What is a marketplace order?
A marketplace order is an order placed through a store view whose
channel_type is marketplace — today that means Amazon, connected through
the Selling Partner API — rather than your own storefront (own_store:
PrestaShop, Shopware, WooCommerce). The distinction is not about the platform
your catalog lives on; it is about who holds the customer relationship. On
your own store the buyer is yours: an email address, a name, an address. On a
marketplace, the marketplace holds that relationship and, by design, we do
not ask it to hand over the buyer's identity.
Formula
marketplace order = order WHERE store_view.channel_type = 'marketplace'
Worked example
An Amazon order for €62 arrives with a referral commission and an FBA fulfilment fee already netted out of its contribution margin, the same as any other order — it shows up in revenue, margin, MER and every P&L line. But open the customer page and that order's buyer is not there: no lifetime value row, no cohort membership, no repeat-rate contribution. The order is fully counted; the customer behind it is not counted at all, because there is no customer record to count.
How Saldo Metrics computes it
canonical.dim_store_view.channel_type classifies every store view as
own_store or marketplace (canonical.default_channel_type, keyed off the
source platform — Amazon defaults to marketplace). Order-, revenue- and
margin-grain views (v_orders, v_contribution_margin, the P&L) do not
filter on this column: a marketplace order's money is real and counts
everywhere those views are read. Customer-grain views do filter on it —
v_customer_lifetime_value and v_cohort_economics fence their source CTEs
to channel_type = 'own_store' — because we request no PII scopes from the
Selling Partner API, so customer_key and buyer identity never populate for
these orders. The fence is on the store view, not on customer_key IS NULL,
so the exclusion holds even if a future connector fills that column in some
other way.
Why it matters
A customer page that quietly drops a chunk of the business reads as broken unless it says why. Knowing "marketplace order" as a concept is what turns Amazon's absence from the customer page from a suspected bug into an explained, deliberate boundary — the money is all there; the buyer-identity layer stops at the store view that never had one to give you.
Common mistakes
- Reading a zero or a gap on the customer page as missing data. It is a privacy boundary, not an ingestion failure — check whether the org has a marketplace store view before assuming something broke.
- Assuming marketplace orders are excluded from revenue or margin too.
They are not — only customer-level rollups (LTV, cohorts, repeat rate) fence
on
channel_type. - Expecting a workaround via the order's shipping address. No address reaches the warehouse either; there is no PII to reconstruct a customer record from.
Where you see this in the app
The note on the Customers page when an org has at least one marketplace store view, and the "what is covered" note beside an Amazon connection on the Connections tab.