Launch a B2C Marketplace
Start selling service online through an enterprise-grade B2C marketplaceSecond is a turn-key marketplace solution to sell services online which includes vendor onboarding & dashboards, a world-class booking engine, a stunning frontend and the entire suite of tools to manage and operate your marketplace.
- Let 3rd party vendors sell services on your marketplace
- Calendar synchronization and geolocation of vendors & services
- Mix & match instant online bookings and quote requests
- Customer reviews and vendor scoring
- Automated payments management (inflows & outflows)
- Fully automated vendor identity verification + manual vetting
- Advanced commission management features
- A turnkey solution including backend, frontend and API
A complete feature-set to launch your B2C marketplace
Build new revenue streams
- Offer new and untapped services directly on your B2C marketplace
- Capture commissions on each transaction
- Activate recurring revenues by capturing commissions on subscriptions sold by your vendors
- Charge membership fees to vendors (or customers) and build revenue visibility
- Mix and match revenue models: commissions, lead-gen & subscriptions
Generate customer trust & satisfaction
- Clearly display quality of services on a vendor per vendor basis
- Empower customers to leave detailed reviews of services and providers
- Rank vendors in search and during matches based on customer satisfaction
- Encourage messaging to properly scope the provision of services
- Offer customer friendly cancellation and refund policies
- Build your B2C marketplace reputation through centralized reviews
Encourage positive competition
- Decide how to weight vendor rankings between price and quality metrics
- Promote good vendors and demote those that have poor performance
- Reward vendors for speedy response times and good customer communications
- Give newcomers a fighting chance by giving them a temporary boost in rankings
- Build a level playing field by communicating clearly what vendors need to achieve to rank high
Drive traffic to your B2C marketplace
- Rapidly become a major hub of services and providers through the B2C marketplace approach
- Tap into massive traffic volumes through high SEO optimization of crowdsourced content
- Run your content marketing operations directly on your marketplace
- Syndicate content and service offerings to other platforms through your REST API
- Integrate your marketplace into your existing frontend or launch it as a standalone platform•
Scale your service offering through the B2C marketplace model
- Massively onboard vendors directly through your B2C marketplace
- Automate identity checks directly through your platform
- Implement powerful vendor & service validation workflows
- Offer a multilingual and multicultural vendor onboarding experience
- Centrally manage vendors on your dedicated dashboard
Maximize supply and customer choice
- Make it quick & easy for vendors to list and update their services on your B2C marketplace
- Centralize all vendor services into a single catalogue
- Encourage vendors to suggest new services that you don’t yet offer
- Let customers request (and then book) services not yet in your catalogue
- Provide clarity regarding availability of services in time and location
Manage your community of vendors
- Setup vendor management teams roles & permissions directly from your dashboard
- Enjoy fully automated identity checks
- Customize and streamline the validation of new vendors and services
- Quickly see who’s performing and who’s not
- Communicate easily with vendors, especially to help them get the most out of the marketplace
Streamline B2C marketplace operations
- Setup operations teams and configure rules and permissions easily
- Supervise all marketplace activities effortlessly through dedicated dashboards
- Enjoy automated alerts for everyone and everything (expiring request, cancelled booking, reviews…)
- Centralize all activity information for easy supervision
- Quickly identify bottlenecks and any customer dissatisfactions
The future of B2C marketplace is services
Service e-commerce is a Greenfield opportunity up for grabs by large companies and startups alike. However, and contrarily to what happened in retail, established companies have deep structural advantages that protect them from disruptors. The big question is who can scale better?
Traditionally, service companies have scaled by increasing headcount and through mergers and acquisitions, since services are tightly coupled with the people rendering them.
The B2C marketplace model has shifted this paradigm as you can now onboard third party vendors at scale, safely, and throughout the world. However the initial ramp-up is much harder for newcomers as they don’t have any established service offerings, be they internal or through existing partnerships.
Established companies on the other hand are capable of launching a service e-commerce offer rapidly through their existing capabilities and through partnership networks. This gives them the necessary impetus and head start to start scaling through a B2C marketplace.
However we must not discount the capabilities of startups. These newcomers have the agility and pure-player focus that enables them to conquer a market if the traditional players do not act fast enough (see what Airbnb did to hospitality). Additionally, they are capable not just of disrupting distribution, but business models too – thereby potentially turning an entire industry on its head.
Whichever the case, Second enables companies to launch their B2C service marketplace effortlessly so they make focus on what matters: delivering value to customers.