Thirty years ago, the whole world was revolutionized by the emerging market of selling products online. While start-ups have seized the opportunities offered by this new sector, many large companies have not been able to turn the corner in time and are still learning how to do so today. Now is the time for a second, bigger, revolution, the sale of services online.
Sourceforge recently caught up with Clément Schereck, co-founder and COO of Cocorico, one of the major actors in the e-commerce service industry. Cocorico decided to develop an open-source software that would standardize the selling of services online, and provide all businesses with a reliable option for doing this.
Q1 : Why did you choose to create this company? What are some of the challenges you encountered?
The 4 founding partners of Cocorico all worked for the service e-commerce industry, and our professional paths crossed due to this. 2 of us were involved in the technical aspect of creating service marketplaces and 2 of us were service marketplace entrepreneurs. We saw the opportunities rising and the numerous underlying challenges connected to it, so we all went to service e-commerce providers. This gave us the opportunity to observe the market more wisely. We are well aware of the challenges developers, operators and project leaders can encounter when trying to feature services on classic e-commerce sites. The first lines of the Cocorico code were written in 2016 and just 5 years later, over 1,000 platforms have been launched thanks to our technology.
Q2 : Why did you specifically choose service marketplace?
We didn’t, users and customers chose for us. The opportunities for selling services online has been there as long as the internet has existed. The platforms Uber and Airbnb, to name a few, showcased how offering services through a marketplace strategy provides a huge potential for both growth and scalability. The demand for the online sale of services was there, but in order to provide competitive technology, there is no general solution, you must be specific. When you compare the 2 big families of marketplaces, product marketplaces and service marketplaces, the challenges you will encounter when launching when launching either type of marketplace are opposite from one another. For example,with a product marketplace handling the availability of stock is one of the biggest problems, whereas for a service platform you have to manage the availability of the vendors. Sometimes it’s difficult to determine if a product or a service is being sold on the platform. A good example of this can be observed with Uber eats, are you purchasing the food as a product or the delivery of the food as a service? It’s the role of the marketplace operator to define whether a product or service is being sold and they then must create a more adapted user experience for the platform.
Due to the different user experience and user interface, each platform has its own technical specificity which means that this can not be provided by the same solution. E-commerce was already at its golden age while the opportunity for service marketplace was on the rise, which is why we chose to specialize in service marketplaces.
By making the decision to exclusively sell services, we are able to offer the most competitive features. Cocorico has over 1600 features that are dedicated to selling services.
Q3 : What type of company are you working with? Is there a specific industry?
There is not a specific type of company we are working with. We have worked with all types of companies from small start-ups, to large corporations. We have even worked with government agencies, and of course we have also provided freelance developers with solutions. When we take a step back and look at the different sectors we have worked with, it’s crazy to see how applicable the e-commerce industry is across the board.. Who would have guessed we would launch a marketplace to rent farm equipment and a platform that connects precision medicine laboratories using the same technology? The possibilities for service marketplaces are endless, and that is why it can be adapted for all industries.
Due to the market becoming increasingly aware,, we decided to extend our services with Hatch, our SaaS solution. In order to understand how the Cocorico group as a whole is working, Cocolabs tailors marketplaces based on Cocorico for large corporations, while Hatch allows project leaders to launch their service marketplaces through a self hosted SaaS. This logic enables us to provide each need with the right technological and financial fit.
Q4 : Why did you choose to be an open-source software?
Open-source has been a part of who we are since the beginning. Primarily because we use an open-source stack as much as possible and secondly because we know how much our talented team shares this value. In addition to that, it is amazing how an open-source solution enables you to interact with other developers and project leaders around the world. That’s why we built Cocorico on using the Symfony framework.
Open-source additionally provides an advantage to our customers. Thanks to the community of over 700 developers who worked on Cocorico, our customers are assured to have a competitive solution that is stable while offering high performance for their business. Platforms launched using Cocorico are sustainable since customers will always be able to go in the code, and maintain their platform internally which is not the case for many other solutions. Going in the same direction, open-source is rich with abundant support: the developers community will always help to solve any problems they may encounter.
Open-source is also a good reflection of the way we are working inside the company: our employees are all very implicated in what they are doing and are always open to sharing their knowledge.
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