More and more consumers are using marketplaces as the jumping off point for their ecommerce journeys, essentially using them as retail search engines. This pushes up traffic and makes these sites among the most powerful in ecommerce, the recently published ChannelX Europe’s Marketplaces 2024 report highlights.
However, this success also produces challenges. The continued growth has seen the marketplace sector become more crowded, leading to increasingly fierce competition. This has seen not only a raft of new marketplaces launching across the region – servicing everything from the general market through to those that service highly specific verticals – but also many retailers launching their own marketplaces.
Competition
There are some 400 D2C marketplaces operating across Europe, with a further 250-plus B2B platforms also in play. That’s a lot of online real estate, even taking into account the levels of traffic seen within the sector.
Furthermore, the vast majority of these retailers aren’t Europe-based. Of the Top1000 retailers in Europe, 49% have their HQs in the region. However, 74% of the traffic to that same Top1000 goes to retailers – including marketplaces – that are non-European companies.
Naturally, this includes Amazon and eBay, which dominate the marketplace landscape in the region and globally. But it also points to the increasing power and reach of the likes of Shein, AliBaba and Temu, which have commanded a significant proportion of sales in the region in a short time.
This has added to the overall competition in the market and puts more pressure on both existing players and retailers (with or without their own marketplaces). That said, these large players also add to the overall use of marketplaces among consumers across Europe.
This is an extract from one feature in the recently published ChannelX Europe’s Marketplaces 2024 report.
Outlining the overall performance of the sector across Europe, the report assesses how marketplace trading as a whole has changed since 2023, focussing on both the sectors using marketplaces and the regions where marketplace use has changed.
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