A data shop is a digital storefront on which a data provider lists their data products. It enables providers to market their data business by creating listings and adding explanatory, branding assets, such as a description of their USPs or positive customer testimonials. From a data shop, the provider can then sell datasets and licenses just like any e-commerce company would. Data shops are designed to be user-friendly for both buyer and provider: easy to browse and purchase from; simple to set up and manage.
Data providers can run proprietary data shops, built using their own tech stack and managed independently. The benefit of running your own data shop is that you don’t pay a subscription or success-based commission fee for the shop as you would with third-party software. However, the data shop’s reach is pretty limited. It also requires a lot of engineering effort to develop an online shop from scratch.
Alternatively, data-as-a-service companies can set up their data shop on data marketplaces or data commerce platforms. Data commerce platforms work like Shopify does for retail and consumer goods. They make building an online data shop much faster and easier, as they’re built to making listing and selling data products simple. They also enable providers to brand themselves as they like so they stand out from other providers on the marketplace. Data commerce platforms like DCC improve the data shop’s reach by making the provider’s storefront available across multiple channels.
