Email deliverability for marketplaces
Where the addresses come from
- Buyer sign-ups, usually consumer addresses captured at signup.
- Seller onboarding, business addresses attached to a payout relationship and therefore well maintained.
- Guest checkout, where somebody buys once and never creates an account.
- Alert preferences, which determine who receives what and are often ignored in list planning.
Transactional volume dwarfs marketing
Order confirmations, shipping updates, message alerts, dispute alerts and payout notices all vastly outnumber whatever the marketing team sends. The reputation is built by the transactional stream and spent by the marketing one.
A failure is also two-sided. A seller who does not receive a message alert leaves a buyer waiting, and the marketplace gets the complaint about both.
Sellers have the higher-value addresses. They are business contacts attached to payouts, and a seller who misses a payout notice or a policy change contacts support rather than shrugging.
What the results tend to look like
Split. Buyer addresses behave like any consumer list and resolve reasonably well. Seller addresses are business domains with the usual catch-all share, and they are the ones where a failure costs the most.
What to do about it
Monitor bounces per user rather than per campaign
A marketplace failure is one seller unreachable rather than a campaign statistic, and it never appears in a campaign report.
Surface a delivery failure in the product
Tell the user their address is failing, in the interface, where they will see it. They cannot read the email telling them their email does not work.
Separate transactional from marketing sending
A promotional campaign should not be able to delay a dispute alert.
Check seller addresses at onboarding
They are attached to payouts and policy contact, which makes them the highest-result addresses in the system.
Questions people ask
Why is a marketplace bounce different from a campaign bounce?
Because it breaks a transaction between two other people. A seller who never receives a buyer's message looks unresponsive, and the marketplace absorbs the complaint from both sides.
How should a failing address be communicated?
In the product interface, not by email. Someone whose address is bouncing cannot read a message explaining that their address is bouncing.
Which addresses matter most?
Sellers. They are tied to payouts and policy notices, and a missed alert there costs more than a missed promotion to a buyer.
Related sectors
See the breakdown on your own list
100 free checks a month, no card. Addresses we could not get an answer on come back labeled rather than guessed at, and we do not bill them.