You want to maximize your ecommerce enterprise's potential. What online seller doesn't?
The more you can identify strategic opportunities to get your products in front of people, the better chance you have at expanding your brand and bringing in new customers.
Enter the rise of the online marketplace.
Marketplaces allow you to partner with other third-party sellers in a mutually beneficial way. Instead of selling only your own products on your site, you bring in additional vendors with a similar (but not competitive) vertical. You become a sales channel for yourself and other stores like you while also drawing in additional customers from the sellers.
The marketplace business model has grown a ton in recent years. Several online businesses have converted their stores, and many have turned to Mirakl marketplace as their go-to platform for that process.
We wanted to highlight the essential advantages of Mirakl to give you an understanding of why you should consider it as your brand thinks about expansion. Below we'll provide a basic overview of the platform, the advantages of marketplaces, some stories of top brands who use it, and give you a way to maximize the efficiency of your marketplace and other sales channels.
What is the Mirakl Marketplace Platform?
Mirakl is a marketplace platform that helps enterprise brands across industries scale their ecommerce efforts. They offer a fully configurable solution to help online sellers build their marketplace exactly as they want.
The organization is known for its ability to help marketplaces launch quickly, grow at an impressive rate, and impeccably secure technology. Their website explains that "during 2020’s record Black Friday surge, not a single Mirakl customer experienced one second of marketplace latency or downtime."
Advantages to Running an Online Marketplace
Online marketplaces, regardless of what platform they run on, bring a variety of opportunities to online sellers including:
- Brand expansion
- Exposure to new customers
- Increased sales
- Additional revenue streams
- Greater product offerings
In addition to these benefits, there's also a reality setting in that having an online marketplace is becoming less a competitive advantage and more of standard practice for larger, enterprise retailers.
Companies can't keep up with the product offerings and inventory offered by leading marketplaces like Amazon or Walmart. Bringing in additional vendors allows you to add more items to sell without having to produce the products yourself.
Success Stories from Mirakl Powered Marketplaces
Mirakl launched in 2011 and has seen steady growth. In 2021, Forbes reported that the French startup was valued at $3.5 billion and set out to raise over $500 million in Series E funding. According to the report, Mirakl "has become a critical ally for retailers that are desperate to pry business away from Amazon."
Those retailers include the 50,000 plus Mirakl marketplace sellers that reached over $4 billion in sales in 2021. Over the years, big-named retail brands have taken notice of the young company, and many have made the decision to partner with them.
Here are some success stories from Mirakl-powered marketplaces.
Best Buy Canada
Most of us know Best Buy as a leading technology retailer, and they've had great success with this model. However, Best Buy Canada saw an opportunity to go beyond that, and they trusted Mirakl to help make an expansion possible.
The company saw the marketplace platform as an opportunity to do what you'd expect from bringing in third-party sellers. They wanted to broaden their product offering to serve their existing customers better and draw in new ones.
But something unexpected happened in the process that caused the brand to shift to its business model. Mirakl's VP of Customer Success says, "Best Buy is one of the largest online retailers in Canada for luggage and fitness equipment, and has a significant share of the market for baby goods and baby gear, among other categories."
Running their Mirakl marketplace has allowed them to have great success in areas where they were once losing money. The marketplace opened up the new, unexplored potential for their entire business.
Kroger
One of the most familiar brands came in 2020 when Kroger, the largest grocery retailer in the United States, signed with Mirakl in response to the massive shift towards online shopping. The press release explains that Kroger's digital sales "exploded in 2020."
The COVID-19 pandemic played a significant role in this growth, but even as stores have begun to open back up, the convenience and efficiency of online ordering have influenced customers to stick with online shopping for groceries and other products.
According to the press release, Kroger trusted Mirakl "with the flexibility and agility it needs to introduce new products and categories as customers’ needs change."
Macy's
Macy's is an iconic brand that has had to pivot multiple times as consumer preferences have changed over its nearly 200-year history. The latest adaptation includes expanding into the ecommerce marketplace world.
The Macy's Marketplace expects to launch in the latter half of 2022, though they announced their partnership with Mirakl in November 2021. Matt Baer, Macy's chief digital and customer officer, explained that the move is part of the brand's ongoing "digital evolution."
Their goal is for the marketplace to complement their already successful digital initiatives targeting $10 billion in sales by 2023. Baer says they expect "the new marketplace platform to produce incremental revenue on top of that target." He goes on to say Mirak "will enable [them] to expand [their] assortment at a low incremental cost while giving Macy’s customers easy access to even more product selection to meet their diverse needs.”
Additional Retailers Who Utilize the Mirakl Marketplace
Creating a detailed account of brands utilizing the marketplace platform would take up too much space for a single blog. Beyond the three organizations mentioned above, you could read stories of companies like:
- Urban outfitters
- Madewell
- Express
- Hudson's Bay
- Bed, Bath, and Beyond
The list could go on, but you probably get the picture at this point: brands of all kinds are using Mirakl marketplace to scale their business. And it seems to be working out pretty well.
Maximizing Efficiency In Your Marketplace (and Other Sales Channels)
Mirakl has helped thousands of brands build their dream enterprise marketplace. Their platform empowers companies to build, scale, and maintain their site with expert support and easy processes.
But they aren't focused on any additional sales channels.
The modern ecommerce consumer wants variety in how they buy your products, giving rise to the multichannel selling trend.
Sellers following this model have a lot to manage, even when they've built a successful marketplace with a platform like Mirakl. Monitoring each sales channel can become a frustrating part of running an online store.
StoreAutomator exists to make this process more efficient so you can focus on selling your products–on your marketplace and beyond it. Our platform gives you a one-stop-shop for all your data, inventory, and listing needs so you can:
- Manage channels
- Streamline operations
- Expand to new channels
- Increase sales
All that on one secure dashboard. No switching windows or toggling through tabs.
We also integrate with a growing number of marketplace platforms, including Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and Mirakl.
Those sites can help you sell. We can help you maximize your time, so you can focus on growing your brand. To learn more about StoreAutomator, set up a live demo with one of our experts. We'd love to see how we can help you optimize your online store, whether that’s with Mirakl or any other sales channel.