Independent alternatives to popular third-party marketplaces like Amazon are emerging, and some distributors have found meaningful success selling through them. This has many wondering if they should build their own marketplaces.

What makes great independent marketplaces work? And could you achieve similar results if you built a marketplace of your own?

As defined so well on Wikipedia, a marketplace is an ecommerce site where products or services are provided by third parties and transactions are processed by marketplace operators. Instead of a classic retailor/distributor model, where you have one seller managing the inventory and the fulfillment, you instead have many sellers transacting in one location. Outside of Amazon, a few popular marketplaces include:

• Craigslist
• Etsy
• Airbnb
• Uber
• Upwork
• eBay

A few examples of emerging successful B2B marketplaces include:

• Digi-Key has built an electronic components industry marketplace on Mirakl software. They’ve become a destination for people looking for electronics, even just as an informational resource. 
• Culitrade is a marketplace for the food equipment buying group SEFA (Supply and Equipment Foodservice Alliance). They offer a broad selection of products and services that couldn’t be offered by an individual company. 
• Zoro, an online division of Grainger, and its Zoro supplier partner program for industrial supplies is up-and-coming, touting a collaborative relationship “to reach new customers and increase sales.”

Not every distributor can build its own marketplace – nor should they. This would take us back to everyone running their own ecommerce websites and wouldn’t make much of a difference. Here are a few options for entering into or building a marketplace with others in the industry:

• Multiple distributors can collaborate to build a marketplace. 
• Marketplaces require collaboration. 
• Marketplaces with the widest assortment may be the best candidates. 
• Buying groups are perfect for marketplaces.