How to build a marketplace website
What is a marketplace website? We all know that a marketplace is a place for the different sellers to present their stores. It is an online platform that interconnects the different buyers and sellers and their goods and services. Nowadays there is a small change or shift in the marketplace. The online sales from individual online stores to a marketplace. There are actually different kinds of marketplaces among us.In simple, we can say that these marketplaces can differ by different types of products, interaction, and participants.
Nowadays, in this modern challenging era to make a online marketplace website and with the exciting technologies we have, it is hard to withstand the marketplace if there is no creativity in the field of web development skills required.The basic thing is to build a good marketplace and that requires planning and researching. Also, the main step is to find the targeted audience and the products or the services that you want to offer for. And you need to know the current situation of the marketplace. Find your competitors and also you need to know what makes you unique from others. And find a marketplace website builder of your needs.
How to build a marketplace business? Once you get an overview of the marketplace, the target audience, your unique feature which makes you different from your competitors, the next step is to find out the right technology stack and the best development team to make your project a success one.Also on the other hand, you have to create a user-friendly interface. We know that marketing is also an important part in creating a successful marketplace.Creating a strong brand is important to withstand in the marketplace and to create a marketing strategy for the targeted customers.
- Identification of the marketplace that you want to target
- Find out the revenue model
- Authenticating your business idea
- Selecting the required functionality
- Creating a strong market place
- Grow and Promote your marketplace business
The reason why we build a marketplace is that online marketplaces actually benefit all the parties who are involved. Nowadays all the buyers feel convenient and secure by using e-commerce platforms. Now we will be discussing in detail on how to build an online marketplace website from scratch.
- Choose the marketplace
- Find your revenue model
- Commission: This is the most popular one among the other revenue models. Here the owner of the platform charges a certain percentage of transaction as commission from both buyers and sellers.
- Subscription: The platform charges a monthly fee for the users to access the website. Once they get subscribed to the platform they can find new customers.
- Freemium: Users can use basic features for free and need to pay for accessing its advanced features.
- Advertisement: Other companies could promote their products or services on your website for a specific fee.
- Listing fee: It is a specific amount charged on sellers for posting their products on your website.
- Authenticating your business idea
- Find the functionalities required
- Simple sign up process: allows both sellers and buyers to register easily. Instead of taking more steps to register, rather give users an easy method like sign up through google, facebook, twitter etc.
- Dashboard: provide a separate dashboard for each seller. Allowing vendors to manage, track and upload products and take care of the shipping processes easily in a very effective manner.
- Search and filtering system: adding categories, subcategories and allowing the users to use the keyword as they type the search query. Implementing autocomplete search feature for better results.
- Pages for products: add quality photos, videos and product detailed description for users information.
- Payment option: Also give enough options to choose a suitable payment option.
- Building marketplace website
- Business analysis: An architecture of a website is made to brief out design and other things to be done. All user requirements are made into a list to be done as a main task. A timeline is to be set for the project by estimating the tasks listed.
- Web Design and development is the main part to gain traffic and attract customers. Design given to the website must be responsive enough for the customers to use the website in every platform like desktop, tablet and other devices. And the style applied in the website should be consistent. Once the design is done for the website the developers can add more features and functions to the website and make it more interactive.
- Testing and launching: quality assurance engineers make sure the website developed is free from bugs through manual or automatic tests. Once the testing is done it can be set to launch.
- After completing all these steps you can move to the promotional part for your marketplace business. You should have the right idea about the promotion method. It can be developed through seo, content marketing, paid traffic, influencer marketing or by means of social media.
The first and most important thing as discussed earlier is to find or choose a marketplace. If you want to build a marketplace that actually differentiates from famous websites like creating an online marketplace like amazon, you need to have a thorough background check. So you have to find a target market and target audience. For that, you need to find out the different types of online marketplaces for the betterment of your business. This valuable information or data will help you to build a best marketplace and thus in turn it will help you to get cash inflow. Here we will be discussing the different types of online marketplaces. Basically, the market places are being classified according to participants, focus and offerings .
Revenue model shows how to get stable cash flow from the platform. Monetization methods includes:
It is needed to do research on the business idea before implementing to know the demand on the platform. You can do market research to know about your competitors to make business decisions and potential users by age, location, occupation, interest and other details for promotion. Also focusing on other factors like price, convenience and market access will help in appealing the target audience.
Some functions are essential for a website showing how efficient it works.
