When you look down at your phone, do you see a little 5G symbol? Do you know what that means or what kind of service 5G is providing? To take it a step further, if you’re a business owner, are you connected to 5G? Is it helping your company move faster and operate more efficiently? 

Whatever the answers to those questions are, the problem remains that many of us, consumers and business owners alike, are still mostly in the dark about what 5G truly is, how it’s different, and why we’re actually only just scratching the surface of what 5G is capable of.

On this roundtable episode of Up Next in Commerce, I dove deep into the mysteries of 5G with Geoff Coleman, Chief Product Officer at Gotransverse, Natasha Sachdeva VP Solutions Engineering at Mirakl, and Olivier Smith, Technology Lead from the Office of the CTO at Matrixx. We discussed what 5G is and is not, how it’s currently being utilized, and what kind of possibilities will be opened up when 5G is made available in a more widespread manner. But to get there, it’s going to take a lot of partnership with telecom companies, enterprise software businesses, and cloud, platform and marketplace providers, which is what brought my three guests together. It was a really interesting discussion, and I hope you enjoy it!

Main Takeaways:

• Making It Sticky: What makes something like a marketplace sticky for consumers is how seamless the experience is for everyone. Whether you are offering local goods or using a marketplace to bring more wide-ranging products from all over the world to customers’ in your backyard, whatever you’re selling matters less than how easy the shopping, transaction and delivery experience turns out.
• How Marketplaces Create Growth and Opportunity for Sellers: There are limits to how ecommerce can grow and scale, and marketplaces offer a way to expand those opportunities. Marketplaces offer sellers speed and agility, along with resources that they cannot get elsewhere.
• Partner Up: As large and far-reaching as telecommunications companies are, even they cannot provide 5G to every industry. In order to advance the technology across all fields, partnerships with other large enterprise companies are necessary. This sets up a B2B2C model that requires finesse and understanding of different roles, particularly as it relates to delivering technology and services to the end consumer.

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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For a full transcript of this interview, click here.