How To Think About Marketplace Teams Inside Organizational Designs
One of the most common questions I get is about building a marketplace organization. Usually, it goes something like: "where do I put the group?" The simple fact is that a marketplace cuts across your entire organization, but there are a few key call-outs:
Your merchant organization must share responsibility for growing these marketplace sellers, and must be incentivized to do so. They also need to give direction to the marketplace team on which sellers to recruit and why to meet assortment and/or pricing goals.
Second, I like having the Director of Marketplace under the Head of Merchandising as a peer to the other category leaders. The primary roles of these people should be recruitment and onboarding. But there is marketplace dust you must sprinkle elsewhere also:
The Finance team needs to have a clear understanding of the differences between marketplace economics vs standard sales.
The Data & Analytics team likely has a lot of work in front of them to model the entire concept of a "seller" who is not the retailer, and being able to track the performance of a seller independently.
The Customer Service team must understand how to identify marketplace sales, and how to escalate customer service issues and other concerns to the marketplace sellers.
