Marketplace Management

Video Introduction

Overview

CloudBlue Connect enables an innovative approach for establishing, integrating, and managing your go-to-market channels. With Connect’s Marketplace module, we help supercharge your revenue channels, quickly list products, sell effectively, and effortlessly ace collaboration with multiple business partners.

Getting your featured products out on a marketplace allows your buyers purchase subscriptions while Connect does the rest of the work for you. The Marketplace module is designed for all your business challenges: from acceleration of sales to scaling your business operations.

Let’s outline some of the benefits of the Marketplace module that direct your go-to-market channels to revenue:

• Expand a range of your services
  Growing a number of products and diversity of services that are added to your core business helps you stand out and enhance your value proposition. Naturally, maximized customer experience leads to bigger sales and increases your business volume.
  
• Modernize and improve distribution
  The Marketplace solution is designed to facilitate and automate purchasing and distribution processes, for even most sophisticated business models. Your physical network of products or services can also be digitized and brought into the cloud market with Connect.
  
• Reduce costs and increase margins
  Skyrocket your margins by bringing more product vendors and driving down IT costs for all parties involved. Connect provides full control of your product listings and subscriptions within each marketplace by using a single comprehensive platform.
  
• Advanced customization options
  The Marketplace module allows expressing your own logic to define your go-to-market channels. By using Connect, your marketplaces can also be used to work with different currencies and price list attributes, multiple countries and locales, and other configurations.
  
• Seamless and simple integration
  Connect enables to easily and smoothly integrate with all of your market channels and external systems from one place to take maximum control between the company and the customer.

About Marketplaces

A marketplace is used to establish an online shopping place that connects all actors in your supply chain to improve and streamline the customer experience. Therefore, by registering more marketplaces, your organization define more sales channels that help customers from different regions or industries buy more with less effort.

Marketplaces define your available go-to-market channels and can also be used to express different concepts for targeting a particular audience. The following showcases and describes different marketplace concepts:

• Regions: Marketplaces can represent different geographical regions or countries. Namely, you can create a marketplace for the “United States” region, “Canada”, “Germany”, and so on.
• Sizing: Marketplaces can be differentiated by the size or scale of the target businesses. For instance, “Consumer”, “SOHO”, “SMB”, “Enterprise”, etc.
• Industries: Marketplaces can represent different industries of the offered solutions. You can create different marketplaces for “Healthcare” products, “Fintech”, “Energy”, and so on.
  

Marketplaces are linked with the operational systems that are used to execute their go-to-market strategies. These systems are called Hubs, and they are also associated with customers and resellers (tier accounts) on the Connect platform. The following outlines hubs, marketplaces, and tier accounts relationship:

• Your marketplace should be associated with at least one hub
• Each hub can serve multiple marketplaces
• Each marketplace can be represented in multiple hubs

Mapping Marketplaces to Hubs

The Marketplace module allows managing your established hubs as it is required for your organizations. A single marketplace can be linked to multiple hubs that define staging and production environments (or express any other required concept).

Your generated tier accounts can also be managed by your specified hubs. Therefore, the system prompts to specify the Tier Account External ID. This allows the CloudBlue Connect platform to detect a required marketplace when a created subscription is linked with a particular tier accounts hierarchy. Marketplaces can be established on the same or different levels of the tier accounts hierarchy, and the system provides a large number of possible configurations.

While most commercial systems natively support the marketplace concept, some systems might need to map their generated marketplaces to their hubs manually. Thus, Connect allows performing required operations via an intuitive graphical user interface.

Marketplace Detection Logic

Subscriptions are generally created in the hierarchy of tier accounts. Each tier account in your supply chain might have their own marketplace within the system. Thus, it is important to understand how system detects a marketplace that is required for subsequent business operations.

A single subscription can be interconnected with 3 tiers accounts. For example, an end-customer (Tier-0), a reseller (Tier-1), and another reseller (Tier-2). In case the marketplace was not explicitly specified while creating a subscription, the system uses a certain logic to detect a required marketplace as illustrated below:

Namely, marketplace is associated with the lowest tier of a given hierarchy is associated with the requires subscription. In the example above, Tier-1 Reseller represents a marketplace that is associated with the provided subscription.

Next Steps

To learn more about Hubs, Marketplace and Hub API, the provided graphical user interface, and other operations that are interconnected with the Marketplace module, refer to the following sub-articles: