What is an integration marketplace? Here’s what you need to know

Product integrations can be critical for retaining clients and closing new business, but only when a company presents them in a way that’s intuitive and appealing.

To that end, many organizations use an integration marketplace.

We’ll explain how integration marketplaces can look by covering real-world examples. We’ll also break down its benefits and share how Merge can power yours.

But to start, let’s align on the definition of an integration marketplace. 

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What is an integration marketplace?

An integration marketplace is a place on your site or application where prospects and clients can browse through, learn about, and activate specific integrations with your product.

To power an integration marketplace, an organization can either build integrations in-house (“native integrations”) or outsource the development and maintenance to a 3rd-party solution—such as a unified API platform, an embedded workflow builder, or an integration marketplace as a service.

Integration marketplace examples

Here are a few integration marketplace case studies:

Causal‍

The modern business planning software’s marketplace breaks down integrations by category, allowing visitors to find those that suit their needs quickly. They also make it clear when an integration is currently available and when it’s not (see the Request Now banners). 

Allowing visitors to request integrations with specific apps accomplishes two things: It brings in leads and it helps their team assess the demand for specific integrations so that they can prioritize effectively.

‍Ramp

The platform—which provides corporate cards, an expense management solution, and much more—breaks down the most common integration use cases at the top of their marketplace. This helps readers validate the integration use cases they have in mind as well as uncover others they hadn’t thought of and would find valuable. 

Ramp then lists out their integrations across software categories and, to make the browsing experience even easier, they provide category filters and a search bar (where visitors can search for specific applications they’re interested in connecting to Ramp).

Related: Examples of API aggregators‍

Drata

The compliance automation platform’s integration marketplace features a search bar and a broad set of filters at the very top. The reasoning behind this is probably that since there’s a wide range of integration use cases for their platform and hundreds of integrations to choose from, they need to make the page as filterable as possible.

They’ve done a few more things to improve the user experience: They use a software category tag for each application (which is especially helpful when they offer multiple integrations with a company, like ADP); they’ve added concise benefits for integrating with a given application (this copy is often consistent across categories); and they’ve made it easy to navigate to each 3rd-party application’s website.

‍Benefits of an integration marketplace

The top benefits of an integration marketplace include closing more sales, improving customer retention, moving upmarket, and expanding to new markets.

Let’s explore each in more detail.

Increases customer acquisition

Cutting through the noise and making your product stand out in the eyes of prospects can prove difficult. 

Integrations can, fortunately, make all the difference. 

By offering more integrations and integration categories through your marketplace, your prospects can quickly grasp additional use cases with your product. The integrations can also help communicate your product’s relative maturity as well as your team’s commitment to product innovation.

Related: The benefits of having integration partners

Improves customer retention

‍‍Once customers start integrating your product with their other applications, you’ll become a more embedded part of the clients’ processes. As a result, stripping you out and replacing you may become a complex and daunting task that isn’t in the clients’ best interests. 

In addition, your integrations should provide additional value to customers, leaving them more satisfied and with less reason to churn.

Helps you move upmarket

‍Start-ups, mid-sized companies, and enterprise organizations often use different applications for a given category. For instance, within a given industry and region, a start-up might use Gusto as their HRIS, while a mid-sized company might use Namely, and an enterprise organization might use Workday. Offering up product integrations in your marketplace that fit the company profile you’re after can, therefore, prove critical in moving upmarket successfully.   

Enables you to expand into new markets

‍Similar to the last point, organizations in specific regions and industries often rely on unique sets of applications within a given software category. As a result, you can gain traction in these markets more easily and quickly by offering up the integrations your target markets care about via your integration marketplace.

Power your integration marketplace with Merge

‍As mentioned earlier, you have several options for implementing integrations for your marketplace. And while each option has its advantages and disadvantages, Merge’s unified APIs stand above the rest.

Merge offers a comprehensive set of unified API categories (CRM, HRIS, ATS, file storage, etc.), hundreds of integrations, robust common models for each category, enterprise-grade security controls, and more to help organizations deliver top-notch product integrations at scale. In addition, countless organizations have leveraged the integrations they've built with Merge to provide standout marketplaces, including the examples covered earlier (Drata, Ramp, and Causal). 

Learn how we can make integrations your competitive advantage by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.