It's stunning how dramatically the story around marketplaces has advanced in a single decade. In our early days, working from a cramped office in Paris, we were pitching something bold and new. When we approached company executives with our message about the coming marketplace revolution, a good number scurried in the other direction. While many of them shared our vision of a vibrant commercial world, one not dominated by a handful of digital giants, they didn't yet feel the urgency to transform their businesses. They weren't in the market for a revolution, or ready for one – at least not enough to entrust a crucial piece of their strategy to us.

The growth of dominant pure‐play marketplaces, we insisted, could be parried only by a new generation of marketplaces mobilized by top enterprises. When customers grow accustomed to near limitless selection, efficient payment and prompt service, there's no going back. We believed this fervently, and we still do.

In those early days, however, online marketplaces were a hard sell. The executives we talked to often conceded that our pitch made sense. It was true that customers, whether business or consumer, wanted greater efficiency and transparency, and more choice. But the solution we were selling was disruptive. And if you have a business that's chugging along and even earning profits, why place a big bet on a business model that's bound to shake everything up?

What we needed as a startup company, it was clear, were flagship customers. Once the big brands everyone knew embraced online marketplaces, everyone else would see that the revolution was afoot. We needed them on board, and it drove us to the point of obsession. The fate of our startup, it seemed, hinged on signing one of them.

In France, we had our sights set on the legendary fashion and decor retailer, La Redoute. The company had thrived for more than 180 years, constantly evolving. Its leaders kept learning and adjusting. They figured out how to deliver fashion and home furnishings to generations of satisfied and loyal consumers, even as the available products and technologies shifted radically. The franchise first rose to prominence in an economy still powered by horses. Yet its strategists did what it took at each transition – from trains and telegraphs to globalization and the internet – for their venture to advance. An online marketplace, we argued, represented La Redoute's next great transition.

La Redoute's team listened to our pitch and made a move toward an online marketplace, attempting to build one in‐house. With that, our great white whale seemed to swim away.

Four years later, struggling for a foothold in North America, we chased after another retailing giant: Macy's. Adrien recalls trailing Macy's, Inc., CEO Jeff Gennette at conferences, and finding ways to sit near him, one time even showing him a Forbes article on why Macy's needed a marketplace. We were pitching with passion.

But even as recently as the mid‐2010s, it wasn't entirely clear, at least from the outside, that the marketplace revolution was inevitable or necessary. Macy's, like many other companies, decided to wait a bit, evaluating market trends before placing its bet.

In the years since then, any doubts about the dominance of the marketplace economy have been swept away. As marketplaces proliferated, capturing a greater share of industry profits, they increasingly defined the new status quo, both for consumers and industry. Shoppers assumed more than ever that they could hunt down a sofa or a laptop on whatever device they chose and have it whisked to their home or office, preferably the next day, if not sooner. B2B customers not only wanted but expected to be able to shop for replacement parts, whether for helicopters or forklifts, on a single site, and to receive them within hours.

As these trends became the norm, market leaders, including the marquee brands we had courted so ardently, returned to us to help them address their most urgent issues. La Redoute had already mounted a marketplace effort, but came to us in 2021 after recognizing that they needed greater scale to unlock the full potential of the marketplace model. And that same year, Macy's signed up for our platform. This confirmed our vision and sent a clear signal throughout the industry that the marketplace revolution was here to stay.

What led these companies, and hundreds of others, to their “make‐or‐break” moment on marketplaces? We see five reasons for this.

1. Popularity. Consumers prefer marketplaces. Every time we survey them, they tell us the same thing. They like the convenience, the assortment, and the prices, and they like buying on marketplaces. They're not the crazy dangerous world that it may have been 15 or 20 years ago. Marketplaces are what they hope for and expect.
2. Profits. Yes, when you launch your marketplace, you need to think about how you approach the P&L, and the new way of calculating margins. But marketplaces are more profitable. Why? No misplaced inventory. No warehouses. No need to take back orders. No risks on new categories with changing customers. Lots of flexibility to grow your business faster.
3. Customer acquisition. Marketplaces dramatically increase traffic on eCommerce sites. This is proven. We have dozens of clients who can attest that marketplaces drive much more traffic from search engines, leading to better conversion rates and more products in the customers' baskets. This is especially important as the cost of reaching customers through paid channels like search engine marketing and social media has become, for many, unaffordable.
4. More sellers. Every day, more sellers are piling into marketplaces. As we write this, they total more than 20 million. Many are small, but a good number are huge. Not long ago, the luxury group Kering, which owns Gucci, Balenciaga, and Yves Saint‐Laurent, announced that its digital marketing strategy would revolve around e‐concessions, a fancy word for marketplaces. Sellers are flocking to marketplaces because that's where the customers are.
5. Omnichannel. It's no longer about marketplace versus eCommerce versus brick‐and‐mortar. It's marketplace plus all of these things. It's about adding the power of the marketplace to the power of your business. That combination reaches customers with great efficiency where they choose to be, whether online or in the physical world. What's more, having the marketplace provides valuable back‐up for omnichannel businesses. If supply chain issues arise, whether from extreme climate events or conflicts, sellers on the marketplace can step in. In tough times, you've got a team.

Even if we had stood to the side or chosen another line of business, the marketplace economy would still be dominating. However, it would likely be the domain of just a few digital giants. That is the nature of the networked economy. When something works better, it tends to grow exponentially, whether it's smartphones or ride shares. It gives birth to behemoths.

And until the democratization of online marketplaces, these first marketplace titans were poised not only to dominate the market, but to have it to themselves. For us, this evokes a 1984‐style dystopia, in which a handful of mega‐companies extend networks to surveil, predict, and optimize our movements, choices, and spending decisions.

We certainly don't want to depict the journey of our for‐profit company as a selfless mission. But if we look at the digital giants as 21st‐century Goliaths, companies in our field are equipping legions of Davids. Take Maisons du Monde, which was founded in 1996 in Brest, France, as a regional furniture and home decor company. Some 20 years later, now with hundreds of stores and a thriving eCommerce business, Maisons du Monde saw the growth opportunity in offering customers the broadest possible selection, everything from Louis XVI sofas to beechwood cribs. The company raced to more than 1,500 curated brands and 210,000 new products within the first year of launching its marketplace. Sales quickly accounted for 40% of the company's online revenue in France. It enabled Maisons du Monde to compete with the giants. The company proceeded to open marketplaces in Spain and Italy.

Similar stories are sprouting around the globe. New marketplaces foment diversity, flexibility, greater choice for consumers and businesses. They create opportunities for sellers big and small, and they add jobs.

As we write this, the earliest online marketplaces are barely two decades old. The expanding ecosystems, both in consumer and B2B commerce, are learning engines. Every day, marketplace managers are poring over data, learning about what works and what doesn't. This is the course of their never‐ending optimization: They learn, they enhance their platforms, they evolve their offerings.

The upshot? With its powerful combination of reach, selection, and data‐driven optimization, the marketplace model is poised to continue its race ahead. It can continue to build on the powerful advantages that it enjoys over traditional retail and eCommerce.

Plenty of science fiction visions, whether in movies or books, feature dystopian versions of this future. Data‐crunching machines zero in on customers, first feeding their needs and desires, and then fulfilling them. In these scenarios, privacy is in tatters, and machines are fully in control.

Our vision of what's ahead is much brighter. For starters, control is increasingly in the hands of the customers. The digital machinery is engineered to satisfy them. Every year there are more customers, and they want everything. They want to find it quickly, order it with a keystroke or two or a voice command, and to receive it as close to immediately as possible. They demand optimum quality, and all at the right price. These customers are not the tools of the marketplaces. It's the marketplaces that work for them.

The second common misconception is that the future of commerce is purely digital. This is not true. In B2B, marketplaces are frequently used to connect buyers with products sitting in warehouses near them. In retail, stores are central to the omnichannel future. When time is money, proximity matters.

Look at it through the buyer's eyes. If a pizza restaurateur has her Italian‐made pizza oven go on the blink right before a holiday weekend, she needs a replacement part within hours. The most likely help is going to come from a wholesale marketplace featuring loads of sellers, some of them – hopefully – nearby.

The physical space also delivers strong value in retail. Storefronts are great for all kinds of reasons, from logistics to customer care. But they also appeal to people's desires to go places, see other people, touch things, and try on. The two sides of commerce, digital and physical, will work ever more closely as one.

As this happens, online marketplaces will increasingly assume their role as the nerve center of commerce. They'll fuel the networked intelligence that can zero in on whatever the customer might want or need. And they combine with the logistical network to deliver it at the right time, place, and price.

This vision, of course, is true not only for omnichannel shoppers, but also for vast industrial supply chains. With a combination of minute‐by‐minute data flows and a plethora of sellers, marketplaces will get supplies where they're needed, minimizing waste, both in time and space.

This evolution is still in its early days. Online marketplaces are primed to grow explosively in the coming years. Feeding on ever deeper streams of their own data, each player in the marketplace economy will be figuring out hour by hour, geography by geography, and, ultimately, shopper by shopper what drives engagement, delight, and revenue. And it's not just individual companies that optimize, but the entire ecosystem. People see what others are trying. Word spreads. The entire ecosystem continues to grow smarter and more responsive.

The experiments, naturally, will extend into the very organization and deployment of assets, from movies to real estate. Marketplace technology conceivably could connect philanthropies, educators, even railroads. The possibilities are endless. When we founded our company, we never suggested using an online marketplace to turn a media giant into a retailer, but Evan Moore and his team at NBCUniversal saw the opportunity and ran with it.

The marketplace laboratories will be generating legions of new concepts. Some will change the way we buy things, or spend our time, even the way we think about commerce. The change will be profound. It already is.

So, as we draw this book to a close, let's take a moment to sketch out the next steps for you.

The most important is to think deeply about your company, and to figure out where it fits within the evolving marketplace economy. The question, as we hope we've made clear, is not whether marketplaces are in your future. They are. The only issues for most players in commerce is how to adapt to them and benefit from them. Where do you fit? Will you be running a marketplace? Are you better suited to be a seller?

The answer might be one or the other, or both. If it is neither, we suggest that you open up time with your brain trust – whether the management team, the board, or both – to delve into the issue deeply. The number of retail companies or industrial supply chains that can thrive outside of marketplaces altogether is diminishingly small, and shrinking by the day. After all, this is where the growth is occurring. It's already a multi‐trillion‐dollar ecosystem, and it's expanding. As we've said, the number of sellers on marketplaces has exploded and shows no signs of slowing down. From startups to global brands, practically everyone needs a share of the growing traffic flowing to marketplaces. That is how the whole economy is quickly evolving.

Hold‐outs are increasingly rare. Consider the case of Kering, the holding company for luxury brands such as Gucci, Yves Saint‐Laurent, and Balenciaga, among many others. If any players can thrive with stand‐alone eCommerce sites, these gilded brands would seem to be ideally positioned. And yet… the company announced that it wants to operate in the future with marketplaces. Kering decided it needed the reach of other sales channels, but also the control that comes with managing the offerings.

You now have the roadmap. We've detailed the steps, from making the initial decision, to the work involved in designing, and later, operating the new marketplace.

Yes, it's a ton of work. Challenges abound, as they do in any era of rapid change. But it's also an exciting time. And that's the way to look at it. You have a chance to remake your company and launch what amounts to a startup. It's brimming with potential and provides a ticket to the future. In this building process, you're creating an engine, an ever smarter and more efficient marketplace that grows and connects in ways and into areas you might not yet imagine.

It's a journey. And unlike the pioneers of online marketplaces, early in the century, you don't face this journey alone. There's an immense new industry now. It includes technologists, consultants, sellers, and most importantly, customers to support a marketplace and help it find a place for itself in the growing ecosystem.

Bon voyage!