The Future of Buying and Selling Is Happening Inside Marketplaces
By: Katherine
272 views
67% of global E-commerce GMV now flows through online marketplaces. Discover why buyers are bypassing brand websites, why sellers on 3+ platforms earn double the revenue, and why your local business listing matters more than you think. Find.Agency helps businesses get found — for free.
Published On: April 14, 2026
Nobody announced the transition. There wasn't a press conference. One quarter the shop had a website, the next quarter the shop had a listing on five different platforms, and the website was almost beside the point.
That's the thing that keeps nagging at me. The shift didn't feel like a decision — it felt like weather.
Something Changed in How People Find Things
Online marketplaces now account for roughly 67% of global e-commerce gross merchandise value. Not 30%. Not a notable share. Two-thirds. And over 40% of total ecommerce growth in 2025–2026 came specifically from marketplace activity, not from brand websites, not from social ads, not from direct traffic.
Sixty-three and a half percent of all B2C online retail sales in 2024 happened through marketplaces. That's not a trend line pointing somewhere interesting — that's where the majority already is.
And still, somehow, the standard advice for small business owners is: "build your website, run some ads."
The Buyer Went Somewhere Else
Let me try to be specific about what changed on the buyer side, because I think this is where most of the argument sits.
Online marketplaces are now the primary research channel for 51% of consumers in the US, the UK, and Canada — not Google, not a brand's own site, a marketplace. When a buyer wants to compare services, check availability, read reviews, and make a decision, they go somewhere that does all of that without redirecting them 6 times.
The average consumer now shops across three to five platforms per month. They are not loyal to Windows—they're loyal to friction reduction.
And here's where it gets harder to argue simply: 60% of product discovery still happens in physical retail stores according to Salsify's 2026 Consumer Research, narrowly ahead of online marketplaces at 57%. So the marketplace hasn't buried the physical world, not yet. But 67% of those same shoppers research online before any in-store visit. Which means the marketplace still touches the transaction, even when it occurs at a till.
The Seller's Position Has Also Shifted — More Than Most Sellers Know
Sellers listing across three or more marketplaces earn up to twice the revenue of single-channel sellers. Not marginally more. Double.
And this is the part I'm reluctant to make sound too neat, because it isn't neat. The reason isn't mystical. It's surface area. More places where your business name appears mean more chances to be found, more review signals pointing to you, and more credibility indicators stacking up without you having to manually push each one. Businesses active on multiple listing platforms report a 347% higher search traffic than those with incomplete or inconsistent information. And listings on verified directories — not generic link farms, but actual business directories — help search engines confirm your location, category, and operation details, which feeds directly into local pack rankings.
The mechanic is boring. The results aren't.
There's a Thing Nobody Is Saying Plainly
Marketplaces reduce customer acquisition cost by 30–50% compared to standalone stores.
I keep coming back to that figure because it's the kind of number that should make a small business owner stop mid-sentence. Most independent businesses are paying for reach — through ads, boosted posts, and agency retainers — when the audience already exists on a platform they haven't listed yet.
It's a bit like having a stall at a farmers' market but not telling anyone what you sell or whether you'll be there tomorrow. The foot traffic is already walking past. The question is whether you've put up the sign.
Discovery Is the Gap — and It's Widening
This is an underdeveloped thought, and I'm leaving it that way, partly because I'm not sure I have it fully right yet.
What I notice is that discovery — the moment before intent, before search, before comparison — has moved almost entirely inside platforms. Around 60% of consumers discover products unintentionally while scrolling, not while searching. Only 1 in 10 shoppers says that keyword searches reliably help them find what they want. AI search tools are used by 22% of consumers for product research, but only 14% trust the recommendations enough to act on them.
So there's a trust gap. People are using AI for research, but still transact on established platforms. Which tells you where the friction is, and which tells you where the credibility lives. It lives in the listing, in the review history, in the verified business profile — not in the ad.
I'm not entirely sure where that leads. But I think it means the businesses that don't establish a proper presence inside these discovery environments are going to find themselves invisible at exactly the moment someone's looking for them.
The Local Business Is Not Exempt From Any Of This
Here's the bit that comes with a note of impatience, because the conversation around local search tends to get very small very fast — people talk about Google Business Profile, maybe Apple Maps, and then stop.
The reality is that 46% of all Google searches have local intent. Over 1.5 billion "near me" searches are conducted each month. Seventy-six percent of those mobile searches lead to a physical visit within 24 hours. And the businesses showing up in that local pack — the top three results that most searchers never scroll past — are the ones with structured, verified, multi-platform listings feeding search engines accurate data.
A business that exists only on its own website and in one directory is not competing in that environment. It's not even in the room.
And here's where I'll say something that may annoy part of the audience: the businesses spending £500 a month on Instagram ads while their Google Business Profile has no photos and an incorrect address are making a specific kind of mistake. It's an expensive, visible, loud mistake that produces results you can screenshot — and it's covering up the invisible, quiet failure underneath: nobody can find the actual business when they go looking.
What a Platform Actually Does
There's a version of this where I describe marketplaces as aggregators, logistics layers, trust infrastructure — all technically accurate, all tedious. Here's a more direct version.
A marketplace brings the crowd to your door. It does not build your door for you.
Your listing is the door. And the quality of that listing — the accuracy of your business hours, the completeness of your service descriptions, the number of reviews from actual customers, the events you're running, the deals you've posted — that's what determines whether someone steps through or keeps scrolling.
The global e-commerce market is projected to reach $39.70 trillion in 2026. Total online shoppers will pass 2.86 billion this year. Those numbers don't mean much to a single business, except as context for how many people are already out there looking for what somebody sells. The platform just decides whether they find you or your competitor.
The Messy Part I Keep Coming Back To
I've been circling something I haven't quite landed on. The question is whether small, independent businesses — not tech-adjacent, not venture-backed, but actual local businesses with three employees and a good reputation in a postcode — can actually win inside marketplace environments designed mostly to serve volume sellers.
I think they can. I think local search specifically still has a slope that favours the specific over the scaled — a neighbourhood accountant with 40 detailed reviews outranks a national chain with a thin profile in that postcode, and that's genuinely structural, not optimistic noise.
But I'm not sure how long that window will hold if the big players start taking local listings seriously. So the window matters. The timing matters.
Where Find.Agency Fits Into All Of This
Find.agency is built for what's described above — specifically, the gap between "I have a business" and "people can find my business in the places they're already searching."
It's a global business discovery platform. That means a business can list its name, services, location, and hours, post available jobs, create events, publish deals and coupons — all through a single account, feeding a centralised profile that's built to surface in search results and business directories across the web.
The free plan includes a business listing, visible products and services, and 2 job postings, with no monthly cost. That alone covers the basics: searchable business name, accurate business information, customer reviews, and a category-structured listing that search engines and local directories can read properly. For £15/month — or £99/year — the Plus plan adds 50 products, 20 jobs, unlimited events and deals, and priority placement at half the usual sponsored rate. The Business plan at £29/month (£249/year) removes all caps and takes 80% off sponsored listings.
There is nothing clever to say about that pricing. It is genuinely less expensive than a single boosted post on most social platforms, and it produces something that doesn't disappear when the budget runs out.
If your business isn't listed on Find.agency, it's not visible where buyers are already searching. Create your free listing today — no credit card, no expiry, no reason to wait.
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