Marketplace Academy
Everything you need to know about marketplaces, and the decisions you have to make before you build your own. One chapter per decision, in the order you have to make them. Written from the implementations and advisory work behind Mercur.
1. Foundations
- 1.1Which Marketplace Platform Model Should You Choose?
- 1.2What Is the Merchant of Record in a Marketplace?
- 1.3What Is Included in a Marketplace Platform, and What Do You Have to Build Yourself?
- 1.4Why Build a Marketplace, and Which Metrics Prove It Worked?
- 1.512 Marketplace Decisions You Have to Make Before Launch
2. Money
- 2.1How Do Marketplace Payments Work?
- 2.2When You Need a Payment License to Run a Marketplace?
- 2.3When to Take the Buyer's Money: Payment Capture and Authorization
- 2.4How Marketplace Split Payments Work and Who Pays the Fees?
- 2.5How Marketplace Seller Payouts Work: Cycles, Holds, and Reserves
- 2.6Marketplace Ledger: Why Balances Must Match the Transfer
- 2.7Marketplace Payment Reconciliation: How to Match Platform, Payment Provider, Bank, and Your Accounting
- 2.8Marketplace Refunds: Who Pays for Them and Out of What?
- 2.9Who Keeps the Marketplace Commission on a Refunded Order?
- 2.10Marketplace Chargebacks: Who Carries the Cost, and What if the Seller's Balance Is Empty?
- 2.11Should Your Marketplace Support Cash on Delivery?
- 2.12Marketplace Fraud Prevention: How to Stop Buyer Fraud, Seller Fraud, and Collusion
- 2.13Marketplace Seller Verification: KYC, Beneficial Owners, and Sanctions
- 2.14Marketplace Store Credit, Wallets, and Gift Cards
3. Tax and invoicing
- 3.1Marketplace VAT: Are You the Agent or the Principal?
- 3.2Online Marketplace VAT: When Does the Platform Become the Deemed Supplier?
- 3.3Marketplace Invoicing: Who Issues Which Invoice, and When?
- 3.4Marketplace E-Invoicing: What Changes When You Invoice for a Seller?
- 3.5Marketplace Credit Notes: Which Period Does a Correction Belong To?
- 3.6Cross-Border VAT on a Marketplace: Foreign Sellers, Imports, and Customs
- 3.7DAC7 Reporting: What a Marketplace Must Collect About Its Sellers
- 3.8Marketplace Revenue Recognition: Do You Book the Commission or the GMV?
4. Law and liability
- 4.1Marketplace Liability: Are You an Intermediary or a Seller?
- 4.2Marketplace Seller Agreement and Terms: Which Documents Do You Need?
- 4.3Marketplace Consumer Rights: Who Delivers Them?
- 4.4P2B Regulation on a Marketplace: Ranking, Terms Changes, and Suspension
- 4.5GPSR for Marketplaces: Product Safety, Traceability, and Recalls
- 4.6Omnibus Directive on a Marketplace: Price History and Honest Promotions
- 4.7Marketplace GDPR: Controller, Processor, or Joint Controller?
- 4.8Restricted and Prohibited Products on a Marketplace: The 3 Gates
- 4.9Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for Marketplaces: Who Pays the Environmental Fee?
- 4.10Marketplace Compliance: Adding a Required Attribute to a Million Offers
5. Catalog and product data
- 5.1Product Catalog Management on a Marketplace: One Shared Page or Seller Listings?
- 5.2Product Matching on a Marketplace: GTIN, EAN, and Where Identifiers Stop
- 5.3Who Owns Product Data on a Marketplace?
- 5.4When Two Marketplace Sellers Disagree About Product Data
- 5.5Product Taxonomy for a Marketplace: Categories, Attributes, and Variants
- 5.6Product Data Quality on a Marketplace: What You Can Enforce
- 5.7Duplicate Products on a Marketplace: Detecting and Merging Them Safely
- 5.8Catalog Rules on a Marketplace: Validation Before and After Publication
- 5.9Product Approval on a Marketplace: Manual, Automatic, or Both?
- 5.10Catalog Debt on a Marketplace: Where It Comes From and Who Pays
- 5.11Retiring Products on a Marketplace: When to Delist What Does Not Sell
- 5.12Multilingual eCommerce on a Marketplace: Translations, Search, and Missing Locales
6. Storefront and buyer experience
- 6.1Buy Box Algorithm: How a Marketplace Picks the Winning Offer
- 6.2Marketplace Seller Identity: How to Show the Buyer Who They Buy From
- 6.3Marketplace Multi-Vendor Shopping Cart: Grouping, Thresholds, and Shipments
- 6.4Marketplace Multi-Vendor Checkout: How to Handle Checkout When the Cart Holds Several Sellers
- 6.5Delivery Dates on a Marketplace: What You Can Promise
- 6.6Faceted Search on a Marketplace: Filtering Across Sellers' Offers
- 6.7Showing Prices on a Marketplace: How to Keep Offers Comparable
- 6.8Marketplace SEO: How to Maintain Pages That Carry Many Offers
7. Sellers
- 7.1Marketplace Seller Recruitment: Where to Find Your First Sellers
- 7.2Marketplace Seller Registration and Onboarding: From the Form to the First Sale
- 7.3Marketplace Seller Accounts: Entity, Store, Currency, and Users
- 7.4Marketplace Seller Quality Metrics: What to Measure and When to Suspend
- 7.5Seller Reinstatement on a Marketplace: Probation After a Suspension
- 7.6Seller Requests on a Marketplace: Brands, Categories, and Exceptions
- 7.7Marketplace Seller Panel: What a Seller Can Do Without You
- 7.8Marketplace Seller Support and Education: What to Teach, What to Answer
- 7.9Marketplace Disintermediation: Customers Leaking Off the Platform
- 7.10When a Marketplace Seller Changes Its Legal Form
- 7.11Marketplace Seller Offboarding: What Happens When a Seller Leaves
8. Orders and logistics
Coming soon- 8.1How You Split an Order Between Sellers
- 8.2Order Statuses and Who Is the Source of Truth for Them
- 8.3Sellers Accepting and Rejecting Orders
- 8.4When an Order Counts as Delivered, and Why That Is a Question About Money
- 8.5Closing an Order: Accounting Finality Against the Right to Return
- 8.6Fulfillment Models: the Seller, You, Dropship, Click and Collect
- 8.7Shipping Setup: Zones, Methods, Classes, Fees
- 8.8Carriers, Labels and Tracking
- 8.9Stock Levels and Selling What You Do Not Have
- 8.10Order Documents
- 8.11Bundles, Sets and Services Attached to a Product
9. After the sale
Coming soon- 9.1Return Policy: the Window, the Costs, the Reasons
- 9.2Complaints: Who Decides, How Fast and on Whose Money
- 9.3Who Talks to the Customer: You or the Seller
- 9.4Reviews and Ratings
- 9.5The Buyer Promise and Who Funds It
- 9.6Warranties, Repairs and Spare Parts
10. Pricing, commissions and promotions
Coming soon- 10.1How to Build a Commission Grid
- 10.2Thresholds, Caps and Negotiated Commissions
- 10.3How to Keep the Rates in the System Matching the Document Your Sellers Signed
- 10.4Who Sets the Price, and Whether You Police Parity
- 10.5Seller Promotions and Operator Campaigns
- 10.6Discount Codes: Who Funds Them and What Happens to the Commission
- 10.7A Loyalty Program Running on Seller Offers
- 10.8Retail Media: Build It, Buy It or Hand It to an Agency
11. Buyers
Coming soon- 11.1Who Your Buyer Is and How Their Path Changes
- 11.2How to Arm Your Own Sales Team with Seller Offers
- 11.3Integrating with Your Customer's Procurement Systems
- 11.4Payment Terms and Credit Risk
- 11.5Contract and Negotiated Prices
- 11.6Changing Buyer Habits: What You Cannot Force
- 11.7Marketing the Marketplace: Announce It Loudly or Quietly
12. Technology and integrations
Coming soon- 12.1What You Have to Integrate, and in What Order
- 12.2Who Is the Source of Truth for Which Object
- 12.3Events, Webhooks and Polling: How Systems Talk to Each Other
- 12.4Idempotency: Why One Order Becomes Three
- 12.5APIs for Sellers and Partners
- 12.6Environments and Moving Configuration Between Them
- 12.7Performance, Availability and Failure Modes
- 12.8Security and Data Isolation Between Sellers
- 12.9Identity: SSO, MFA and Roles
- 12.10Audit: What You Log, Who Sees It and for How Long
- 12.11Transactional Email: Domain, Deliverability, Address Masking
- 12.12Data and Analytics: Why Your BI Does Not Match the Panel
- 12.13Where AI Is Actually Worth Using
13. Organization and launch
Coming soon- 13.1Who Runs the Marketplace Inside Your Company
- 13.2How Many People You Need, and for What
- 13.3Which Departments Will Change and Which Will Push Back
- 13.4The Work Queue: Who Approves What, and Where It Waits
- 13.5Incentives and Credit for the Result: 1P Against 3P, Country Against Group
- 13.6The Daily, Weekly and Monthly Routine
- 13.7Month-end Close and Explaining the Numbers to Sellers
- 13.8People on the Market: Who You Will Hire and Who Will Poach Them
- 13.9The Business Case: What It Costs and When It Pays Back
- 13.10Phasing: a Pilot, or a Start with Real Volume
- 13.11How You Will Know a Phase Worked
- 13.12Migrating from an Existing Platform
- 13.13The Tests You Cannot Skip
- 13.14Launch Readiness: Who Can Block It
- 13.15The First Weeks After Launch
- 13.16Running Cost and Independence
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