite for online ordering from customers who are under lockdowns, working from home or who simply enjoy the convenience of buying online. However, for an online retailer, the sales growth leads to increasing costs being incurred in inventory holding costs, sourcing increased inventory, stock delivery and fulfilment.

The multi-vendor model enables online retailers to extensively expand their product offering and range by allowing third-party sellers to sell alongside them on a multi-vendor marketplace.

In this webinar, we looked at how online retailers can transform an existing single-vendor online store into a full-fledged multi-vendor marketplace. Hear from customers’ case studies and learn from marketplace experts as we provide you with a playbook to build and scale your own online marketplace.

Fabian Rebeiro

Founder & CEO

Omnyfy

Stephanie Tran

ANZ Partnerships

Stripe

Lee Blackmore

Digital General Manager

Tools.com

Key Takeaways:

• Learn how to expand the product range without the related costs of stock ownership.
• Explore the variety of shipping models and payment options to enable global fulfilment.
• Hear from customer case studies and marketplace specialists as we provide you with a playbook to transform your retail business from a single vendor to a multi-vendor marketplace.

Want to discuss your marketplace idea?

Simply put, a marketplace is a two-sided business model that connects potential buyers and sellers all within one platform to help sell/buy/exchange products or services. 

Before diving in, let’s take a step back and understand where the marketplace model originated from.  

Evolution of the marketplace 

Before the internet, the most common way to find businesses, products and services was to search in the Yellow Pages (Yellow Book) – a telephone directory with the entire listing of businesses or vendors, organized by category. In the early ’90s, at the very beginning of the internet era, Yellow Pages concept moved online where listing websites like Yahoo listings or Craigslist offered search and categorization where in addition to viewing just listings of these businesses you could search for a business and find the one you’d like to engage with.  

Listing marketplaces further evolved into comparison marketplaces where users were able to  compare different vendors and products/services they offer or compare the companies’ reviews. At this level, marketplaces still lacked the transactional part – the lead or enquiry was ultimately the outcome of the search process. 

From here marketplaces evolved to Consumer to Consumer marketplaces – sites like Ebay, or TaoBao, where consumers could buy products or services from other consumers. At this point, the evolution of the entire marketplace ecosystem started – the need for completing payments lead to the development of payment gateways (such as Paypal and Alipay), delivery and fulfilment solutions began to shift online as the need to get products to buyers and streamline the buying process became more important. B2B and B2C marketplace took off from there – the model expanded into every industry you could possibly think of. 

Why is the online marketplace model gaining in popularity 

The Marketplace model offers great benefits to all the participants. Sellers benefit by getting an easy access to a large number of customers, all for a relatively small commission. For some retailers, third party marketplaces become a vital sales channel, providing the business with stable and reliable revenue streams. This is especially valuable for small and mid-size businesses that don’t have established solid sales channels. 

Buyers get a great variety of products/services/brands and vendors to choose from – all in one place. Moreover, if the marketplace provides a single ordering experience, the shopping process becomes nice and easy, saving time and effort. Some marketplaces provide additional information/reviews in a standardized format to help buyers make an informed purchase decision. 

Finally, the marketplace owner/operator gains all the benefits of a reseller without the need to hold inventory or organize fulfilment – if built right, the platform will take care of the delivery and fulfilment processes through integrated carriers. 

The Marketplace business model  

Looking deeper into what a marketplace is, you’ll realize it’s actually a flexible business model that can provide a lot of new opportunities. Companies can use online marketplaces to widen their reach, accommodate their existing multi-vendor offering or reinvent the entire market sector by creating something completely new. In that sense, there are a few trends and opportunities in multi-vendor commerce where marketplace business model becomes inevitable. Here are some of them: 

• Disintermediation 

Disintermediation happens when one of the supply chain participants tries to shorten the supply chain by effectively “cutting out a middleman”. To stay in the game, the middlemen can provide additional value by creating a marketplace that can accommodate all the members of the supply chain and connect the supply and demand sides together in an effective and convenient way.  

Interestingly Disintermediation is also an effect that most marketplaces aim to prevent – I.e. where the marketplace is facilitating contact between a seller and a buyer, these two parties can also go direct and disintermediate the marketplace from their engagement. Speak to Omnyfy to understand how you can prevent disintermediation on your marketplace.  

•  Managed Marketplaces for Services 

The Uber or Upwork model. By gathering multiple service providers together, the marketplace operator provides great value to the end customer by offering the variety of vendors, verified reviews, standardized search and simple payment and fulfilment processes. Such convenience helps build the demand side, which vendors or service providers greatly benefit from and this in turn drives more providers or sellers on the platform creating what is widely regarded as the most valuable aspect of a two-sided marketplace – the tribe effect. Where people with the same needs and interest congregate on the marketplace which has the largest number of providers that address this need. 

•  Enterprise Platform Business Models

Platform business model can help mid-size businesses and enterprises navigate their complex multi-unit structure by uniting all departments, products and services into a single marketplace. Such a model reduces unnecessary fragmentation, creates a single customer view, enable cross-selling, and provides the ability to provide centralized fulfilment, customer support reporting and analytics for customers across the organisation’s operation entities. 

•  Offline-2-Online Marketplaces 

This business model is perfect for physical marketplaces, such as shopping malls, groceries and department stores, hotel chains and airports. Multi-vendor marketplace enables physical businesses transition their physical business with all its complexity into online ecosystem. This model has been gaining popularity due to changing consumer behavior, accelerated by the need for truly contactless shopping experience during COVID-19 pandemic. Although being an acceleration factor, coronavirus is not the only reason why businesses should build an online marketplace. Most importantly, such a model is easily scalable – the business can go far beyond its current markets, not being limited by physical space, location or current list of physical vendors. 

•  Social Commerce 

Instagram , Facebook, YouTube, Tik Tok – most trending social media platforms went far beyond just content creation and distribution. Now, thousands of influencers and content creators who managed to build at least some following promote third-party brands and products. With the marketplace model, content creators and popular channels can easily transition from being a promoter to being a reseller. Marketplace fully integrated with the social media platform allows run purchase transactions engaging multiple brands and vendors, all within a few clicks. This makes a buyer’s journey seamless and fast – there is no need to visit each individual site anymore, the whole look can be purchased in a few clicks from your favorite influencer. 

To read more about each of these 5 marketplace business models check out our recent article or watch Fabian Rebeiro, founder and CEO of Omnyfy, give a speech on this topic. 

Types of marketplaces 

There are a few different dimensions we can use to classify marketplaces. Here are the most common ones: 

B2B Marketplace – business to business marketplace model. A common example here is any wholesale marketplace that connects wholesalers with retailers and becomes a digital extension to a traditional supply chain. Business products catalogues like Capterra is also an example of a B2B marketplace – connecting businesses with software providers the marketplace became an aggregator of software-related offerings. Another good example of B2B marketplace is a Professional Services Marketplace. Such a platform can be launched by almost any B2B company (e.g. Accounting Firms, Consulting Services, Digital Agencies, B2B Website Design Companies) allowing them to expand their business offering by adding third-party service providers to the platform.

B2C Marketplace – business to consumer marketplace model, the most popular example of which is Amazon. Such marketplace combines a variety of businesses/vendors connecting them directly with the customers.  

C2C Marketplace –  marketplace that connects individuals, This type of marketplace is also called Peer-to-Peer. Such marketplaces usually build connect people exchange experiences, sell products or services to each other. Couchserfing, Bla Bla Car, Gumtree, Facebook Marketplace are typical examples of C2C marketplaces. 

Marketplaces can also be divided into Products Marketplaces and Service Marketplaces, which is quite self-explanatory. 

Finally, marketplaces can be classified by industry. The list of industries that have at least one marketplace participant keeps growing day by day. Retail, Procurement, Professional Services, Food and Beverage, Fashion, Education, Real Estate, Homewares, Health and Beauty, Transportation – this is just a small fraction of industries where marketplace businesses operate. Virtually, you can build a marketplace for any industry or sector of the market. 

Marketplaces in Different Industries 

The best way to understand how online marketplaces cater to the needs of various industries is through examples. To start things off, the list below shows examples from six industries.  

Retail 

• Amazon 
• eBay 
• Lazada 
• AliBaba 
• Rakuten 

Professional Services 

• Upwork 
• Freelancer 
• Expert360 
• Toptal 

Transportation 

• Uber 
• Grab
• Bla Bla Car
• Lyft 

Books 

• Barnes & Noble 
• AbeBooks 

Electronics & Gaming 

• Best Buy 
• Newegg 
• G2A 

Fashion 

• Zalando 
• ASOS 
• StockX 

With the surge in online shopping in the past decade, the trend is moving from creating general marketplaces like eBay and Amazon to specific niche marketplaces that specialize in a single industry or even a single trade.  

Online Shopping on a Higher Level 

Hopefully, you’ve now learned what an online marketplace is. If you’re thinking of building one yourself, it’s important to define what type of marketplace you want to create. Once you do that, focus on choosing a business model that will suit your idea the best. Finally, take a look at the best-practice examples to learn from the success and failures of others. 

If you believe you’re ready to start your own marketplace, the next step is to choose the platform that will help you build your business. Using Omnyfy as a ready-made marketplace platform, you receive everything you need in a single package. Simply pick and choose which features you want to include in your marketplace and make sure to contact Omnyfy for a free consultation. 

Home Delivery Services is one of such solutions. Ensuring high food-safety standards and providing a temperature-controlled, 100% non-contact last-mile delivery service across Australia, HDS offers one of the safes ways to deliver food.

HDS is a perfect delivery partner for marketplaces that sell food products (e.g. South Melbourne Market Direct) that need temperature control and home food delivery marketplaces. Omnyfy has developed a module that enables the marketplace owners with a fully integrated HDS solution. This enables customers to purchase perishable or pre-packaged meals for delivery on specified dates and times and offers Vendors the ability to easily pick-pack and consign their deliveries without leaving the marketplace platform.

Marketplace Owners can also view and manage bookings, Cancel bookings and re-book existing deliveries if the customer requests a new time.

Benefits of the Module

• Refrigerated delivery solution for Australian vendors
• Cost-effective and timely deliveries direct to the customer’s doorstep
• 2 point scanning – full package traceability on HC In/Out
• HDS live tracking
• Additional delivery window options
• Temperature tracking
• Branded tracking and notifications

To ensure your sellers’ journey is seamless, Omnyfy has built in a Fuse module enabling vendors’ Shopify integration.

Connecting the existing vendor’s Shopify Store directly to the marketplace, Fuse enables in-bound sync for Product, Pricing, Inventory, Images, Categories and Product Attributes. Now there is no need to re-publish thousands of products – simply connect your Shopify store, provide the mapping details for Attributes and Categories and sync.

When a new order is placed, the sale and order fulfilment is sent back to the vendor’s Shopify store, allowing for a real-time inventory update. Once orders are packed and dispatched via Omnyfy, the fulfilment status is also updated in Shopify. This creates a smooth vendor experience improving your chances to secure more sellers to join your marketplace platform.

Benefits of the module

• Fast vendor onboarding process
• Seamless order management and fulfilment

• In-bound Sync for Product, Pricing, Inventory, Images, Categories and Product Attributes
• Out-bound Sync of orders

• Real-time inventory and prices update