Over the past few years, we have seen marketplaces booming up at a rapid pace. While this has been debatable in the past whether online marketplace can replace offline marketplace or not, it has become clear that the digital marketplace is here to stay. This has opened a plethora of innovative opportunities for companies and startups and various experiments towards marketplaces have created a clear path to a unique mechanism - the platform.
Originated from the idea of connecting buyers and sellers, there have been various models that have been introduced in the market now. The platform now serves every demography and category of Internet users. Right from dis-fragmented segments to fragmented segments, the platforms have risen to all occasions. Today, every Internet user is a buyer and a consumer. Platforms have enabled everyone, right from big companies to a single user to hold and run a business. A housewife can sell chapattis or home-made spices, a techie can buy a car and host it on a platform for car rentals while managed by unrelated drivers and a big company can create a big data platform to leverage consumer behaviours to increase its foothold. There is something for everyone.
Various new models of platforms have been disrupting the market. Right from entertainment to necessity, disruption is happening everywhere. Beyond the concept of buying and selling, platforms have enabled people to showcase their hobbies and interests and earn extra miles through subscriptions. Popular examples can be recent web-series, which are beyond YouTube and television, and charge people for subscriptions, like Netflix, Amazon Prime or our very own Indian brand TVF. More and more millennials have taken to the platform to host comedy shows, showcase talents like art and singing, and one-on-one humorous content.
Business leaders, today, develop platforms that connect diverse participants to one another and enable them to interact and transact. Companies like Airbnb, Xoxoday have created new opportunities around hobbies, interests, activities and disposable artefacts where people can become hosts and charge to fulfil the wish lists of other users. Xoxoday goes an extra mile beyond travel and stay, and tries to answer the last discovered metric of planning a day with experiences and micro-activities. Furthermore, there are platforms where you can sell or buy used/unused items and experience the luxury yourself.
Today, the force is shifting towards intelligent platforms and technologies like Virtual Reality. IoT will soon be available and powered by Artificial Intelligence based on data analytics.
The factors that govern the disruption of platforms are-
1. Price parity: Since every user is a producer now the services, which used to charge a bomb, will get neutralized. The platform doesn’t always mean discount. Survival of the platform depends on how transparent and convenient it is for a user to transact on it.
2. Connected World: Platforms will connect more and more disconnected segments to each other. Right from a very small restaurant, to a remote location shuttle service, to a small homestay in a remote location; users will be able to discover and explore all.
3. Customer-to-Customer(C2C): Platforms will have to rely more on churning customer data, creating meaningful insights and then serving back with reviews and ratings, testimonials and feedback so that the trust factor strengthens.
4. Communities: Platforms will target communities of like-minded users and publish content by means of analytics and big-data concepts. This will be beyond individual personalization targeting a group to stay connected.
Ultimately the disruption will create newer opportunities and more competition. The older rules of business will no longer be applicable for newer markets and platforms will make sure that you adopt the new rules or phase out. Those who adapt to the ecosystem will be able to not only survive but also increase their horizon or services and products giving them a bigger market share. Once a premium service like IT infrastructure services, premium apps, job consulting, freelancers will be replaced with lower cost or free services like cloud infrastructures, app aggregators, job and freelancer platforms. Business will expand and overall win.
However, with the rise of platforms, there are certain threats which the companies need to work on. The threats can be Government and regulatory laws, and security breaches on platforms. The companies have to take care of their customers and make sure rules and laws decided by Government are met. Every company needs to invest more in scalable and secured infrastructure, and have a dedicated group of people completely focused on the same.
So are you new to the platform? Yes? Follow few simple rules of customer engagement and disrupt the space with a product-market fit. More focus is required to cater to your customers and learning from past data becomes very important. Fortunately, we have all the right tools to cater to the rise of the platform.
—by Abhishek Kumar, Co-founder, Xoxoday
