Dries Bultynck

Digital Business Analist / Performance Strategist

I'm Dries.
The internet is the best thing that happened to me.
I just rolled into, "this thing", 15 years ago
& I still LOVE it until this day!

I help improving the customer experience, marketing & overall performance of
e-commerce (SMCG or FMCG, B2C or D2C) in a pure online or retail context
by moving gradually towards less media spend waste.
I do this by maximizing the use of your first-party data.

I help e-commerce businesses stabilizing building brand and bottom line.

I need help with my e-commerce ➟ or with something specific

I worked for several brands

Throughout my agency and in-house experience, I've worked for several sizes of companies, several orders of budgets and all sorts of challenges.

Before we dive into this allow me to give a definition of a marketplace and a platform making sure we’re aligned with the same context on those terms.

A marketplace is a place where people can shop products or services by one brand or several brands. A marketplace handles the transaction up till the payment itself. A marketplace can be an app, a website or a local store.

A platform connects buyers with sellers. A platform can offer a marketplace as a service in the format of an app, website or local store.

In short. The marketplace is the shopping itself. The platform is the host and service provider for the marketplace. Well.. that’s just a definition. If you have a look at Shopify, Amazon, or even Decathlon, the distinctiveness between being a platform or a marketplace blurs as they both are necessary to serve customers’ demand. The definition of both blend into one hybrid definition. They leverage one another. If you want to read more on this, I’ve found this a great article articulating also the pros and cons but that shouldn’t be your concern.

In short, my personal tip: don’t fuss about the definition as this will keep evolving over time and a definition is just a mental model to cope with our inability to get to a first principle approach.

BUT … it is important to pick the marketplace (or platform – see what I did there) that matches your product type and, if you feel this matters to you, your brand. The marketplace is the match for your product. The platform is rather more of importance on the brand image you think you need to express.

Allow me to dig a bit deeper.