What to ask your agency about marketplace integrations

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on marketplace integrations, these questions are worth asking early.

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Marketplaces bring reach but own the customer relationship. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Fees change the maths on which products are worth listing. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

How to tell if yours is fine

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. Three things worth confirming about marketplace integrations before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Stock must sync both ways or you oversell — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.