Recently, I had the pleasure of joining Sylvian Perrier, CEO of Mercatus Technologies and Mark Fairhurst, Senior Director of Marketing at Mercatus to discuss FedEx, Amazon, and marketplaces, specifically, the opportunity for grocery retailers to leverage this strategy.

Below is the synopsis and you can listen to the full podcast here

We’re joined this week by Rick Watson, marketplace expert and CEO and Founder of RMW Commerce Consulting. This podcast, we’re talking about marketplaces: how they work, what can we learn from Amazon and should grocers launch their own marketplaces?

We start by talking about why FedEx walked away from last-mile delivery with Amazon, and how this impacts both companies. Rick speaks to this topic in the podcast, and regularly in posts on LinkedIn.

The conversation turns to marketplaces and Rick offers his thoughts on how a retailer could benefit from launching their own. “…[A] marketplace is a supply chain tool, at the end of the day. It’s a tool for more supply. If you have more demand than supply, then a marketplace is a fantastic idea. Because it will allow you to grow your market share by offering more selection to your consumers. Then you can become a one stop shop. Which allows buyers to come back, which allows you to acquire more supply and sort of start that flywheel.”

While there’s opportunity, there is also risk. “One of the ways to think about a marketplace, it’s always a race between selection and trust. Selection always has to lead trust because if you don’t have the products up there … you could have a trusted store where you have no consumers. So it’s pointless. You need to always be on that bleeding edge of pushing the boundaries, getting more traffic, getting more selection. But then at the same time, you need to be running as fast as you can to improve quality and trust. I think the times where there are risks is that people forget about the second angle. Or they aren’t investing quite as much as their consumers expect regarding quality and trust.”

Listen to the full podcast to hear how grocers can succeed with the reverse-Amazon marketplace model.