An online marketplace, also known as an e-commerce marketplace, is an e-commerce site where product or service information is available to see and where transactions are processed by the marketplace operator.
Often product or service information is provided by third party companies, but it can also be provided by the company that is the marketplace operator.
Some of the most popular e-commerce sites are things like Amazon.com, or eBay. These types of site allow users to register and sell either single items or larger numbers of items for a “post-selling” fee.
Amazon’s fees are said to be around the 5-10% mark of the selling price.
These types of online marketplace are popular because they are open to a large variety of different third party vendors, this often means that they are able to sell a wider array of products than a vendor-specific online retail store.
There are also online marketplaces dedicated to outsourcing of professional services like IT, search engine optimisation, marketing and crowdsourcing.
