Great blog post for where eCommerce is headed and you can read how pioneer and visionary Adrien Nussenbaum, CEO and Co-Founder of Mirakl, describes where the industry is going and why marketplaces are so important to eCommerce.

Take Walmart, they were able to expand their product catalogue by 4x in a single year through adopting the marketplace model. – link

Online catalogs are places where you sell products. They don’t have to be your products, they could be others products. By combining marketplaces and things like drop ship, your online catalog could be the entry point for thousands of products.  Mix marketplaces with differentiated experiential shopping interfaces and you have a very quick win.

From Mirakl blog – link

In case you missed my coverage of Mirakl and IBM Digital Commerce, you can view the video below to understand how this combination will let you leap frog the competition.