In the campaign to remain relevant and avoid disintermediation, marketplaces feel the pressure to provide frictionless commerce. Achieving this goal, however, is challenging given the current set of monetization tools they are working with.
Frictionless commerce—the ability to conduct seamless, digitally-enabled transactions free of barriers and fraud between businesses and consumers—is a goal of every large e-commerce marketplace provider. Marketplace participants who were previously satisfied with the ability to perform one-time transactions increasingly seek more complex selling capabilities including support for subscriptions to physical and digital offers, usage, and sales of hybrid offerings that combine physical and digital goods and services. To achieve this nirvana-like objective, marketplaces will be forced to modernize their monetization capabilities through investment in billing and payments capabilities and injection of greater speed and agility across the entire spectrum of monetization capabilities. We expect marketplaces to begin to adapt key concepts of the Agile Monetization Platform (AMP) to serve the needs of large scale e-commerce environments.
This research note provides an assessment of agile monetization capabilities and deficiencies in leading marketplaces including Alibaba, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Shopify, and Uber. The focus is on the Seller’s experience across a range of B2X contexts.
