What Is a Marketplace Business? Types and Examples

By Brian Tr · Updated Oct 6, 2026

A marketplace business connects people who want to buy with people who want to sell, and earns money from the transactions between them. The marketplace usually doesn't own the inventory or employ the people doing the work. It provides the place, the trust, and the payments, and the two sides supply everything else.

That's a short definition for a very wide category. Airbnb, Etsy, Upwork, Uber, and Amazon's third-party store all qualify, yet they have little in common once you look at who trades, what's traded, and how much the operator gets involved. Treating them as one thing leads to bad analogies: a founder copies the playbook of a company that was solving a different problem.

This article is the hub for the fundamentals section of the collection. It doesn't re-explain the economics. For how a marketplace makes money, liquidity, GMV, and take rate, read our guide to the marketplace business model. Here we map the territory: the main ways to classify marketplaces, named examples of each, and what the classification means for the business you're building.

What makes a marketplace different from a store

A store buys or makes goods, takes the inventory risk, sets the price, and sells to customers. A marketplace lets independent third parties sell, and it takes a cut. That one change moves the risk, the growth constraint, and the competitive edge.

The academic root of this idea is the work on two-sided markets. Jean-Charles Rochet and Jean Tirole's 2003 paper on platform competition in two-sided markets starts from a practical observation: platforms spend much of their attention on how they court each side while making money overall. A store has one customer group. A marketplace has two, and each side only shows up if the other already has. We cover the theory in two-sided markets and the broader family in the platform business model.

Three practical differences follow.

• Supply isn't yours. A store decides what to stock. A marketplace has to recruit, vet, and keep sellers it doesn't control.
• Growth needs both sides. A store can grow by adding customers. A marketplace has to add buyers and sellers in balance, or one side leaves.
• The moat is the network. A store competes on price, selection, and logistics. A marketplace can also compete on how many people are already there, which is the idea behind network effects.

The line isn't perfectly clean. Amazon runs its own retail and a large third-party marketplace on the same site. Amazon's own earnings release puts third-party sellers at 61 percent of worldwide paid units in the second quarter of 2026, a share that has held between 60 and 62 percent since early 2025. We compare the two models head to head in marketplace vs ecommerce store.

The five ways to classify a marketplace

There's no single official taxonomy. In practice, people sort marketplaces along five axes, and every real company sits at a point on each one.

Use these as a checklist. If you can't place your idea on all five, you probably haven't decided what you're building yet.

Axis 1: who transacts

This is the most common cut, and it shapes everything from onboarding to sales cycle.

B2B marketplaces connect businesses with businesses. Buyers are professionals purchasing for a company, so orders are larger, repeat purchasing matters more, and the sale often involves approvals, invoices, and credit terms. Alibaba.com for wholesale and Amazon Business are familiar examples. Upwork sits partly here, since its customers are businesses buying talent: its 2025 10-K describes it as a work marketplace connecting businesses with on-demand access to independent talent.

B2C marketplaces connect businesses that sell with individual consumers who buy. Buyers behave like retail shoppers, so ratings, delivery speed, and returns decide the experience. Uber Eats and DoorDash connect restaurants and shops with consumers. Amazon's third-party store and Etsy's professional sellers also live here.

C2C marketplaces connect individuals selling to individuals. Supply is lumpy and casual: a seller lists a few items and may disappear. eBay, Craigslist, Vinted, and Facebook Marketplace are the classic cases. The big challenge is trust between strangers, which is why identity checks, ratings, and payment protection do so much work.

P2P marketplaces are a related label, usually used when individuals share assets or time with other individuals. Airbnb is the standard example. Its 10-K describes a global marketplace connecting guests with stays, experiences, and services, with a community of over 5 million hosts and over 2.5 billion guest arrivals. Turo does the same for cars.

The boundaries blur. Etsy is often called C2C, but many of its sellers run small businesses. As of December 31, 2025, the Etsy marketplace had 86.5 million active buyers and 5.6 million active sellers, a mix of hobbyists and shop owners that doesn't fit one box. Don't spend energy arguing the label. Ask what your buyer's decision process looks like, and design for that. The next article goes deeper on the practical gap between B2B and B2C marketplaces.

Axis 2: what is traded

The thing that changes hands determines how hard it is to ship, standardize, and trust.

Standardized goods are the easiest to transact because the buyer knows exactly what they're getting. Services are harder, because each job is different and a bad experience is personal. That's one reason many service marketplaces move toward more operator involvement over time, which we get to in the involvement axis.

Physical goods also add logistics. Upwork, by contrast, has none to speak of: the work is delivered online, and the company reported $4.0 billion of gross services volume for the year ended December 31, 2025. The marketplace's job is matching and trust, not shipping.

Axis 3: horizontal vs vertical

A horizontal marketplace sells many categories to a broad audience. Amazon, eBay, and Craigslist are horizontal. Their strength is selection and traffic. Their weakness is that no single category gets deep expertise, so specialists can attack category by category.

A vertical marketplace focuses on one category or one customer type and goes deep on its specific needs: authentication, specialized search, category-specific payments and shipping. Etsy owns two good examples. Its group includes Reverb, a marketplace for musical instruments and gear, and Depop, a fashion resale community. Etsy reports that Depop alone contributed about $1.1 billion of its 2025 consolidated gross merchandise sales, according to the FY2025 10-K.

The idea that big general marketplaces get split into focused ones has a long history. Many startups from the 2000s and 2010s were built by picking one slice of a horizontal listing site and serving it better. For the strategic tradeoffs, including when a vertical should expand and when a horizontal should specialize, read horizontal vs vertical marketplaces.

Axis 4: how involved the operator is

This is the axis people often skip, and it has a huge effect on margins, quality, and operations.

Open-listing marketplaces let sellers sign up and publish with little vetting. The operator provides search, payments, and a review system. It's the cheapest model to run and the hardest to keep high quality. eBay, Craigslist, and most C2C sites work this way.

Managed marketplaces add a layer of operator control. They might vet suppliers, match requests by hand, set standards, handle quality assurance, or guarantee the outcome. This costs more per transaction but makes sense when the stakes are high, the purchase is complex, or the buyer wants someone accountable. We devote a whole article to the managed marketplace.

Full-stack models go further: the operator delivers the service itself rather than just connecting the parties. Chris Dixon's essay on the full stack startup contrasts the old approach of selling or licensing technology to incumbents with building a complete, end-to-end product or service that bypasses them. His examples include Uber. That's a useful reminder that the line between "marketplace" and "operator" is a spectrum, not a switch.

Rough rule of thumb:

Axis 5: how a marketplace earns

Most marketplaces take a commission on each transaction, but not all. Common models include:

• Commission or take rate. A percentage of the transaction value. Uber's 10-K describes a model in which it connects consumers with independent providers and earns from the transactions it facilitates. Airbnb collects service fees, and says it recognizes its fee as revenue at check-in.
• Fees from both sides. Upwork's 10-K says revenue comes from fees charged to talent as a percentage of billings and from fees charged to clients as a percentage of payments to talent.
• Listing fees. The seller pays to post, whether or not the item sells. Classifieds often work this way.
• Subscriptions. Sellers or buyers pay a recurring fee for access or tools.
• Advertising. Sellers pay for placement. Large marketplaces often layer this on top of commissions.
• Lead fees. The seller pays when the marketplace delivers a qualified request, which is common in local services.

Which model fits depends on how often the same buyer and seller will transact. If they might take the deal off-platform after meeting, a pure commission invites leakage, and a subscription or lead fee may hold up better. The mechanics of take rate and GMV are covered in the marketplace business model article, and the per-transaction math is in unit economics.

Key Facts: Marketplace Types and Examples

• Platforms in two-sided markets must court each side while making money overall, per Rochet and Tirole (2003).
• The Etsy marketplace had 86.5 million active buyers and 5.6 million active sellers as of December 31, 2025, with consolidated GMS of $11.9 billion for 2025 (Etsy FY2025 10-K).
• Upwork reported $4.0 billion of gross services volume for the year ended December 31, 2025 (Upwork FY2025 10-K).
• Airbnb describes a global marketplace connecting guests with stays, experiences, and services, with over 5 million hosts and over 2.5 billion guest arrivals (Airbnb FY2025 10-K).
• Third-party sellers accounted for 61 percent of Amazon's worldwide paid units in Q2 2026, per Amazon's earnings release.
• Chris Dixon's 2014 essay on full stack startups contrasts selling technology to incumbents with building the complete product or service.

Putting the axes together

Real marketplaces are combinations. A few worked examples show how the axes interact.

Treat the "Involvement" and "Scope" cells as editorial judgments, not reported facts. They're how a founder would reasonably place each company, and reasonable people will disagree on some. What matters is the habit: place your own idea on each axis and write down why.

What the type tells you about how to build

Classification isn't an academic exercise. Each choice predicts a specific challenge.

1. Casual supply (C2C, P2P) needs trust tools first. Strangers won't transact without identity checks, reviews, and payment protection.
2. Professional supply (B2B, B2C) needs onboarding and tools. Sellers who run a business care about inventory feeds, analytics, and payouts more than community.
3. Services need a quality answer. Either build strong reviews and repeat matching, or move toward a managed model.
4. Horizontal needs scale and traffic. You win on selection. If you can't reach scale, go vertical.
5. Vertical needs depth. Win on expertise a general site can't match, then decide whether to expand.
6. The earnings model must fit repeat behavior. If buyer and seller can easily meet again off-platform, choose a fee structure that still gives them a reason to stay.

Each marketplace also faces the same cold-start problem: no buyers without sellers, no sellers without buyers. The type changes which side you court first and how, which is the subject of later sections in this collection. If you're also weighing how a marketplace compares to a conventional online store, ecommerce business models is a good companion.

Related Reading

• Marketplace Business Model
• Two-Sided Markets
• Platform Business Model
• Network Effects
• B2B vs B2C Marketplaces
• Horizontal vs Vertical Marketplaces
• Managed Marketplace
• Marketplace vs Ecommerce Store
• Multi-Channel Marketplace Strategy