Marketplaces
Your e-commerce site generates good turnover, but you’ve reached a ceiling. Expanding your catalogue would mean more stock, more logistics, more capital tied up. Some of your competitors have found the solution: they welcome other sellers onto their platform. The marketplace model enables them to broaden their offering without bearing the risk.
You’re considering it too.
But behind the appealing idea, the operational reality is complex. How do you manage dozens of sellers with different levels of maturity? How do you ensure that product listings remain consistent when everyone has their own way of describing their items? And most importantly: how do you distribute money correctly between yourself and your sellers, with French and European regulatory constraints on financial flows?
Your e-commerce teams already manage promotions, customer service, returns. Asking them additionally to play referee between sellers and monitor product data quality risks exhaustion and errors. The transition to marketplace cannot be improvised.
This solution belongs to the E-commerce & Booking family.
Challenges holding back your performance
Traditional attempts come up against three barriers. First barrier: payments. Using your current PSP to collect and then manually redistribute to sellers exposes you to banking licence obligations that you do not possess. Tracking spreadsheets quickly become error factories, and the slightest dispute takes hours to resolve.Second barrier: the catalogue. Each seller sends their products in their own format, with their own categories and approximate descriptions. Your team spends their days reformatting, correcting, and chasing up. Third barrier: seller relations.Without a dedicated space, exchanges take place via email, requests get lost, and onboarding processes drag on.Result: six months after launch, you have ten active sellers out of the fifty recruited, and your margin is eroded by the time spent coordinating everything manually.
Our Technical Approach
Our approach begins with the financial question, because that is what most often creates a blockage. We integrate a marketplace payment component compliant with PSD2 directive, capable of automatically splitting each transaction between your commission and the vendor’s share. Funds transit through an authorised institution: you are covered from a regulatory standpoint without becoming a payment agent.
Next, we structure the vendor space. Each merchant accesses their dashboard visualisation tool to manage their catalogue, track their orders and settlements. Rights are segmented: a seller only sees their data, whilst your teams oversee everything. For the catalogue, we implement harmonisation rules upon import.
Mandatory attributes are defined by category, formats are automatically standardised, incomplete listings are blocked before publication. Your front end remains consistent, regardless of the vendor’s rigour. The entire system builds upon your existing CMS: your e-commerce platform, your e-commerce platform, your online shop or bespoke solution: without platform replacement.
Dedicated spaces for vendors
Automatic distribution of payments
Harmonisation of product data sheets
Technical Architecture
Search, check availability and price, order: these three steps also structure Online Auction Platform and Direct Booking Engines.
- Dedicated spaces for vendors
- Automatic distribution of payments
- Harmonisation of product data sheets
Smooth and frictionless integration
We integrate marketplace modules onto your existing architecture. Your ERP continues to manage your own stock and orders. The vendor flow is processed in parallel, with status synchronisation to your unified back-office. Connectors are standard when they exist, developed bespoke otherwise.
We proceed in batches: first split payment, then the vendor space, finally catalogue harmonisation. Each component is tested under real conditions with two or three pilot vendors before rollout. Your teams retain their usual tools for after-sales service and logistics.
Audit flows and constraints
Analysis of your e-commerce architecture, current volumes, PSPs in place, and identification of applicable regulatory obligations.
Setting up split payment
Marketplace payment provider integration, commission rules configuration, testing with live transactions.
Seller space deployment
Creation of seller dashboards, definition of onboarding workflows, catalogue import and order management.
Pilot and scaling up
Launch with 3 to 5 test sellers, adjustments based on field feedback, then progressive opening to other merchants.
Measurable results for your organisation
- Automatic payment distribution compliant with PSD2, without manual intervention
- Onboarding of a new seller within 48 hours compared to an average of 2 weeks
- 70% reduction in time spent correcting product listings
- Unified catalogue with product sheet compliance rate exceeding 95%
- Real-time visibility on commissions and settlements for you and your sellers
- Capability to manage 100+ active sellers without additional staffing
Clarifying your decision-making
Do we need to become a payment institution to perform split payments?
Becoming a payment institution is not necessary: Clarendis integrates authorised providers that hold the licence. You remain an e-commerce merchant, not a financial agent, and sellers’ funds never pass through your accounts.
Our potential sellers are small manufacturers, not e-commerce professionals. Will they manage to use the interface?
The seller area is designed for non-technical users: spreadsheet import, direct editing in the interface, explicit alerts on missing fields. Clarendis also trains your teams to support the sellers who need most help.