Everything in our world switches to online, and the mall experience is no exception. Modern sellers want to become more efficient by switching from dozens of small brick-and-mortar shops across the country to online service, while buyers want to purchase any goods and services from the comfort of their own couch.
This guide is designed to help non-technical business leaders understand the fundamentals of building and scaling a thriving digital marketplace. We’ll delve into key considerations, best practices, and common pitfalls to avoid.
Exploring the market
Building a successful digital marketplace requires careful planning and strategic execution. To get the best results, you need to conduct in-depth market research, including not only clients and rivals but even nearby niches.
Comprehensive research is the only way to determine what you need and what you DON’T NEED to do. Find out the mistakes of your rivals and what you can learn from them to develop the best marketplace strategy.
Inspect The Niche
First of all, determine the niche and sub-niche of your marketplace. Explore your unique value proposition and answer your next questions:
- What problem does your marketplace solve?
- Who is your target audience? Why they?
- What specifics of potential sellers and buyers on your potential marketplace?
- What do they need? Why your rivals don’t give them that? Can you deliver it?
Implement in-depth competitive analysis by analyzing each rival with a SWOT matrix. Collect customer Insights by conducting surveys, interviews, or analyzing social media to understand user needs and preferences.
Why do you need to gather THAT MUCH Data?
It’s vital to gather as much data as possible, as it will constitute the foundation of all your work. If you do not have enough information about rivals’ mistakes, you might fail in marketplace optimization and create an unusable service.
But if you know what to do and how to make it best, you improve your chances of becoming the best in your niche. It lowers your risks of failure and provides you with insights about reasonable resource allocation.
Choose Marketplace Models
There are 3 major models of marketplace platforms. There are B2B, B2C, and P2P marketplaces. Here are the key differences between them:
- B2B (Business-to-Business): Transactions occur between businesses. The buyer’s journey is long and complex as it is aimed at decision-makers. It may take weeks or months to persuade the client to take the action.
- B2C (Business-to-Consumer): Transactions occur between businesses and individual consumers. The buyer’s journey is usually shorter as it is aimed at the general user.
- P2P (Peer-to-Peer): Transactions occur directly between individuals. It suits economy models, where individuals can directly connect to exchange goods or services.
Key Considerations for Marketplace Development
Before you even start to actually develop marketplace software solutions, it’s time to keep in mind the next considerations:
- Prioritize intuitive user interface for both buyers and sellers.
- Implement secure and efficient payment gateways.
- Establish reliable shipping and logistics solutions, especially for B2C and P2P models.
- Provide customer support to address inquiries and resolve issues promptly.
- Enforce robust security measures to protect user data.
- Use multiple marketing channels to build brand awareness.
- Adhere to relevant laws and regulations, especially regarding taxes, licensing, and consumer protection.
We recommend you start with the basic MVP (minimum valuable product) and build your further strategy relying on the feedback. You don’t need to create some extra fancy platform at the beginning, as you still modify it. Thus, in most cases, MVP would be enough.
Custom Develomplent Or Templates: What To Choose
Multi-vendor marketplace development takes a lot of time and effort. So, it requires careful planning. To save time, many businesses decide to use templated solutions. However, to make a well-calculated choice, you should understand the specifics of both approaches.
Custom development provides you with unprecedented freedom of choice. You can create any platform that you want to, but it will take a lot of time.
You can simplify the lives of the developer team by using specific tools and platforms. React, Angular, and Vue.js can help them create a user-friendly interface. PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and MySQL will be useful for those who need comprehensive databases, not just an “Excel spreadsheet.”
Meanwhile, using templates is a completely different approach. They suit those who want to create a relatively simple platform at an early date. Let’s examine its advantages and disadvantages to determine whether it fits you.
The most common marketplace platforms where you can build your website are Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce.
We at Corpsoft Solutions prefer a hybrid approach of using templated and custom solutions in one project. That way, you can get the best of both worlds while saving time and money. You can even use cloud solutions to save on server maintenance. Cache static files, as it can speed up page loading for users.
Determine your budget, deadlines, and marketplace growth strategies. Perform the next steps only once you are done with preparation. Don’t rush yourself.
Developing Catchy UX/UI Design For Your Marketplace
UX (User Experience) and UI (User Interface) are two interrelated processes that are crucial for your marketplace growth. UX (User Experience) is the experience a user has while interacting with a product. It’s about how easy, convenient, and enjoyable it is for a user to interact with your online service marketplace, how simple and logical it seems, and what emotions it evokes.
UI (User Interface) is the visual component of a product, meaning everything a user sees on the screen. It includes fonts, colors, buttons, icons, page layouts, and more. UI should not only be visually appealing but also functional, supporting the UX.
If you choose a proper marketplace design, it will naturally retain users as they are curious to explore your platform. Use the next 5 principles of marketplace development:
- Simplicity: If you can remove something without ruining the platform’s premise, do it.
- Logicality: Intuitively-friendly interface that meets client’s needs.
- Site speed: The faster, the better.
- Personalization: Ensure that your marketplace algorithms correctly analyze user’s interests and match offers to their needs.
- Mobile version: Your international marketplace should be available on laptops, tablets, and mobile phones.
However, to ensure that you’ll develop the best possible platform, you need to create multiple prototypes to check your ideas. There are three stages of prototyping. During the low-fi prototyping, a team creates a dummy mockup on the paper just to test the main ideas. You can have even 15-20 mockups during this stage.
During the mid-fi stage, you choose 3-5 mockups and create an early prototype, showcasing crucial features. The hi-fi prototype is the latest stage, where you choose between 2 setups to determine which of them becomes the reference for future development.
Test all your prototypes to fix potential issues in your marketplace before the release. Sometimes what you may imagine as a user-friendly element/function may become too tricky for your clients. Perform A/B tests to have a quick idea of what’s working and what is not.
The most common tools for digital prototyping while you build a marketplace website, are:
- Figma: One of the most popular collaborative design tools that can help you to create interactive prototypes.
- Adobe XD: Vector design tool that you can use for creating a site prototype.
- Sketch: Vector graphics tool for MacOS.
- InVision: Online whiteboard and collaborative mindmap.
- Axure RP: A software for creating prototypes and specifications for websites and applications
- Proto.io: Another software that helps you to create interactive hi-fi prototypes.
Choose a prototyping tool depending on the project’s complexity. InVision or Marvel suits simple cases, while Figma and Axure RP will be a perfect fit for complete projects with a lot of interactive elements. If your team is are novice in web design, pick services with friendly interfaces and huge communities like Figma or Adobe XD.
Development and MVP Testing
Once you determine the project’s vision, it’s time to actually create a marketplace by starting with MVP. Minimum Viable Product is the simplest form of a product that focuses only on core features. Its main purpose is to validate core hypotheses and gather user feedback.
MVP of any product, including the saas marketplace platform, gathers real-world user feedback in the early development stages. If properly implemented, it fastens time to market and mitigates potential risks in the long run.
You can launch MVP on the market as the “beta-test” option, so you may collect real user feedback. It helps you to improve the marketplace consumer experience while still testing the service. Check the short list of crucial MVP features in the picture.
What Does Any MVP should have:
- Registration/Signing In
- Simple search
- Shopping cart
- Adding products to the marketplace as the seller
Basic payment methods
Promote your MVP as a beta test, not like the final product. However, ensure that it properly works, as if you release buggy MVP, users may assume that the final version will be not-so-friendly too. So, it’s better to release a relatively stable product as the MVP.
Here is what you need to do:
- Determine your goals. What do you want to achieve, and which problems do you need to solve?
- Determine crucial features. What is vital, and what can you drop along the way?
- Create a prototype. Visualize your MVP to realize what you need to create.
- Develop the MVP. Create the basic version of your future platform.
- Real-live testing. Collect as much customer feedback as possible.
SEO And Content Marketing
Content is the king. To ensure the best promotional results, you should combine promotional tactics. The most common are SEO, social media promo, PPC, affiliate marketing, and influence marketing. We recommend you mix multiple promotion approaches to get the best results in your marketplace advertising.
Before starting any marketing, take a closer look at your target audience, determine your strategic and target goals, and create a promotion strategy that will align with them. It relates to any business, whether it’s a white-label software marketplace, assistance marketplace, finance platform, etc.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimization of a site and its content to reach the search engine needs to increase chances of getting into the first results of the search query. Successful SEO can lead to increased organic traffic since most users tend to watch only the first results from Google search queries.
It takes at least 2-3 months to see the first results, but they are long playing. After you secure the “place under the Sun,” the user will see your page in search queries for quite a long. Usually, we talk about months. However, to achieve these results you need to use long and niche keywords that are popular with your clients but don’t have that much competition among the rivals.
Optimize your website by using the latest UI-practices to make users comfortable on your site. Optimize all content, including titles, descriptions, and photos. Implement link-building strategies, adding links to your marketplace on other platforms.
This practice is especially vital for b2b marketplace development. Business users pretend not to react so actively on social media or paid articles. While you still need them with B2B marketplaces, concentrate on the SEO building your organic traffic.
Social Media
As of early 2025, using social media is vital for your promo. Especially it relates to a B2C marketplace, where you create an emotional bond with your potential sellers and buyers.
Post on socials and use paid ads to target precise promo to different parts of your target audience. It’s better to run more campaigns at once than to use one promo for multiple unrelated user portraits.
Remember old marketing memes where King Charles and Ozzy Osbourne may look like the same target persona, while in reality, you need to use different approaches to them since they have completely different psychographic portraits.
Social media is the place where you can directly communicate with your clients and build long-lasting relationships with them. Create your brand public persona, directly ask your users what they like and what you need to improve in communications with them.
Tell them about your values. Show that you are a business that is open to dialogue. In some cases, your socials can become your additional sales channel since they have the potential to promote the brand in a non-obtruding way.
PPC
Pay-Per-Click is the promo where you pay only when the user clicks on your promo. It won’t be your only promotional channel, but it definitely can help you in your marketing. The most common PPC platforms are Google Ads, Meta Ads, and TikTok Ads Manager.
Set a list of keywords that may trigger the campaign. If users often search for info with those keywords, the system will understand that it can show ads related to that topic to them.
Beware that the more common (or well-paid) the niche, the higher the price for a click. It relates even when you run a third-party marketplace, as you may still need to closely collaborate with some sellers helping them to sell their products under your platform.
Affiliate Marketing
This type of promotion can help you raise new clients by collaborating with other businesses or bloggers who will act as partners. They post about you on their sources, leaving the affiliate link. Once the user performs a targeted action (usually its sale), you pay the affiliate some percentage of this sale.
If you use templated marketplace management software, you may have built-in integrations with common affiliate platforms. Use them to provide special affiliate links, banners, and other marketing materials. By using affiliate marketing, you improve your link-building strategy while paying only for results.
Influence Marketing
Influence marketing is the collaboration with opinion leaders in your niche. You can try a partnership with regular influencers or collaborate with affiliate influencers. The choice is up to you.
However, before you even start to work with them, conduct the market analyzis. Look for bloggers in your and potentially related niches. Analyze their audience, whether it fits you and they are ready to take immediate action, or you’ll use blogger get for brand awareness.
Keep in mind: Follower count is not the most important thing. Sometimes, a relatively small influencer with 50K subscribers can have a more coherent audience that provides you better results rather than huge bloggers with millions of followers.
Develop a content plan in tandem with influencers. They know their audience, so they can modify your ideas to get the best possible results for your campaign. Once the influencer publishes the content, analyzes campaign performance and uses this data to make the next collaboration even better.
Post-Release Marketplace Support
Creating a marketplace website is not enough to achieve success. If you want to become the best on the market, you need to constantly improve your product to meet the latest requirements and standards. So, after you release the marketplace, you should analyze user data, make the software product better, and release new features among the firsts.
Become the trendsetter while ensuring that your platform is still easy to use. It will increase the chances of getting even more loyal clients that will provide free word-of-mouth promotion to your platform.
Keep in mind that scaling can be complex even when you have the best marketplace tools. That’s why it’s so crucial to collaborate with experts who already have experience in turn-key marketplace development and promotion. Corpsoft Solutions is one of those teams.
We have experience in e-commerce marketplace development, finance, and healthcare software solutions, so we can help you with your project.
Wrapping Up
Developing and promoting your project can be complex, even when you have the best marketplace tools. That’s why it’s so crucial to collaborate with experts who already have experience in turn-key marketplace development and promotion.
Corpsoft Solutions is one of those teams. We have experience in e-commerce marketplace development, health tech, software solutions and promo, so we can help you with your project.
We collaborate with businesses, providing partial and whole turnkey solutions to businesses who want to create their own software solutions. We analyze the market, design the promotion strategy, develop the actual platform, modify existing solutions, do marketing, and further support.
Want to turn your ideas into reality? Book the first free consultation with the Corpsoft Solutions team!
FAQ
- What is a marketplace?
A marketplace is an online platform that connects buyers and sellers, allowing them to transact goods. It functions as a digital shopping mall where various sellers can offer their products, and buyers can explore dozens of options in one place.
- How to build a marketplace website?
To build a marketplace website, you’ll need to define your niche and validate your idea. After that, choose a business model and decide the types of marketplaces that suit you. Design the user interface and develop the platform. The last steps are to test the platform and successfully launch it.
- How to build an online marketplace?
If you want to build a successful online marketplace, explore the niche and find unfulfilled audience needs. Develop your marketplace to ensure that your platform closes this gap. Analyze the user data and trends to become the trendsetter in your niche.
- How to build a marketplace app?
Define your niche and core features. Design a user-friendly interface and choose a suitable tech stack. Develop a robust backend to handle user accounts, product listings, payments, and search functionality. Test thoroughly, gather feedback, and iterate to improve user experience. Launch your platform and promote it through marketing strategies.
- What is a marketplace business model?
A marketplace business model is a platform that connects buyers and sellers to facilitate transactions. The platform owner provides the infrastructure and tools, while sellers list their products, and buyers purchase them. The platform generates revenue through fees or commissions on each transaction.
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