E-commerce and marketplace - mixed business model - Excel Template

Description
In the Excel file you will find a model of a business that operates at the same time marketplace (with 3 sides), e-commerce model and advertising business on the back of the marketplace. In this model I will show you how to model in Excel more complicated businesses that consist of many business units. For every business unit we will do separate estimation of sales and margin.

In this file I will show you how to create in Excel model that encompasses 3 business models. This to some extent is a simplified version of Amazon business model (they have e-commerce, marketplace and advertising business).

Mixed models including marketplaces and e-commerce are much more complicated to model than traditional marketplace or e-commerce. We will also model more complicated type of marketplace a 3-sided marketplace. In this type of marketplaces, you cannot quite often make enough money on end-customers and suppliers and you need the 3rd side to generate the profits expected by your shareholders. Such examples you can find in all big marketplaces: Uber (the 3-side are car producers, advertisers in the future), Postmates (bike and other accessories producers) etc. In the model I will show you how on the back of traditional marketplace model to build the model of a 3-sided marketplace. The 3rd side is a source of profit but also will require additional effort in acquiring. Therefore, you will have to model it independently as well to see how much cash it will require. That is one of the reason why the 3rd side is only added after some time. At the beginning startups tend to concentrate only on 1 of the sides of the marketplace. The 2nd side is also addressed but with limited resources and attention. The 3rd sided is only added when the market is mature.

The model obviously can be used also to model 2-sided marketplace and e-commerce model.