What is Marketplace Performance Management?
Marketplace performance management is knowing which metrics are key to success and which levers to pull in order to grow those metrics. Many of the traditional Ecommerce metrics do matter to a marketplace operator, but the seller community adds an entirely different dimension that requires quantification and continual adjustment. Interest in Marketplaces is high because marketplaces have shown explosive growth compared to traditional ecommerce models—according to the NYU Stern School of Business, Marketplaces are three times more profitable than traditional ecommerce models. But delivering on a profitable marketplace model requires diligence, careful measurement and timely course correction.
The Marketplace Model is Ascending
Marketplaces and other complex ecommerce models are increasingly in demand as companies work to capture new and repeat customers, expand offerings and channels and become destinations for buyers. As the facets like product, customer, market, geography, price, profitability and others expand, measuring results and targeting future investment becomes very hard to do. Balancing evaluation with expediency, many companies try to leverage spreadsheets and ‘checkbox’ formulas to give a picture of the performance of their selling environment. This is often a flawed approach as homogenizing data across multiple spreadsheets can be challenging—even if the data is consistent! Different data sources make it very hard to evaluate site performance in a timely fashion. And that means companies are often playing catchup as their marketplace business expands and market and buying behavior changes.
Data Needs to Yield Actionable Insights
Quantifying and visualizing this vital data has often meant buying a reporting tool and rolling your own dashboards, but this approach often results in reporting and analytics that only show part of the story of what is going on with your marketplace. In larger marketplaces, over 50 KPIs are typically measured to indicate the health of the business. As you might guess, those KPIs are not static and companies that roll their own are often playing catch up. It is hard to overstate the dynamic nature of a marketplace—new buyer communities, new product offerings and new suppliers all combine to make efficient measurement a challenge.
The answer is a holistic analytics approach to the complex analytics needs of marketplace environments and complex multichannel ecommerce. McFadyen Digital has been supporting sophisticated customers in the ecommerce environment for over a quarter century, and has been a specialist in marketplaces for over 10 years. This history is the foundation for building an analytics solution that is specifically designed to address the needs of the marketplace and multichannel business selling through ecommerce channels as well as managing and measuring drop shipping.
The Marketplace Performance Management Dashboard
To help marketplace operators create programatic actionable intelligence, McFadyen Digital has created the Marketplace Performance Management (MPM) Dashboard, a purpose-built solution that allows businesses to respond quickly to some of the most compelling questions in complex ecommerce. With over 100 commerce focused KPIs, you can look at homogenized data that will help gain a deeper understanding of what has happened, and what the implications are for the future.
High level business questions examples:
• Customer Digital Relationships: Where do I investment, and where do I pull back?
• How do I measure complex customer relationships?
• Are my marketplace and drop ship partners delivering the customer satisfaction that supports my brand?
• Based on current sales and profitability results, what new products and categories should I consider and where do I expand or reduce focus?
• What is the trend in customer loyalty? Are there products or categories that impact customer loyalty?
• Will expanding my marketplace business also expand margins, increase revenue or grow customer base?
• Given the fiercely competitive landscape, how do I best capitalize on the expanding digital universe?
The MPM Dashboard can deliver insights into questions like these and many more because it is a true SAAS platform that leverages the deep and broad experience of the McFayden Digital ecosystem. Our customers get a much wider and deeper KPI starting point than any other approach. At the same time, McFadyen Digital can customize the content, dashboards and reports to meet the specific needs of each customer. Our customers get the best of all worlds—a true SAAS platform that can be fully customized to meet all of your needs.
Leveraging these dashboards, customers can see what markets are the most profitable, which are the fastest growing. Customers can drill into geographic differences, and in the next moment pivot to look at what product line had the biggest rate of return.
MPM starts with a robust cloud delivered SAAS environment, specifically built to be a close fit to the KPIs most companies are looking for. Data is consumed into this model via a sophisticated connector technology that allows near term updating of the changing market. Customers can be up and live in no time. And for those customers that have unique dashboard and reporting needs, the MPM model is designed to consume disparate data sources and allow customers great flexibility in presentation. Dashboards and reports can be customized without any concern of upgradeability.
The MPM offering is that one place businesses can turn to where a single version of the truth exists. When a business is analyzing performance it is critical that relevant KPIs, in context with the rest of the data facets be considered –yielding a full picture from whichever angle is needed. MPM give businesses a tool that allows them to drill into the data from any dimension, making the insights relevant and timely.
With robust technology and easy customization, customers will get the exact information they need at exactly the time they need it. MPM performance delivers on marketplace profitability.
To learn more about the Marketplace Performance Management Dashboard, please schedule a demo or write us at info@mcfadyen.com. You may also be interested in our recent ebook on the topic, Creating Actionable Insights with Marketplace Performance Management.
