Supermarkets have learned how to acquire customers through marketplaces.
The next challenge is learning how to operate them efficiently.
More Channels, More Sales — But Also More Complexity
A few years ago, digital grocery growth was concentrated in proprietary platforms.
Today it happens across marketplaces, quick commerce apps, and retail media partnerships. Each represents a genuine revenue opportunity and, at the same time, a layer of operational complexity that most grocery retailers were not originally built to absorb.
The scale of marketplace adoption across Europe is no longer in question. Today, over 60 per cent of top European retailers operate through marketplaces like Glovo, Uber Eats, Wolt, Talabat and Deliveroo. The question for supermarkets is not whether to be present across marketplaces. It is what happens to their operations when they are.
“When I started in 2020, groceries were just 2–3% of Glovo’s business. Today, they represent around 20% of GMV and continue to grow 40% year on year.”
Joana Pontes, Head of Groceries, Glovo
The Operational Fragmentation Problem
More channels should mean more revenue. But in practice, they produce more complexity, with symptoms that are familiar to any Director of Operations managing a multi-channel network:
- Multiple picking devices required per order
- In-store teams operating without a unified workflow
- Disconnected product catalogues across channels
- Inconsistent pricing between platforms
- Lost sales from real-time stock mismatches
- No consolidated operational visibility across all channels simultaneously
What has changed is the scale at which these pressures compound and what they silently cost in margin. Instaleap’s analysis across European retail operations indicates that order preparation times run up to 30% slower in fragmented multi-channel environments, with error rates running two to three times higher than in single-channel stores.
Why Marketplace Operations Break As Retailers Scale
Each new channel creates friction at three critical points of the in-store operation.
Orders Become Fragmented
Operating with separate queues, separate devices and no unified priority it’s the recipe for failure. Pickers spend time reconciling systems rather than fulfilling orders and labour cost per order rises with every channel added.
Catalogues Become Fragmented
Different platforms carry different pricing rules. When teams maintain product data manually across systems that don’t communicate, errors propagate across all channels at once.
Store Availability Becomes Fragmented
Pausing a store during a stock issue means updating every marketplace individually. Miss one, and the result is cancellations, SLA penalties, and reputational damage.
Retailers Need Multi-Channel Orchestration
Connecting to a new marketplace is no longer the hard part. What remains unsolved is the operational layer. The most progressive retailers in Europe and the Middle East are now making this transition from fragmentation to aggregation. Fragmentation is a structural design flaw: supermarkets were built to organise stores by aisle, not by API.
Closing that gap requires a new operating model, not another channel.
What Marketplace Orchestration Looks Like In Practice
For orchestration to function at the operational level it must work across four capability layers in parallel:
Order Management
A single system that covers the entire multi-channel operation. Manage the picking flow across every channel and marketplace, running on a single device and a single workflow, with real-time visibility into every order in progress.
Catalogue Management
A single source of truth for product data, stock levels, pricing, and language variants. Synchronised instantly across every connected channel.
Store Management
Centralised control over store availability across all marketplaces simultaneously. The ability to activate, pause, or snooze any store, per channel or all channels at once.
Performance Analytics
Live operational dashboards that give store managers and headquarters real-time visibility to monitor picker performance and resolve issues before they reach the customer.
When these four capabilities work together, the operation moves from reactive to predictive.
What Marketplace Orchestration Looks Like In Practice
To help retailers orchestrate marketplace operations at scale, we built the Marketplace Aggregator: a single platform that centralises every order, every channel, and every operational decision across three connected hubs.
Results From Day One
The impact is measurable from the earliest weeks of deployment.
Picking Speed
Error Rate
On-Time Delivery
Order Cancellations
Active Stores Managed
These improvements represent structural operational gains that compound across every channel, every store, and every order, with direct impact on Net Promoter Score and EBITDA.
Carrefour achieved a 10% reduction in preparation time, 40% fewer cancellations, and 32% fewer missing items. Continente, consolidating Uber Eats, Glovo, and its own Quick-Co platform, recorded a 15% reduction in preparation time and a 30% reduction in both cancellations and missing items.
The Next Stage Of Retail Growth
The grocery store of the future is already distributed. It runs across apps, marketplaces, and delivery fleets — simultaneously and at speed.
The retailers that define the next phase won’t necessarily be the ones on the most channels. They’ll be the ones managing all of them as a single, synchronised operation — with full visibility, full control, and zero fragmentation.
Sources:
- Instaleap by Instacart & Glovo. eGrocery Sales and Marketplaces: How Leading Supermarkets Are Boosting Revenue with Glovo and Instaleap. Webinar, 9 July 2025. instaleap.io/webinar-glovo-egrocery-sales-and-marketplaces
- Instaleap by Instacart. The Marketplace Aggregation Playbook: How Supermarkets Accelerate eGrocery Growth with Marketplaces, Without Sacrificing Margin or Operational Control. 2025.
- Instaleap internal benchmarks across EU retail operations.