Katerina Petraki on where B2B marketplaces are headed: vertical niche platforms are winning, SaaS companies are becoming marketplaces, and the line between B2B and B2C is blurring with creators. Regional gaps remain in Mexico, India, and Vietnam.
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Thanks, Katerina. That was extremely high value. I don't know if I've ever heard somebody say nearly every sentence had something valuable in it. I was like typing furiously. I was actually curious though. I mean, you've got so much good granular stuff in there, but if you could zoom out for a second and look at the future of B2B marketplaces, I've seen kind of It looks like there's a little bit of grouping in the, so like ingredients versus finished products versus components and electronics. I was just curious from your viewpoint, since you're like at both levels of startup and really big companies, do you see it being like more consolidation across categories or is there, will there be more of like proliferation of just extremely niche marketplaces? I kind of wanted to leave it open, just see like, you know, what was in your brain with that kind of stuff.
Yeah, thank you, Justin. And great question actually. So the answer is it depends on the country, but we're in the US. So let's speak about the US for a second. So in the US, because you've had like already existing general B2B platforms, if you want, both for things like what we do at Alibaba.com all the way to Amazon Business, right? Which are also general marketplaces, but for different use cases. What you see a lot here is 2 things. You see really like right now proliferation of like B2B marketplaces that are very vertical, like, you know, like specific chemicals all the way to kind of like specific commodities that are being created because for 2 reasons. First of all, because there's just so much need for digitization in B2B. Like B2B is like really offline. Like there's just very few transactions that are happening online today. That you will see it more and more. Like, let's try to digitize all different categories out there. So that's one thing that you see, and I can send you if you're interested, like I have a full list of like constantly kind of like all these like B2B marketplaces that are coming into kind of like vertical needs to address vertical need and categories. And then the other thing is you start to see, which is a little bit outside of the marketplace, but you start to see a lot of these like SaaS marketplace, right? They tend to kind of like use this as a way, as I said earlier, to drive to, like, it's much easier to crack the chicken and the egg problem if you start with a SaaS platform first and then you transition to marketplace. It's tricky to be that, but you see a lot of these lately, right? You see a lot of them who start completely as like, let me create a platform to solve for a problem and then open it up to a marketplace. So that's what I see and I will, I, you will have more and more of this happening. And then at some point, you know, I would expect like in a few years down the line, you will start seeing some consolidation, right? At the level 1, if you want category level, right? And I mean, you know, like instead of like this beauty as level 1 category and there's all the way down to like nail salon that you could be focusing, right? So there are marketplaces who do like very, very specific things, right? So you'll see consolidation at the level 1 category. And then you'll see consolidation in kind of like the services category. So Lightspeed, for example, has been kind of like great at like getting a lot of these marketplaces and a lot of these services that help create kind of like the SaaS platform that they have today. I mean the ERP solution, I don't mean the VC. So that's what I see a lot in the US. And then specifically, kind of like if you talk about more globally, there's certain industries and there's certain countries that they still haven't developed really a kind of like a good general marketplace, right? So you see like in Mexico, in India, in kind of like parts of Vietnam, you will see more and more kind of like domestic solutions that haven't existed because they have traditionally been more export hubs, right? So we see they're more general. Marketplaces coming together. And then the third thing that I see in general is the lines between B2B and B2C, at least from an investment perspective as I'm looking at it right now, they're blurring so much with like influencers coming in the creator economy. So there's a huge need out there and I haven't seen a great platform yet, but there's a huge need out there to connect these two, right? So be it, is that a marketplace that does that? Is that a SaaS solution that does that? I don't know. But you will see, I believe, more and more somebody who's trying to solve that problem, right? Connecting the industry as a whole.
