In addition to our recent recognition as a Leader in The Forrester New Wave™: Marketplace Development Platforms, Q4 2021, Marketplacer has also been highlighted in McFadyen Digital’s Marketplace Suite Spot Report, an evaluation and comparison of online marketplace platforms with offerings beyond traditional first-party ecommerce solutions.
“The Marketplace Suite Spot Report evaluates the top technologies that businesses can use to create, launch, and grow an online marketplace. Some of these solutions require a stand-alone ecommerce platform to serve up the front end buying experience, some offer this functionality as part of an integrated full-stack suite, and some include varying degrees of native order management capabilities. This report focuses on the aspects pertaining to enabling – at minimum – the ability to list, sell, and handle tax and payments for a two-sided marketplace (buyer and seller).”
McFadyen Digital is the leading agency for ecommerce marketplace strategy and implementation. McFadyen Digital has been evaluating marketplace vendors for clients for more than half a decade. The first Marketplace Suite Spot report was published in 2020 and included six vendors. Substantial additional research was performed for this 2021 edition.
Features that Marketplacer was praised for include:
- A broad and deep feature set for consumer-focused marketplaces
- An open modern technology stack of GraphQL APIs for operator extensibility and REST APIs for seller integrations, along with Webhooks to support event-driven processing is publicly available. Well-written and detailed English documentation is provided on the platform including APIs and even database schemas (rare for SaaS vendors).
- The M-Connect wizard enables quick initial integrations with sellers using SaaS ecommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, etc. within 15 minutes. See VAN section in this report. Salesforce.com invested in Marketplacer and a connector is available in the Salesforce AppExchange. While Marketplacer is offered primarily as a marketplace-only platform intended to be integrated with an ecommerce platform, they do offer limited headless commerce capabilities for those prioritizing time-to-market over all else. The headless offering includes catalog, cart, checkout and other ecommerce capabilities as APIs (no front-end).
Our approach with sellers was also singled out as a way of “quickly connecting sellers that use common cloud ecommerce platforms. M-Connect provides a wizard that enables a 15-minute connection to sellers running Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento and other cloud ecommerce engines. Data mapping is still required to match the operator taxonomy and attribute harmonization, but M-Connect at least solves the catalog, inventory, pricing, and order integration challenge.”
Download the full report here.
