Take Rates Are Compressing, and Marketplaces Are Selling Services Instead

A marketplace earns its commission by solving a discovery problem: buyers cannot find sellers, sellers cannot reach buyers, and neither can assess the other. That value is highest at the beginning and declines as the participants become established. Once a buyer knows which supplier they want and the supplier knows the buyer, the introduction has already been made — permanently — and both sides begin to view the recurring percentage as a tax on a relationship the platform is no longer creating. In business-to-business categories, where transactions are large, repeat rates are high and both parties are professionals, this pressure arrives quickly and is applied deliberately. Disintermediation is the most visible symptom and the least interesting one. Every marketplace of any size has participants who meet through the platform and transact outside it, and the usual countermeasures — masking contact details, prohibiting off-platform dealing, penalising it — are expensive to enforce and mostly work against the participants least able to evade them. The more consequential pressure is negotiated rather than evasive: the largest sellers, who supply the inventory that makes the marketplace worth visiting, obtain preferential rates, and the blended commission declines even where the published rate does not move. The platforms holding their margins have generally stopped defending the commission on matching and repositioned around services that must be repurchased with every transaction. Payments and settlement, credit and financing against receivables, escrow, verification and quality assurance, logistics and returns, dispute resolution, and financing that lets a buyer defer payment while a seller is paid immediately — each of these is genuinely valuable at each transaction, which is exactly what an introduction is not. The revenue mix shifts from a percentage of gross volume towards fees for functions that would otherwise require the two parties to build a relationship of trust from scratch. The strategic reading for anyone building or selecting one is that a marketplace's durability depends on which side of that line its revenue sits. A business earning a percentage for having introduced two parties who now know each other is collecting rent on a service already delivered, and rent of that kind erodes. A business earning fees for handling money, risk, movement of goods or resolution of disputes is selling something that is consumed and needed again. The published take rate says little; what it is charged for says most of it.