Supercharge your SaaS with an integration marketplace

The average company uses 342 SaaS apps prompting B2B software buyers to consider integrations a top priority in their purchasing decisions. However, simply providing connections between platforms is not enough for SaaS companies to deliver a good user experience. Customers should be able to discover, activate and monitor integrations without calling customer support.

An integration marketplace offers an elegant solution to software connectivity challenges. This feature provides a centralized, self-service hub for integrations that delivers a seamless experience for customers connecting your application to their other tools. Users can create a more cohesive tech stack with just a few clicks. Marketplaces save customers time and resources and position your company as a more flexible, scalable and indispensable partner, driving higher product adoption and customer retention.

The benefits of an integration marketplace

Many B2B SaaS companies neglect or bypass creating an integration marketplace because it feels tangential to building the connections. However, the marketplace is critical in an integration strategy, enabling brands to position their integrations as core product features and enhance the overall user experience. This feature creates value for both your customers and your company by facilitating:

• A cohesive user experience
• Streamlined integration activation and management
• Increased integration adoption
• Improved product value and stickiness
• Reduced developer burden
• Streamlined customer onboarding
• Fewer support calls

By offering user autonomy, marketplaces simplify workflows and minimize the strain on customer service resources.

Keys to a successful integration marketplace

The optimal integration marketplace should offer customers a simple, seamless experience from start to finish. Important characteristics include:

• Ease of discovery

Customers can't use the marketplace if they can't find it. Showcase the feature as much as possible. Place it prominently in the main navigation of the app or website, not hidden in a submenu, and include links on relevant content pages.

Discoverability is also critical for those searching for the marketplace. Optimize the marketplace page for SEO by defining its purpose, highlighting key integrations, and connecting it to the product name, company and industry.

• Simple search capabilities

Don't make your customers click through multiple pages to find what they need. A prominent search bar should allow the user to search by title and description. Categorizing integrations with a tag cloud also enables customers to efficiently sift through options. Also, consider creating a feedback mechanism for users to notify you and request additional information when their search yields no results.

• Essential product details

Many companies often feature multiple integrations with similar names, which makes providing additional information critical. Include a description of essential differentiators to help users understand what the integration accomplishes, and list any prerequisites or dependencies.

• Self-activation features

The ability to activate an integration is an indispensable function of a marketplace. Turning an integration on should be intuitive and simple, removing friction and enabling a customer to immediately benefit from the connection.

• Configurable integrations

Every company has different environments and processes. Empowering users to customize an integration provides greater flexibility and control and enhances your product's value.

• Self-support features

It's inconvenient to call customer support every time there's an issue. The ability to view and actively monitor integration logs allows customers to troubleshoot many of their own problems for enhanced efficiency.

Support for building a marketplace

Building and maintaining an integration marketplace requires significant engineering resources,  and often distracts from core product work, making in-house development impractical for many companies. An embedded integration marketplace from a third party -- often an embedded IPaaS platform -- alleviates the development burden. Your customers get the marketplace benefits without dev teams having to build or maintain the infrastructure. These interfaces are white-labeled, so you can customize the look to make it feel like a native part of your platform.

An embedded marketplace empowers your company to scale its integration capabilities. Rather than repeatedly creating one-off integrations, dev teams can build them once and deploy them to each customer who needs them, freeing devs to focus on innovating the core product and building new integrations.

Making integrations accessible

In a competitive market, integrations can be differentiators -- but only if users can find and activate them. Requiring customers to seek external assistance for integrations conflicts with their goal of creating a frictionless tech stack. Marketplaces enable autonomy, delivering the convenience users crave while also showcasing your platform's capabilities. A marketplace should be an indispensable part of your integration strategy.

Michael Zuercher is CEO and co-founder of Prismatic, a leading embedded integration platform (embedded iPaaS) for B2B SaaS companies. A second-time founder, he previously scaled a software company whose product had hundreds of integrations serving thousands of customers. He passionately believes that B2B SaaS companies need a better way to build and manage integrations.