Decathlon UK shifts to online marketplace model

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Decathlon UK are opening up their website to new partners after shifting to an online marketplace model, powered by Mirakl.

Thousands of new products will sit alongside Decathlon’s in-house products on decathlon.co.uk, enhancing Decathlon’s existing offer with technical and innovative products that ensure they offer the best range of sports goods.

Decathlon’s new marketplace will enable the company to capitalise on this growth and meet rapidly evolving consumer demand. Its online marketplace, powered by the Mirakl Marketplace Platform, will provide an environment in which businesses that sell to consumers and/or other businesses can sell physical items or services.

“We’re very proud of our in-house passion brands, and the innovation and quality they offer. However, we want to be able to offer UK customers the best choice of sports products and we believe our marketplace will achieve this.”
– Ashley Milns, Decathlon Marketplace Business Developer

In line with what was initially speculated back in 2020, Decathlon did indeed launch in Belgium before announcing their launch in the UK. Decathlon becoming an online marketplace is great news for brands and certainly opens up more avenues for businesses selling health and sports related goods, especially considering how well outdoor activities took off during the pandemic.

“Decathlon is a true Platform Pioneer. The team, driven by innovation and their desire to respond to customer demand, recognised very early on the huge value the marketplace model can bring to scale their product offering quickly. Already powering their Belgian marketplace, we are delighted to now bring our expertise and leading technology to Decathlon UK. We look forward to supporting them every step of the way as the marketplace grows.”
– Luca Cassina, Executive Vice President Customer Success EMEA, Mirakl

Decathlon has also decided to work with partners that share its values of quality and accessibility. Additionally, they are particularly excited to be working with a number of local UK brands.

3 Responses

  1. I think it is rather a bold, challenging and wonderful move. The easy way would have been selling their own products on other popular Marketplace like Amazon/ Flipkart to build the holy grail of customer data, which puts their customer’s data easily into these marketplace hands.

    We have historically seen how these data insights have been used by big marketplaces to build their own business and control the market, often at the cost of the sellers selling on their portal.

    This will surely make Decathlon UK more independent and open to future possibilities, including, new business integrations. More importantly, this move reemphasizes Decathlon UK’s commitment to its customer data privacy and build the data in more sustainable way.

    Kudos to the team….

  2. @Diviak H Dev – great point! I was thinking that myself yesterday when I first heard about this. It follows conversations we had here internally last year re: The Range marketplace, especially as Tesco had a good go at their own marketplace in previous years.

    However times have changed and people are more savvy now perhaps.

    I think that so many businesses and even personal users are starting to see that by only using 1, 2 or 3 websites/services (i.e. Amazon, Facebook, Google) for everything = the growth and ultimate dictatorship negativity of their monopoly.

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