Marketplace integrations: what to get right first

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. If you only fix one thing about marketplace integrations this quarter, make it the first item below.

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Start here

Marketplaces bring reach but own the customer relationship. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Then this

Stock must sync both ways or you oversell. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Eventually

Fees change the maths on which products are worth listing. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

In practice

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Three things worth confirming about marketplace integrations before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Fees change the maths on which products are worth listing — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.