Will you create a marketplace? Start with the API

By Kleber Bacili is CEO of Sensedia

 
Convenience - all in one place, best prices and confidence. Marketplaces are winning over online consumers and are increasingly showing themselves as a market strategy for large e-businesses. For this model to work, markeplaces have to attract many shopkeepers and their thousands of products. Shopkeepers, on the other hand, need to be able to connect to marketplaces in an uncomplicated way. The magic for this to happen are the APIs, a kind of digital glue that integrates tenant systems with the marketplace platform. The integration promoted by the API is what accelerates the attraction of new tenants, responsible for a good part of what is sold in a marketplace.
 
The wave of marketplaces started with Amazon and the bold vision of Jeff Bezos, its creator. In Brazil, CNova, which controls the online operations of Extra, Ponto Frio and Casas Bahia, was the pioneer, but today it has the company of B2W and Walmart, in addition to Mercado Livre, which is a little different because it focuses on sales announcements and not on unique products. These companies saw in this business model a new strategy for better profitability of their core assets (traffic and reputation): more sales, more product assortment, less logistical complexity and greater customer satisfaction.
 
In the case of Cnova, the API is responsible for facilitating the access of tenants to the company's system and making its products available for sale. E-commerce platforms and ERPs connect to the API, which allows automation of sales channel management in a single environment and does not require manual updates. At Amazon, 40% of the products sold in the last year were from retailers in its virtual mall, accumulating two billion products sold. Imagine the slice that Amazon captures from these transactions!
 
Marketplaces have become an option for e-commerce and are increasingly within the major brands in different sectors such as tourism, decoration, automobiles, books, industries and software, in addition to the spaces that are already marketplaces by definition (as in the case of Free market). The interface intermediated by the interface is not restricted to tenants and stock and delivery data, but extends to product descriptions, brand images and digital payment methods.
 
Of course, in order to function, virtual malls need an efficient infrastructure. The API needs to have adequate documentation so that the developer can integrate with the marketplace platform without any unforeseen circumstances. This reduces onboarding - the time it takes for stores to integrate into the marketplace. A portal for developers with all the necessary information, tips, testing environment and space to communicate with support makes this process much faster and simpler.
 
For the developer who wants to integrate and is starting to work with the API, bringing examples of how to use it, documentation according to industry standards and all the information he needs, organized and easily accessible, will make your experience be much more peaceful. In the process, API management and exposure technologies can cause onboarding to drop from months to weeks.
 
After the integration, the shopkeeper now has a platform that automates the entire sales process through the marketplace, from product registration, price updates, inventory and order updates. And it gains a new sales channel, ready to offer greater visibility to the brand and an exponentially larger number of possible buyers. At Cnova alone, there are around 70 million visitors / month, considering the three virtual stores controlled by the chain.
 
The API is the key for information to move automatically between storeowners and their virtual mall. Safety, reduction of rework and errors, speed and ease of this connection are incentives for more partners to be part of its marketplace, bringing greater diversity of products, increased revenue and opportunity to sell new services. That is why to join this wave and create a marketplace, thinking about the API that will make the integration with its partners must be one of the initial steps to promote the business.