Marketplace Development Platforms

This Wave grades one scorecard for four different businesses: selling atoms to consumers, atoms to businesses, bits to businesses, and bundles of both. The newest edition, The Forrester Wave: Marketplace Development Platforms, Q4 2024, scores nine providers on thirty three criteria, and its two Leaders each own one end of that ladder.

The report under the name: The Forrester Wave: Marketplace Development Platforms, Q4 2024

Principal analyst Joe Cicman announced the evaluation on December 5, 2024, with the buyer's warning attached: "becoming a marketplace is a business transformation, not a feature rollout."

The complexity ladder is the report's spine. Selling atoms to consumers, physical goods to individuals, is the model everyone knows. Atoms to businesses adds prenegotiated pricing and quotes. Bits to businesses is digital goods, software and infrastructure, sold through multi-tier channel partners. And bits plus atoms to businesses, multivendor bundles of connected devices and applications, is the most complex transaction model Forrester has yet scored.

The top rung deserves its own look, because it is where the category is heading. A connected-device bundle, hardware plus software plus services from multiple vendors, priced, contracted, and entitled as one transaction, is not a catalog problem. It is an orchestration problem, and the platforms that can run that rung are effectively running a commerce operating system, not a storefront. The report scores the rungs separately for exactly this reason: the distance between them is bigger than most vendors' marketing admits.

The companion guidance, a Buyer's Guide published for 2025, maps nine real-world use cases across SaaS vendors, IT distributors, manufacturers, franchises, group purchasing organizations, and communications providers. The message is consistent: the platform decision follows the business model, never the other way around.

Two Leaders, two ends of the ladder

AppDirect took a Leader placement with the highest scores in both Current Offering and Strategy, and the highest possible scores in twenty five of thirty three criteria, including the customer experience front end, search, promotions, AI, vision, innovation, roadmap, and adoption. Forrester's phrase is "across-the-board strategic superiority," and its vision for AppDirect is a "flywheel of subscription digital commerce" in which technology advisors curate integrated, white-labeled stacks.

That is the bits end of the ladder, and AppDirect's top score on the customer experience front end, server-side rendering, native mobile, no-code visual editing, centralized content management, is the infrastructure of digital-services marketplaces.

Mirakl tied for the top Strategy score and took the highest possible scores in twenty one of thirty three criteria, including AI, retail media, seller network, seller onboarding, seller compliance, vision, innovation, roadmap, adoption, application architecture, and pay-out automation. Forrester positions it for established retailers and B2B organizations that need scale, and the company counts more than four hundred fifty enterprise marketplaces deployed.

That is the atoms end, physical product catalogs, retail media, pay-out infrastructure for thousands of sellers.

Two Leaders, two different businesses wearing one category name, and the scorecard's structure acknowledges it: the same criteria graded both, but the maximum scores split cleanly along the atoms-bits line.

The 2021 New Wave and the field it drew

The market's first evaluation was a New Wave in Q4 2021, fourteen vendors, and Marketplacer took a Leader spot on differentiated ratings in vision, physical product catalog, seller management, and pricing.

Three years later the field is nine, and the shrinkage is the story. The marketplace platform market consolidated exactly as its customers' marketplaces did, and the survivors are the platforms that picked a rung of the complexity ladder and owned it rather than promising the whole ladder.

The Buyer's Guide makes the point concrete with nine use cases: SaaS vendors building app stores, IT distributors serving managed service providers, manufacturers opening direct channels, franchises standardizing procurement, group purchasing organizations, communications providers. Each use case maps to a different combination of the ladder's rungs, and the guide's core advice is that platform selection starts with the business model. The Wave ranks the platforms. The business model chooses the rung, and the rung chooses the winner.

Cicman's own guidance frames the buyer's risk: it is not for the faint of heart, but it is increasingly what buyers want, pay-for-outcome commercial models, ecosystem revenue, partner-led growth. The platforms that make that transformation survivable are the ones the scorecard rewards.

The honest limits of one ladder

The four-model ladder is the report's strength and its boundary. A buyer who knows their rung, bits to businesses, atoms to businesses, can shop the criteria with precision. A buyer who does not yet know their model will find the scorecard cannot decide it for them, and the two Leaders' opposing strengths prove the point: the best platform for digital services is not the best platform for physical goods.

There is also the market split to watch. Forrester has begun dividing marketplace coverage into two landscapes, digital services and physical goods, and the category this Wave scored as one market is formally separating. The Q4 2024 scorecard is the last edition that treats the ladder as one category, which makes it both a current ranking and a historical document.

Three questions before you build the marketplace

Which rung of the ladder is your business on? The answer determines which Leader's strengths apply. Selling digital services through partners points to AppDirect's territory. Selling physical goods at retail scale points to Mirakl's.

Is this a transformation or a feature? Cicman's warning is the first question to ask your own organization, because the scorecard rewards platforms built for businesses that answered it honestly.

What happens to your seller relationships when the platform changes? Seller onboarding, compliance, and pay-out automation decide whether a marketplace survives its first year. Ask for the seller experience in a demo with actual sellers, not the buyer experience alone.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.

The natural next comparison is Marketplace Platforms For Digital Services: forrester split its marketplace research into two separate categories for 2026, and this one, the digital services half, still has no scored Wave, only a landscape and the predecessor evaluation it was carved out of.