The marketplace model is no longer defined by Amazon and Alibaba. Over the past several years, a wave of established retailers and brands have launched their own vertical marketplaces: Ulta Beauty, Best Buy, Nordstrom, Lowe’s, Decathlon. In the UK, Asda launched a marketplace on George.com in late 2024, and Decathlon has expanded its Mirakl-powered marketplace across Belgium, Italy, and the UK. Services verticals are following the same trajectory, with platforms like ClassPass and Mindbody building curated multi-vendor ecosystems in health and fitness.
They’re doing it because the economics work. Marketplaces now account for 67% of global eCommerce sales, up from 40% a decade ago. Mirakl-powered marketplaces grew 34% in 2024, nearly four times faster than the broader eCommerce market. Beyond this, consumer preference is shifting too; 70% of shoppers prefer specialized marketplaces over everything-stores when prices are comparable. The driver is trust. In high-consideration categories, from beauty to fitness to home improvement, consumers want the assurance that brands and sellers have been vetted. That is a fundamentally different promise from an everything-store, and it is why vertical platforms are winning on relevance in ways generalist marketplaces cannot replicate.
Against this industry backdrop, the growth case is well established, and the strategic logic is clear: range expansion without inventory risk, deeper customer data, and the ability to own the assortment, monetisation, and discovery layer within a category. As Retail Brew put it, this new wave is not about becoming the everything-store, but rather owning a vertical.
What’s less understood is the payments infrastructure required to power vertical marketplaces. The moment a retailer becomes a marketplace operator, it takes on a fundamentally different payments operation and the need to work with experienced, yet flexible payment infrastructure becomes non-negotiable. The ones getting this right are turning payments into a genuine growth advantage and they offer a useful model.
From single merchant to multi-party commerce
A traditional retail ecommerce merchant processes its own transactions. A marketplace orchestrates payments across potentially thousands of sellers, each with different onboarding requirements, compliance obligations, and payout expectations. Every transaction involves splitting revenue between operator and seller in real time. Fraud screening scales across a seller base the operator doesn’t fully control. And the numbers illustrate how central third-party commerce has already become: at Nordstrom, an estimated 60–70% of online product now comes from third-party sellers. At Target, 10% of external online traffic is driven by marketplace product alone.
For many of these operators, marketplace product already represents the majority of online assortment. Yet the payment infrastructure underpinning it is often an afterthought, bolted onto systems designed for first-party retail. For example, in early 2026, MediaMarktSaturn, Europe's leading consumer electronics retailer, selected Nuvei to support online marketplace payments across its European markets, driven by Nuvei's extensive local payment coverage and pan-European reach.
When your marketplace goes global
The complexity increases significantly when a marketplace operates across borders. Sellers expect to be paid in local currencies, on local timelines, through local methods. Consumers expect to pay the way they’re accustomed to. And both sides expect it to feel seamless.
Beauty is a useful lens here. U.S. beauty eCommerce alone is approaching $90 billion, with the global market nearing $700 billion. McKinsey projects online channels will account for nearly a third of global beauty sales by 2030. Brands are expanding aggressively into MENA, APAC, and Latin America, and marketplace channels are a primary route 6to market. TikTok Shop generated nearly $1 billion in U.S. beauty sales in a single year, ranking as the eighth-largest health and beauty retailer in the country.
For marketplace operators in categories like beauty, localization is not a phase two consideration. It determines whether sellers join your platform and whether consumers convert. Every new market means new acquiring relationships, new alternative payment methods, and new regulatory requirements. Without flexible infrastructure built for that complexity, international expansion stalls at the payments layer.
Payments as a growth lever
The marketplace operators pulling ahead are treating payments infrastructure as a strategic asset, not a back-office function. Three dynamics are driving this shift.
1. Retail media runs on payments data
Marketplace operators are building advertising businesses on top of their seller networks, and the targeting runs on transaction data: purchase behaviour, basket composition, conversion patterns. Retailers who launched marketplaces in 2025 are already generating margin-rich ad revenue that only exists because they built a marketplace. Payments data is the foundation of that revenue stream.
2. Seller experience drives platform stickiness
Small and mid-sized businesses still spend an average of 18 hours per week on banking and financial tasks, mostly reconciling data across multiple platforms. Sellers choosing between marketplaces factor in how quickly they get paid. Offering next-day or real-time payouts, in local currency, with automated reconciliation reporting is a direct competitive differentiator for the platform. The operators that get this right build seller loyalty that competitors struggle to replicate.
3. Orchestration is becoming the norm
The payments orchestration market grew 20% in 2025 as marketplace operators recognised that a single PSP integration doesn’t hold up at scale. Multi-party commerce requires flexible routing, intelligent approvals, and the ability to manage acquiring relationships across markets from a unified platform. Critically, operators running multi-acquirer setups for redundancy and authorisation rate optimisation need a payments architecture that decouples the acquiring layer from the payout layer entirely. This platform flexibility offers a better experience all-around; a failed or switched acquirer on the consumer side does not disrupt seller payouts, and new acquiring relationships can be added market by market without rebuilding the payout infrastructure.
What separates infrastructure that scales from infrastructure that stalls
Not all payment infrastructure is built for marketplace complexity. In my experience working with platform operators across Europe and North America, the ones that scale share a few things in common: a modular architecture that lets them adopt pay-ins, payouts, or both without ripping out what already works; their own acquiring licence so they control routing, approval rates, and local payment method coverage directly; a unified payout layer that operates independently of the acquiring side, so seller settlements are never disrupted by changes on the consumer-facing front end; and native integrations with the marketplace operating platforms their business already runs on, so go-live is measured in days rather than quarters.
This is the infrastructure model we built Nuvei for Platforms around. Modular by design, backed by our own acquiring licences, with decoupled pay-in and payout architecture and pre-built connectors to Mirakl, Marketplacer, and VTEX. Marketplace operators can keep their existing acquirer and layer in Nuvei payouts, or take the full stack. The point is flexibility: infrastructure that fits around the platform’s architecture, not the other way around.
The bottom line
The vertical marketplace model is proven. Retailers and brands are entering the space for the right reasons: range expansion without inventory risk, richer customer data, deeper engagement, and new revenue streams through retail media. The consumer shift reinforces this: specialised marketplaces are winning on trust and relevance in ways that generalist platforms structurally cannot replicate.
What’s less visible is the operational step change that comes with the transition. A retailer running its own storefront and a retailer operating a marketplace are not running the same business. The payments layer alone changes fundamentally: split settlements, cross-border payouts, local acquiring, compliance across seller bases the operator doesn’t fully control.
For retailers weighing this move, the payments upgrade is often the most underestimated part of the shift. It shouldn’t be seen as a hurdle. With the right infrastructure partner, one modular enough to plug into an existing tech stack and deep enough to support multi-market, multi-currency, multi-acquirer commerce from day one, payments stop being the ceiling on growth and start becoming the engine that drives it.
That is the infrastructure shift Nuvei for Platforms was built for, and it is the foundation the next generation of vertical marketplace operators will scale on.
