Marketplace success doesn’t mean becoming the next Amazon; it’s about building a model that is fit for purpose, complementing and amplifying the core proposition. Today, over half of global eCommerce sales flow through multi-brand, third-party platforms. As digital-first players and global marketplaces expand, competition intensifies and customer expectations rise.

Digital transformation has become both essential and expensive, adding another layer of complexity for firms operating in an already strained environment. In response, many retailers are turning to online marketplaces to expand their reach, diversify revenue, and stay competitive.

There are two ways to participate in the marketplace ecosystem: selling as a third party through an existing platform or operating a marketplace of your own. At Metyis, we support clients across both – managing marketplace operations for the former and advising on strategy and transformation for the latter.

Graphic 1: eCommerce revenue worldwide 2017-2030 by segment

Marketplaces offer retailers an opportunity to:

• Drive sustainable and scalable growth by creating new, commission-based revenue streams without drastically increasing a company’s inventory position 

• Maintain relevance in the market by expanding range in a flexible and responsive way 

• Harness data and insight from an expanded product and customer base to inform core offering  

• Innovate through forward-facing technology that enables enhanced customer experiences and access to emerging channels

Success stories include B&Q’s clicks and bricks home improvement marketplace, which has grown to over 1 million products since launching in 2022 – now accounting for over 38% of B&Q's eCommerce sales. Similarly, Zalando has proved the model in the fashion industry across Europe, giving third-party sellers access to fulfilment and data insight tools within a seamless customer experience.

Yet most marketplace initiatives fail because they lack a clear vision and underestimate the transformation required. Process changes are often well understood, but successful delivery depends on expertise within the business, cross-functional collaboration, and cultural alignment.

We spoke with Peter Filcek, Director of Marketplace at Tesco, and Patrick Luetjens, VP of Customer Success at Mirakl, and we also drew on the experience of our own colleagues at Metyis: Senior Partner Anish Patel, Partner Raph Schroder, and Senior Director of Digital Commerce Francesca Padula, alongside insight from other industry specialists. This article brings those perspectives together to focus on how retailers can successfully launch, sustain, and scale a marketplace of their own to thrive in a rapidly evolving market.

Transformation delivery structure 

Delivering a marketplace is not simply about launching a platform; it’s about transforming how a business operates. The following Metyis framework outlines the key stages of transformation that enable retailers to launch – and scale – a marketplace with confidence.

Graphic 2: Metyis framework for transformation marketplace delivery 

North Star: a shared vision of what you are trying to achieve and why

A North Star gives everyone – from department leads to delivery teams – a single, measurable outcome to rally behind. It provides consistency and focus, acting as a guiding thread through shifting priorities and delivery pressures. As Francesca Padula, Senior Director at Metyis notes, “Defining the ambition and scope of the marketplace is critical to success. Retailers who win are those with a clear vision.”

For a marketplace transformation, the North Star serves to demonstrate the value of the model to the broader organisation, uniting the business around a shared purpose. Embedding this vision across the leadership team is essential to ensure the programme lands successfully.

Patrick Luetjens sees this as the number one success factor for marketplaces at the outset: “You have to think big, go all in from the beginning and give the marketplace full support, and this can only happen if you have C-level commitment from day one”. For example, B&Q’s early marketplace growth illustrates this clearly. A top-down commitment from the B&Q's CEO positioned the marketplace as a core growth engine for the business, ensuring alignment across departments and fostering integrated marketing and cross-channel collaboration.

A strong and compelling North Star that resonates with the wider organisation doesn’t just guide transformation – it anchors it. It becomes the foundation for every strategic choice that follows: shaping the value proposition, defining the operating model, and enabling the technology to bring it all to life.

Strategic choices: retail advantages that turn into a winning marketplace proposition

In an increasingly competitive market, leveraging a retailer’s unique strengths is essential. Trusted brands, category expertise, established logistics network, and a loyal customer base can provide a strong foundation for new channels of growth. The challenge lies in translating these strengths effectively into marketplace success.

Peter Filcek identified this as the key learning he would share with any new entrant: “Be deliberate about what your USPs are. Identify what from your master brand is critical and unique to your marketplace, and ensure it is embedded from day one”. Strong USPs guide consistent strategic choices – shaping assortment, customer proposition, and seller mix – and ultimately define how the marketplace will deliver on its North Star.

A critical area of complexity is setting up a merchandising strategy. Senior leaders must balance a paradoxical task: protecting the core business by growing customer consideration in areas of strength, while expanding their marketplace through category growth that may risk cannibalising first-party sales. Yet what feels like a risk is, in reality, an opportunity.

As the most successful marketplaces have demonstrated, a strong complementary range can enhance both marketplace and core retail performance. In an interview with Mirakl, Marc Vicente, Group Digital Director at Kingfisher (parent company of B&Q), explained this long-championed flywheel effect: “Having more choice and more products generates more organic traffic and a larger number of customers who visit our site. When they visit, they don’t just buy third-party products but also first-party products, so it benefits not just the marketplace but the overall core business”. This strategy has enabled B&Q to improve their customer offer in its strongest categories, leading to growth across both channels. Today, 38% of sales come from its marketplace, with half of those from new customers – and 10% of them go on to make a first-party purchase.

Stepping into this opportunity in the right way means being highly deliberate about how to expand. Opening the floor to everything on day one is rarely the answer. As Raph Schroder, Partner at Metyis, has observed, “You need a crystal clear omnichannel strategy. It is critical to understand what role to play in each category, and how it adds to the customer journey.” Without a cohesive merchandising strategy, retailers risk overwhelming customers, diluting brand clarity, and ultimately reducing retention.

A marketplace should be treated as a distinct but complementary channel, one that expands choice and relevance in ways that align with customer needs and the retailer’s core strengths. As Raph Schroder highlights, a pivotal input into this strategy is a “true understanding of profit by channel”. Marketplaces often incur hidden costs at launch, from increased performance marketing to higher customer service demand, which can distort forecasts if not anticipated. Comparing net profitability across channels helps shape a coherent growth strategy, supporting scale in a sustainable, profitable way.

By clearly defining what makes the brand unique and making deliberate and informed choices about how marketplace supports that ambition, retailers can move beyond fear of disruption and unlock a value proposition that drives both marketplace growth and broader brand performance.

Delivery: a value proposition for a marketplace designed end-to-end

A well-defined value proposition should comprehensively map the journey across customers, sellers, and colleagues. This documentation clarifies requirements, surfacing key decisions, to help prevent delays during delivery. Understanding knowledge gaps and misalignment at this stage in the journey is essential to not only encourage collaboration between teams but build a realistic roadmap for delivery.

One of the most unexpected challenges in this phase is seller management. While retailers can leverage expertise from existing first-party models, it is vital to recognise where the marketplace model diverges – and design a value proposition that reflects those operational realities. Sellers are the heart of any marketplace, and putting their needs on par with customers is essential.

To create a seamless seller experience, the onboarding journey should be light-touch, supported by policy-based governance, and reactive performance management once it is live. This approach stands in contrast to first-party retail, where extensive checks occur upfront, reflecting the financial and stockholding commitments that follow. Enabling both approaches to run in parallel requires a mindset shift, and trust in the marketplace model.

Patrick Luetjens, VP of Customer Success at Mirakl, has observed that many retailers face a common misconception when scaling: “Often operators confuse scale with less quality – however, there are ways to scale and in a curated way where you have specific quality mechanisms in place”. Establishing the seller and colleague journey that balances growth and governance is critical. Strong quality control mechanisms, supported by technology platforms, enable automatic suspension or intervention when sellers fail to meet agreed quality criteria (such as delivery on time or return rates), protecting both the customer experience and brand reputation.

Alignment on these quality criteria is the first step, establishing where intervention is needed to mitigate risk without compromising on the growth ambitions or customer experience.

With evolving regulations, such as PRAM in the UK, marketplaces must meet increasing compliance requirements. This makes having a light-touch approach wherever possible a key lever for growth, enabling sellers to move seamlessly through onboarding and reducing the workload required for your seller support teams. As Patrick Luetjens emphasises: “Identifying the set of quality criteria, and letting the marketplace team scale within those defined criteria, I think is very important.” 

Working through these decisions in the value proposition creates alignment across teams from the outset, transforming potential blockers into shared understanding and setting a clear path to launch. 

Delivery: an operating model for people, processes, and cross-functional alignment

The value proposition serves as the blueprint for the operating model. As structural design begins, it’s essential to anchor every decision in the marketplace’s unique strengths, identifying the teams, capabilities, and enablers required to deliver them effectively. The next step is translating this design into the broader organisation, ensuring the marketplace operates as a connected, scalable part of the business rather than a standalone venture.

Patrick Luetjens has observed that often “marketplaces work as a silo” in the early stages. While this approach helps create an autonomous space to innovate at pace, giving teams flexibility to learn and iterate with minimal disruption, Patrick reinforces that support from the wider business is essential.

As the marketplace matures, integration becomes critical. As Peter Filcek explains, “to truly leverage the scale of the existing business, the marketplace has to be integrated. Without that connection, it becomes almost impossible to deliver core functions like quality, marketing, or taxonomy, effectively.”

A successful transition from standalone to full integration requires foresight – building an operating model that can scale seamlessly as the business evolves.  

Designing an operating model with integration in mind from day one ensures the marketplace can grow as part of the enterprise, not in isolation. As Anish Patel, Senior Partner at Metyis notes, the continued evolution of a project only grows more important once that project goes live, “so embedding your transformation as part of business-as-usual is critical.”

Delivery: Technology as an enabler and an opportunity for innovation

Technology requirements should be developed in parallel and iteratively with the value proposition. This is particularly important when launching a marketplace within an established retail business with multiple legacy systems. Early collaboration not only builds a shared vision between teams, creating internal Product experts who can guide technology decisions, but also surfaces potential compromises to review. Raising these risks and unknowns early helps manage expectations and foster stronger cross-functional alignment.

Integrating new platforms provides an opportunity for retailers to embrace innovation and drive trade in new ways. Agentic commerce is transforming the retail landscape, with a 4,700% year-on-year increase in traffic to US retail sites from GenAI browsers. Platforms such as Perplexity and ChatGPT have already introduced purchasing functionality, demonstrating how quickly these channels are evolving. 

Patrick Luetjens shared how Mirakl is already leveraging AI for marketplace innovation, using it for category and range optimisation or integrating with agentic models through their solution, Mirakl Nexus: “Agentic Commerce will become an even bigger part of commerce in the next two to three years, but maybe even faster because we’ve never seen such a change being adapted this fast by users.”

Where retailers may see large language models (LLMs) access to site data as a concern, Patrick frames it as an opportunity: “It’s crucial because the younger generations are turning to those platforms as a point of entry for their purchase, so the goal is to be visible where your customers are” – while ensuring the experience remains seamless, including managing cancellations and returns.

By integrating with innovative platform technology, retailers can tap into new channels and spaces, creating a halo effect that benefits the wider business. Technology, when aligned with the value proposition and operating model, becomes not just an enabler, but a driver of scale, relevance, and customer engagement. 

Cross functional enablers: transformation through leadership and collaboration 

Successful marketplace transformation is built on cultural as much as operational change. The North Star must be reinforced through day-to-day collaboration and leadership advocacy that brings every team on the journey. Peter Filcek noted that the key lies in “bringing all the teams along with us," ensuring shared ownership and cross-functional delivery at every stage. 

Alignment across workstreams - including legal, tax, finance, marketing, and customer experience – is essential. Cascading a strong vision and North Star at the start helps set the foundation, fostering the environment over time required for teams to collaborate across boundaries. Francesca Padula, Senior Director at Metyis, outlines “a structured governance model, that balances wholesale and marketplace operations” is critical to enable this, bringing teams together to resolve competing priorities as the marketplace scales.

This alignment becomes especially important when marketplace challenges traditional retail instincts - shifting from control to enablement, from perfection to iteration, and from owning the product to curating the experience. These changes can feel uncomfortable for established teams, which is why visible support from senior leaders and industry expertise is essential to demonstrate that this new way of working is not a threat, but a growth opportunity.

Embedding robust governance and change management structures provides the scaffolding to make these cultural shifts real. Clear decision-making forums, empowered sponsorship, and consistent communication help build confidence, address resistance early, and maintain momentum as new processes and mindsets take hold. 

Creating an environment where the business is collectively excited about the marketplace helps turn the operating model from a plan on paper into a functioning, integrated part of the organisation. By intentionally managing both the operational and cultural dimensions of change, retailers can create the conditions for the marketplace to thrive as an integrated, scalable, and trusted part of the business.  

Building the foundations for marketplace success  

Building, launching, and scaling a marketplace is a strategic transformation that tests a retailer’s operational capabilities and cultural adaptability. Success depends on the expertise to navigate both dimensions effectively. Legacy systems, unfamiliar processes, and entrenched ways of working can restrict agility and limit the ability to meet competitive demands. It is essential to manage the technical and cultural complexities, without derailing the broader business strategy.

While each retailer’s marketplace journey will differ depending on their industry, scale, and customer base, successful transformations share common foundations. A strong organisational culture, clear governance, and effective change management are critical to embed marketplace thinking, align teams around new ways of working, and enable the marketplace to scale efficiently. These foundations allow retailers to unlock strategic potential and achieve long-term, sustainable growth.

The retail market is evolving, and the time for change is now. With extensive experience launching and operating marketplaces, Metyis offers the expertise to bridge the gap between business needs, technology requirements, and seller strategies. Our work with both retailers and third-party sellers provides a unique perspective that ensures alignment across the ecosystem. Whether you are stepping into the marketplace space or evolving existing platforms, Metyis will partner to accelerate your strategy execution and realise scalable, sustainable growth.