The value of Buying vs Building

Buy vs Build. How buying a marketplace platform improves your chances of success

Buy vs Build. How buying a marketplace platform improves your chances of success As customers grow ever more discerning about which online brands meet expectations, it's clear that the link between experience and brand, is stronger than ever. Customers remain willing to pay a premium for products that offer a good experience and they're more likely to share information with a company that satisfies this need.

There's no need to pretend everything needs to be re-invented from scratch

It's apparent that many online businesses fall into the trap of thinking a great customer experience is best achieved by building a solution from scratch, when in fact, many highly engineered platforms have evolved alongside customer expectations to address many of their needs across functions such as inventory, search, marketing, offers, communications, financial transactions, invoicing, sales orders, multi-vendor purchasing, communications, logistics and more. In the marketplace area - regarded as the next generation of eCommerce platforms - cloud platforms like Arcadier have already optimised tens of thousands of complex interactions between sellers, buyers and administrators (as marketplace owners). It ensures you can start with the most sophisticated engineering available and customise from there.

In planning an optimal customer experience ask,  "Where can we make the greatest impact?"

So, the big question is what can you do to minimise risk in achieving the goal of offering a superior customer experience? The answer lies in pausing to reflect; if best-in-class technology meets 90% of your needs with its core functionality, wouldn't it be logical to invest your valuable time, effort and budget in refining and customising the remaining 10% that makes the biggest difference? This time-saving choice translates into speed-to-market with a superior marketplace platform. Further, it's worthwhile for any digital business to accept that they're co-creating experiences with their customers. Essentially, they're iterating and learning as they go. This constant process starts from the day a marketplace launches and data begins revealing insights about customer interactions. Whilst it's sometimes necessary to launch with an MVP or proof of concept, the idea is to launch with the best product possible, because you might not get a second chance.

Don't delay high-level analysis until later - start the moment you go-to-market

When a business chooses to use an advanced marketplace platform like Arcadier, it removes human resource barriers to develop robust, scalable and optimised platforms to go-to-market and enables marketplace operators to immediately focus on higher-level analysis and improvement. This increases the likelihood of success of the project.

We've invested 500,000 man hours, to help you get a flying start

After investing half a million man-hours over the last decade in its platform, Arcadier has fully optimised marketplace interactions between sellers, buyers and administrators (as platform owners). The distillation of this effort is carried in three words that embody Arcadier's approach: flexibility is power.

According to Nick Renford, Arcadier's Chief Marketing Officer, "It's a similar mindset that allows Disney+, Netflix, Adobe and McDonald's to run on AWS, even though they have resources to develop their own infrastructure. It's not about ownership of a platform in constant evolution. It's about the effectiveness of each and every transaction moment informing a customer and brand relationship".