Marketplace Performance Management Best Practices: Getting the Most from Multi-Vendor Commerce
A look at Marketplace Performance Management though the best-selling Marketplace Best Practices book.
With the Amazon-best-selling book, Marketplace Best Practices, McFadyen has set the standard for Marketplace Best Practices. We bring together all the insights customers need to manage and optimize the complex marketplace and commerce environment. McFadyen has a long history of establishing the benchmark for these more involved ecommerce environments.
While some of the best practices defined are in the setup and structuring of the business, there are many operational aspects that cannot be achieved without effective measurement. Marketplace Performance Management (MPM) delivers the critical insights you need to focus your efforts to achieve those best practices. In a nutshell, MPM is the tool set that enables customers to embrace the best practices by providing deep measurement of the often hard to read metrics that determine the difference between a strategic business asset and a project that fails to deliver on its promise.
It is worthwhile to dig into how MPM can make your rollout and operation easier in course of the myriad of decisions you will have to make to make your marketplace effective. In a traditional ecommerce model, reporting and analytics typically come from the ecommerce system itself or from spreadsheet insights that combine ecommerce with ERP and or CRM data. But what happens when at least part of the success of your marketplace happens outside the four walls of your enterprise? This is where MPM gives the forward insight needed to see how you are performing against all members of the party—you as the operator, the buyers and the sellers.
Performance Insights for Multi-Vendor Commerce
In chapters 2 & 3 of the Marketplace Best Practices reference book, Tom McFadyen discusses the ‘Maturity Model’ for marketplaces. The idea here is that you can get good insight into where you are in your own progression. The presumption for this model is that putting yourself on the maturity spectrum will include the needed data insights to appropriate place yourself on the model. Analytic insights become increasingly critical to the business as you move up the model into the more sophisticated and more lucrative business scenarios. This is true across all levels of the Maturity Model but becomes critical as you roll out more advanced ecommerce business models.
Chapter 4 references business intelligence and analytics as key parts of your marketplace launch. Launching Complex Ecommerce sites like Marketplaces, Dropship and cross organization selling dictate an analytics capability that can make sense of the complexity.
Section II in chapters 9-14 case studies—all these highly successful businesses have analytics driving their success in common. The most successful (e.g. Amazon) are leveraging business intelligence to make timely decisions on trends before others see them. Analytics is the driver for their success. This performance management is also a key ingredient of the innovation flywheel.
Section III, beginning with Chapter 21 on Key Performance Indicators, you will find the foundation for the MPM approach. This whole chapter is about the metrics needed to successfully deploy & operate your Marketplace. From simpler profitability metrics to complex customer velocity, conversion and NPS results, a single place to homogenize site results is best practice. How can you deliver fantastic customer service if you can’t measure how customers value your site? The expertise McFadyen delivers in the area of KPIs and performance management lead directly to the genesis of the MPM offering.
There are other chapters in section III that reference the ongoing need for analytics and business insights. All the way from the obvious in chapter 24 on conversion rate optimization, to the more subtle like chapter 22 on marketing or chapter 25 on measuring customer service results, MPM offers a single place to measure your success and plan our marketplace growth.
In chapter 30– Marketplace Ongoing Operations there are several measurements called out to check the daily and longer-term success of your roadmap. Being able to look at your GMV and AOV growth rates specific to a seller, a group of sellers, a geography, and by seller within a product category will greatly improve your ability to operationalize the site. MPM is the only tool that can effectively give these insights across any dimension you care to look at.
The last chapter in the book is #31—Best Practices for Sellers. This area is often under emphasized since it does not easily fit into typical sales flows. But ensuring sellers are successful and measuring that success is critical to building your community of sellers—and attracting new sellers in the same and other categories. MPM effectively tells you where your sellers are strong, and where they are weak. It provides the tools you need to focus on your seller community with the most effective result.
MPM is the standard for measuring success in complex, multiparty ecommerce settings like dropship, and marketplace. Companies need tools like these to effectively understand if the direction they are moving in is the right one.
Contact McFadyen today at info@mcfadyen.com to get the insights you need for your business.
