The Rise of MACH-oriented Enterprise Marketplaces

If It's Broke - Fix It

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” This is a classic adage we have all heard countless times; however, such a mindset can mislead, and past successes can overshadow current events. The reality is that new challenges require disruptive solutions.

The Changing Marketplace Environment

Over the past ten years, the marketplace business model has grown exponentially. Currently, marketplaces contribute $1.7 trillion to the global economy each year. Market research by OC&C Strategy Consultants predicts that by 2025, the online marketplace model will surpass the majority of established retail outlets in terms of spend. (OC&C, 2022)

This rise is driven by the growing number of companies embracing the marketplace business model, expanding across new markets, increasing product ranges, and improving logistics and supply chain operations. This industry growth requires modern solutions to facilitate and support increased complexities and prioritize flexibility for e-commerce operations.

Legacy Systems in New Industries

Legacy software systems are long-standing software packages that have begun to show their age and conform to performing operations in a predetermined manner, with little room for growth or 3rd party integrations.

Many solutions may not have been designed to support the development and execution of modern e-commerce operations and, therefore, therefore, lack the flexibility to enable increasingly more complex business logic functions.

Uncertain Times in the E-Commerce Industry

As the last few years have demonstrated, monumental market shocks can occur without warning and have forced organizations to evaluate their processes fully. For instance, the Covid pandemic created an unprecedented opportunity for the e-commerce industry.

While such a tectonic shift in online consumer behavior and buying habits should have been a gift to many online marketplaces, this wasn’t necessarily the case as many companies found themselves stretching their legacy-based systems to breaking point, attempting to accommodate the sharp increase in traffic and order volume.

While the pandemic may be an extreme example, legacy-based systems have long been showing their age. Take retail giant The Schwarz Group, who own the global discounter chain Lidl. In 2018, the group chose to opt for a legacy-based implementation for their inventory management system. Unfortunately, this system failed to deliver on its expected objectives and had to be scrapped entirely at an estimated sunk cost of €500 million.

As the above example demonstrates, continuing with such systems may not be a feasible long-term strategy for large, enterprise-level companies that face market dynamics more challenging than those of their SMB counterparts. Such companies will need to have the resources at hand to respond effectively.

MACH Architecture

As shown above, unforeseen challenges can emerge quickly and without warning. This fact requires businesses to have the capacity to respond quickly to changing marketplace conditions. One such approach that businesses can take to do this is known as MACH.

Standing for Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless. MACH is a concept based on the idea of composable commerce, using pre-existing infrastructure components to facilitate faster development further, but doing so without imposing rigid and predetermined business logic upon users.

Such a modular approach emphasizes flexibility in the development process and replaces inelastic elements which hamper innovation.

By switching to a MACH approach, organizations can find the best-of-breed solutions for their specific needs and deploy more new updates faster.

Onport & MACH

All too aware of the intricate nature of many of the existing multi vendor marketplace solutions, Onport was designed to avoid the common pitfalls of overcomplexity, rigidity, and a lack of experimentation that signals the end of the monolithic architecture age.

Onport empowers its users with several pre-existing infrastructure components. These range from Software Development Kits (SDKs) and our Command-Line Interface (CLI) to extensive API documentation and webhooks. For instance, our CLI module allows Onport to be run from the command line without having to use the web interface. This ensures a more granular system management approach, such as for custom reporting. Learn more about our MACH offering here.

Onport - Modern Tech For Modern E-Commerce

Onport is an ecommerce marketplace and dropshipping platform enabling companies to centralize the core areas of backend marketplace dropshipping operations using next-generation composable technology - inventory syncing, order routing, shipping workflows, payment automation, and returns management.

The Onport Platform can accommodate both those seeking an out-of-the-box solution and, through an API with +3.000 endpoints, those who require a more flexible implementation.

“With Onport, we were able to launch in less than three months, which we just couldn’t have done, had we built the system ourselves.”

Frank A. Ricciardi | Founder & CEO at Maavee

From growing SMBs to well-established enterprise-level companies, its composable and adaptive infrastructure was designed to be a reliable partner for the growth of any company operating in the e-commerce marketplace and dropshipping space.

Over 200+ companies in the e-commerce space are future-proofing their business with a solution trusted by brands such as Stadium Goods, Cupra, Ivalo, and Naduvi.