Marketplace Strategy & Platform Growth

What Marketplace Strategy Involves

Marketplace strategy is fundamentally different from traditional ecommerce. Where direct-to-consumer businesses optimize for customer acquisition and unit economics, marketplaces must simultaneously satisfy suppliers, buyers, and the platform itself. This creates a three-sided economic problem: How do you attract both sellers and buyers? How do you ensure quality and trust? How do you build a sustainable business model that aligns all stakeholders?

Effective marketplace strategy encompasses five interdependent domains:

• Supply strategy: Identifying, recruiting, and retaining the right sellers. This involves deep understanding of seller economics, competitive positioning, and what incentives drive seller growth.
• Demand strategy: Growing buyer acquisition and retention. Marketplace success hinges on whether buyers can find what they need, when they need it, and whether the selection improves over time.
• Trust and quality: Establishing mechanisms that protect both buyers and sellers. This includes identity verification, transaction protection, rating systems, and enforcement of quality standards.
• Monetization: Designing sustainable revenue models that don't disincentivize either suppliers or buyers. Transaction fees, retail media, logistics revenue, and data services represent different levers.
• Operations: Building infrastructure and teams that can scale. Marketplace operations are more complex than traditional ecommerce because you're managing two distinct customer bases and their interactions.

Pooja's career spans both enterprise marketplaces and startup ecosystems, providing a unique perspective on how strategy shifts across scale. At Coles, managing a $1.1B P&L across 800+ digital storefronts required enterprise-grade operational rigor, stakeholder management, and alignment across product, merchandising, finance, and store operations. At PurvX, the circular marketplace for South Asian fashion demonstrates how lean, founder-led teams can execute marketplace strategy with extreme focus on growth and seller conversion, achieving 800% user growth in six months and 3.2x seller conversion through SEO-led growth and relentless founder engagement.

Marketplace Platform Transformation

One of the most common marketplace challenges is transforming an existing digital catalogue into a full-scale supplier ecosystem. This is fundamentally different from building a marketplace from scratch, because it requires managing the transition from a company-controlled inventory model to a multi-supplier model while maintaining continuity for existing customers.

At Lasoo.com.au, Pooja led the transformation of a digital catalogue into a full-scale marketplace on the Marketplacer platform. The project involved several critical workstreams:

Platform selection and integration: Marketplacer provided a pre-built infrastructure for supplier onboarding, order management, and logistics coordination. Rather than building custom APIs, the team leveraged Marketplacer's existing integrations and adapted the platform to Lasoo's specific requirements for retailer support and merchandising. This decision accelerated the timeline from planning to launch and reduced technical risk.

Seller workflow design: The team worked closely with engineering and product to design seller-facing tools that reduced onboarding friction. This included inventory management, order management, performance dashboards, and promotional tools. Close collaboration between Pooja's merchandising expertise and engineering teams ensured that the tools reflected both seller needs and technical feasibility.

Recruitment and onboarding at scale: Within six months, Lasoo recruited and onboarded 60+ retailers into the marketplace. This pace required systematic processes for seller qualification, documentation collection, training, and ongoing support. The team established seller cohorts, created templated onboarding processes, and assigned dedicated account managers to key retailers.

Momentum and monetization: The transformation generated 120% month-over-month GMV growth, demonstrating strong product-market fit and buyer demand for supplier selection. Simultaneously, the team developed a retail media business that generated a 20% uplift in seller ad spend, proving that monetization could grow faster than transaction volume.

The Lasoo transformation demonstrates that marketplace platform success depends not just on technology selection, but on cross-functional execution. Product, engineering, and merchandising teams must align on seller workflows, buyer experience, and operational procedures. Small differences in product design have outsized impacts on seller conversion and retention.

Seller Acquisition & Onboarding

Seller acquisition is the lifeblood of marketplace growth. Without sufficient sellers, buyer selection is limited and marketplace liquidity stalls. Without the right sellers, marketplace quality suffers and buyer trust erodes. The challenge is that seller motivation is complex: they are not looking for a new sales channel simply because one exists, but because they have confidence that it will generate incremental revenue at acceptable economics.

Conversion and ROI: PurvX demonstrates how aggressive seller conversion can be achieved through relentless focus on seller economics and founder engagement. By targeting sellers in the South Asian fashion space and demonstrating clear ROI through organic search traffic, PurvX achieved a 3.2x seller conversion rate—roughly triple industry benchmarks. This was not achieved through discounted commission rates, but through transparent communication about traffic and sales potential, rapid onboarding, and founder-level engagement with each seller.

Retailer partnerships: Lasoo's recruitment of 60+ retailers in six months required a different approach. Rather than relying on inbound interest, the Lasoo team proactively partnered with existing retailers and wholesale suppliers who already served the same customer base. The proposition was clear: by listing on Lasoo, retailers gained access to new customers without bearing logistics costs (Lasoo managed fulfillment). This created alignment between Lasoo's growth and retailer unit economics.

Trust and data standards: At GS1 Australia, Pooja partnered with Amazon, Google, and Alibaba to develop and promote data standards for product identification. The 'Verified by GS1' program created trust signals for 300+ brands across multiple marketplaces. The insight here is that seller trust is not only about the marketplace itself, but about the broader ecosystem. By participating in industry-wide data standards, GS1 reduced friction for sellers across multiple platforms, which increased the overall health of the marketplace ecosystem.

Effective seller acquisition requires understanding what creates seller confidence: clear ROI expectations, transparent fee structures, rapid onboarding, dedicated support, and proof of buyer demand. Different seller segments require different approaches—some are sophisticated ecommerce operators who need advanced analytics, while others are traditional retailers or international brands entering ecommerce for the first time.

Marketplace Monetization & Retail Media

Marketplace monetization is distinct from single-vendor ecommerce because the platform earns revenue from transaction fees, retail media, logistics services, data services, and seller support fees. The challenge is balancing platform monetization with seller incentives—if fees are too high, sellers will reduce their inventory or leave the platform entirely.

Transaction fees: The traditional marketplace model charges a commission on each transaction—typically 8-15% depending on category, seller profile, and competitive intensity. Transaction fees are attractive because they scale with the business. However, they create a zero-sum dynamic: every dollar of fee is a dollar of seller margin or consumer price.

Retail media: At Lasoo, retail media emerged as a high-margin complement to transaction fees. Sellers naturally want to increase visibility for their products, and if the marketplace offers targeted advertising, sellers will pay for it. Lasoo's retail media business generated a 20% uplift in seller ad spend, meaning sellers increased spending by an average of 20% across their product portfolio. This revenue stream is less directly correlated with GMV (because not all sellers advertise), but it tends to be significantly more profitable on a per-transaction basis.

Margin management: At Catch.com.au, Pooja managed a $200M P&L with 40%+ margins. In a marketplace model, margins are driven by the ratio of transaction fees and ancillary revenue to operating costs. Catch's high margins came from a combination of strong seller demand (which supported higher commissions), efficient operations, and limited buyer acquisition spend (organic traffic dominated). The Catch model demonstrates that not all marketplaces require continuous capital injection to grow.

Monetization strategy must evolve as the marketplace matures. Early-stage marketplaces often rely on low or waived transaction fees to attract critical mass of sellers and buyers. As liquidity improves, monetization can increase through higher commissions, retail media, and value-added services.

Marketplace Technology & Platform Selection

Marketplace technology decisions are among the most consequential decisions a founder or leader can make. The choice between building custom, partnering with a hosted platform, or acquiring turnkey software has profound implications for speed to market, technical flexibility, and long-term costs.

Hosted platforms: Marketplacer and Mirakl are leading platforms that provide out-of-the-box seller management, buyer checkout, order management, and payment processing. At Lasoo, the decision to use Marketplacer was driven by time-to-market considerations. Rather than building a custom marketplace infrastructure, Lasoo leveraged Marketplacer's existing APIs and workflows, then adapted them to Lasoo's specific requirements. This enabled the launch of the marketplace in months rather than years.

Custom solutions: PurvX and Dropped Pin both built custom marketplace solutions, tailored to the specific requirements of circular fashion and international fashion ecommerce respectively. Custom solutions enable deep customization of buyer and seller workflows, unique differentiation, and avoidance of platform fees. However, they require significant technical investment and demand for building internal infrastructure that transcends the core business problem.

Data integration: At GS1 Australia, Pooja worked with Amazon, Google, and Alibaba to ensure that data standards were compatible across platforms. The insight here is that marketplace success increasingly depends on data interoperability. Sellers want to list once and have their product data flow to multiple platforms. Buyers want access to reliable product information. Data standards (like GS1 identifiers) enable this interoperability and reduce friction for all participants.

The technology question is not simply about functionality, but about strategic control. If you use a hosted platform, you move faster but have less control over seller and buyer experience. If you build custom, you have maximum control but incur longer development cycles and higher technical risk. Most successful marketplaces make pragmatic decisions—leveraging hosted platforms for core infrastructure while building custom solutions for differentiated elements of the experience.

Cross-Functional Team Leadership in Marketplace Operations

Marketplace success is not achieved by a single function, but by aligned cross-functional teams working toward shared success metrics. Unlike product-led organizations where product roadmaps primarily serve customer acquisition, marketplace organizations must serve two customer bases simultaneously: suppliers and buyers. This requires constant alignment across product, engineering, merchandising, finance, operations, and warehouse teams.

Marketplace complexity and team structure: The complexity of marketplace operations demands more sophisticated team structures than traditional ecommerce. A traditional ecommerce organization might have a product team focused on consumer experience and an operations team focused on logistics. A marketplace organization requires, in addition to these, dedicated seller success teams, data teams that manage seller information and product feeds, merchandising teams that curate supplier assortments and manage quality, and often a separate finance team focused on seller accounting and payment processing.

Cross-functional collaboration at Coles: At Coles, Pooja led a large cross-functional team spanning product managers, business analysts, merchandisers, ranging managers, and business development professionals. Pooja also coordinated with IT teams on technical implementation, Finance teams on P&L management, and supermarket store teams on execution of offline-to-online initiatives. The organizational structure reflected the reality that online merchandising decisions had to be synchronized with store operations, supply chain, and financial planning.

This scale of coordination is non-trivial. A merchandiser might make a decision about which products to feature that seems optimal from a merchandising perspective, but creates complexity for the warehouse or logistics team. A product team might design a seller feature that is technically elegant but adds friction to seller onboarding. Effective leadership means building shared understanding of constraints and priorities across functions, establishing decision-making frameworks that prevent silos, and investing heavily in cross-functional communication.

Offshore coordination: At Coles, Pooja worked with offshore teams via Accenture, coordinating product development and implementation across time zones and organizations. This demanded clear documentation, structured status reviews, and explicit handoffs. Marketplace complexity amplified the challenge—because marketplace decisions affect multiple stakeholders, ambiguity in communication downstream could undermine execution quality.

Production, studio, and warehouse collaboration: At Catch, Pooja coordinated with production teams (responsible for sourcing products), studio teams (responsible for photography and content), email and social teams (responsible for promotional campaigns), and warehouse teams (responsible for fulfillment). Marketplace success meant these teams had to be aligned on weekly deal calendars, promotional mechanics, and inventory allocation. A promotion that looks good on social media but strains warehouse capacity is ultimately damaging.

Lessons in alignment: Effective cross-functional leadership in marketplaces is characterized by several practices: (1) Shared success metrics that transcend individual functions—GMV growth, seller count, buyer retention—rather than metrics optimized within silos. (2) Regular synchronization meetings that bring together leaders from product, engineering, merchandising, operations, and finance to review progress and surface conflicts early. (3) Clear decision-making authority and escalation paths, so that conflicts don't become bottlenecks. (4) Investment in onboarding and documentation, so that new team members and external partners understand how decisions are made. (5) Ruthless prioritization—marketplaces are complex, and competing demands will always exceed capacity.

Global Marketplace Operations

Marketplace strategy must be adapted to local market conditions, regulatory requirements, and competitive dynamics. Pooja's experience spans marketplaces in the United States, Australia, and India, revealing how geography shapes marketplace opportunity and execution.

United States: PurvX, founded in 2023 and based in San Francisco, operates a circular marketplace for South Asian fashion. The US market is characterized by high buyer expectations around product discovery, returns, and customer service, but also significant pricing power for differentiated assortments. PurvX's strategy leverages SEO-led growth—capturing demand from US-based consumers interested in South Asian fashion—rather than competing on paid acquisition. The founder-led approach reflects the early-stage nature of the company and the need to conserve capital while proving unit economics.

Australia: Lasoo and Catch both operate in Australia, a market with fewer competitors than the US but also lower absolute market size. Australian marketplaces have benefited from strong private label and retail brands, and from relatively sophisticated retailers with existing ecommerce capabilities. The Lasoo and Catch experiences show that marketplace transformation and retail media monetization can work effectively in smaller, more concentrated markets where existing retailers are seeking incremental channels.

India: Dropped Pin, founded around 2010, sourced international fashion labels for the Indian market. At that time, India's ecommerce market was nascent, and early players focused on category expansion (books, then electronics, then fashion) rather than marketplace models. Dropped Pin's experience illustrates the importance of market timing—in a market where ecommerce adoption is accelerating, first-mover advantage is significant, but so is execution risk.

Global marketplace success requires understanding local competitive dynamics, regulatory requirements (payment regulations, cross-border trade requirements, data localization), and customer preferences. Marketplaces that successfully expand internationally often maintain distinct P&Ls and organizational structures for each region, allowing for local adaptation while maintaining consistency in core marketplace principles.

Frequently Asked Questions