The model of the online marketplace is simple and it can be applied to any industry.  

Think about it, if you want to buy groceries what do you do? You pick up your phone, open the Amazon app and order the monthly groceries. Or you are planning a trip with your family to Europe, where are you going to stay? Let’s book a villa on Airbnb, is the first thought.  

This is just the beginning of the marketplace economy. In the next decade, more marketplaces are going to emerge for different sectors. It makes total sense that the marketplace is such a hot pick today for every wannabe entrepreneur. Most startups that make it big have one common string – they solve a big problem with simple tech solutions.  

Marketplace apps also benefit the economy vastly. For starters, they help local businesses reach a wider consumer base. Traditional businesses can make a brand without any investment. All they have to do is list their products on the marketplace.  

Before we look into the details of what you need to start an online marketplace, a word of caution – you must have heard that marketplace apps can be scaled to a billion-dollar business. This is true, but it’s not a piece of cake. And it definitely can’t be done overnight. You have to be patient and put in the work.  

Now let’s see what do you need to start your own online marketplace  

1. A revolutionary idea  

Coming up with an idea for a marketplace app is not difficult. You don’t have to have a disruptive idea like uber was when it first started. Marketplace apps are a successful business model. All you have to do is identify a market sector where there is a need for a marketplace.  

Amazon started with books and slowly ventured into other categories. Another successful marketplace ideas are Airbnb for booking a place to stay while you are traveling.  

An Indian startup, Zomato, which is a food delivery app has seen massive success. It started with specific Indian cities and now has an international presence.  

Also Read: Quick Insights: What You Need To Know To Build A Successful Marketplace App In 2021

The idea can be about any sector, art, music, medicine, pharma, human resources, anything. Just make sure that there are two parties – the buyers and the sellers.  

Here is another example to get your creative gears roaring. Studio time is an LA-based marketplace to rent studios for recording music. It is now present in New York and London as well.  

2. Sellers and buyers  

The two pulling ends of a marketplace are the sellers and buyers. Before you start working on your app or website, start interacting with buyers and contacting sellers to get on board. Getting both – buyers and sellers is the most difficult part of the entire marketplace development journey. It happens a lot that you get the sellers to agree but by the time buyers arrive they are gone.  

When Amazon and Flipkart started their operations overseas like India, they started with both ends at the same time – the customers and the businesses.  

But for new marketplaces, it is better to focus on one market at a time. Try to secure the initial supply before you call the customers to buy. Don’t get too greedy with the features or services you are planning to include in the app. Don’t try to build everything for everybody and get everyone on board.  

A piece of advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, spend time with your users. There is nothing more beneficial than listening to the users, identifying their problems, and including them in the solutions. You are far more likely to succeed if your users are engaged with the platform every step of the way. 

3. The tech stack  

The technology you choose to build the app is the foundation of your app’s success. This is where all buyers and sellers will be. If you don’t have a technical background, it will be a good idea to find co-founders or hire an excellent offshore react native company to help you figure out the technology side of the marketplace business.  

Building a marketplace is far more complex than creating an eCommerce store. You need scalability, you need to provide app/website access across all devices and platforms. And you also need to make sure that the servers never go down. NEVER. If that happens either the buyers will kill you or the sellers will.  

Another important part of the marketplace is payment integration. You need very secure payment setups and you need multiple payment options too. Think about it, what if you provide only one type of online payment option and due to some reason it goes down. What will you do? That is why you must have all the standard payment options like cards, net banking, PayPal, and the local ones too depending upon your demographic.  

Also Read: Develop An Ecommerce App That Is Loved By Thousands

Lastly, the technology you choose to host the app must be of the latest version. And as technology changes every 6 months, you need to make sure that you’re not 3 versions behind. Older tech stacks are not good for the functionality of the app/website and your marketplace business repo.  

An older technology stack also lacks the required standards needed to provide a great user experience.  

4. MVP  

It is tempting to think about selling to millions of customers right away. It is good motivation but not an effective business strategy. You should know that it takes sweat and time to build a massive marketplace like amazon, Etsy, and Airbnb.  

When you are first starting in your market niche don’t worry about being the best or creating the perfect app for your customers on the first try. There is no such thing as a perfect marketplace. You should focus on building a minimum viable product first and getting it to the market.  

Just build a product which a few users will be interested in. get the feedback, iterate, and grow from there. If you try to do all the things at once, it might fall flat. Learn from the big players – they started small and built their way up. So can you.  

5. Sell  

After building your version of the app/website, it’s time to sell. The more you sell the more successful your marketplace is.  

Selling more is the unbeatable strategy to crush your competition. There are always some big players in the market with big pockets and to beat them, you must provide customers what they want. Optimize the search results and suggestions for users so that they would buy more.  

Without selling, your marketplace startup is bound to fail.  

Ready to build your own marketplace?  

Now you know what you need to get started with your own marketplace. Remember that your niche will set your marketplace apart and combined with relentless execution will help you beat any competition. Get buyers to meet the initial demand and initial trust in users with every visit.  

Have a marketplace idea? Contact our marketplace app development company and get started.  

The post What Do You Need To Start Your Own Online Marketplace? appeared first on Imenso Software.

You also have an idea and have decided to build a marketplace app. And you are right (maybe) about its success. So how to be sure that your marketplace app idea works.  

But before jumping on to start building your “gonna be a success” marketplace app it is imperative that you know the depth of creating a marketplace app business.

Especially if you are new to this arena, knowing key parts of the process might save a lot of time and investment. And as the saying goes that in today’s world, it is not the person with the idea that succeeds it is the one with great execution. You need to understand the nitty-gritty of marketplace app development.  

Let’s get started.  

What is a marketplace app? 

A marketplace is where people buy and sell stuff. A marketplace app is just that but in your palms. The common examples of the marketplace are eCommerce stores like Amazon and eBay where there are millions of buyers, multiple vendors selling the same stuff and the platform facilitates the transactions.  

The more recent trend in marketplace app development is to provide professionals as a service. The top examples are Upwork, Fiverr and UrbanClap.  

Also Read: Easy Mobile App Ads Monetization Guide 2021

Each new vendor and customer added to the marketplace creates a positive impact on the ecosystem.  

Where are the most potential to create a marketplace?  

To accurately predict what will happen we need to dive into the past.  

The first marketplace app to make it big was Uber in 2009. The simple idea just took an entire industry by storm and has since become a massive success.  

After Uber, other companies like Amazon, eBay and Etsy launched their apps in the early 2010s which now has billion-dollar valuations.  

According to Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm – Andreessen Horowitz the next wave of most successful marketplace apps will be from regulated service industries like healthcare, law, and finance.  

So if you have an app idea to replace intermediates from these industries, you are on the right road.  

Different types of marketplace  

Generally, when we categorize marketplaces we tend towards what is the commodity being traded. For marketplace apps, we can divide based on other criteria as well.  

1. Commodity  

• Physical goods – Amazon, eBay 
• Services – Urbanclap 
• Staffing/Hiring – Fiverr, Upwork  

2. Structure 

• market place – Airbnb  
• Market network – Pared 

3. Participants

• Two-sided – Uber 
• Multi-sided – Doordash 

4. Audience 

• B2B – Dial4Trade 
• B2C – Instacart 
• C2C – Letgo 

Now let’s talk about the development process. 

Features  

The exact stack of features for a marketplace app depends on the core service, product or commodity you are offering.  

For an online eCommerce marketplace, there are primarily two parts – a customers profile to buy products using a shopping cart and an admin panel to manage users.  

Also Read: Top 10 User Design Strategies Of 2021 To Reduce Bounce Rate

Although this sounds easy, building a marketplace app is a massive undertaking. One quick hack to build the feature collection you want is to use off the shelf components.  

Now let’s see what are the technology requirements you will need to build the desired features.  

Technology stack  

As we discussed that the basic feature of marketplace apps is to create two-sided platforms one for buyers and the other for admin. You can choose any combination of technology to build a marketplace app as long as it can handle large databases, thousands of users in a day and is scalable.  

To build a marketplace app, eCommerce platforms capabilities might not be enough. If you are looking for detailed functions with top performance, you can hire dedicated developers to build the app from the ground up.  

Here at Imenso, we love to use React Native to build mobile apps for Android and iOS and React.js/Node.js for web application development. Here is a stack of different APIs and SDKs we use to build different parts of the marketplace app:  

• Authentication: Google, Apple IChat: Twilio, SendBird 
• Mapping: Google Maps, Apple Maps, Mapbox 
• Payments: Stripe, PayPal, RazorPay 
• Back-end: Firebase 

For more details you can contact our expert developers, we would love to help you out.  

How much does it cost to make a marketplace app? 

To quote the exact price of marketplace app development is difficult. It depends on many factors including which operating system it is being built for (android, iOS or hybrid development), what is the size and complexity of the app and where the marketplace app development company is located. For different countries the hourly rate of development changes.  

• For US marketplace development company – $80 – $200 / hour 
• For UK marketplace development company – €50 – €150 / hour 
• For India marketplace development company – $20 – $100 / hour  

After adding the overhead expenses and approximate time taken for building marketplace app can be within $5000 – $50000.  

Important things you can’t miss while marketplace app development  

1. Engage the users and sellers simultaneously  

One major sore point for marketplace app developers is the classic chicken or egg situation. As a marketplace app owner, you need the supply and the demand to fulfill the supply. You need to entice the users and sellers at the same time. 

For a food delivery app, you need to show customers that restaurants are delivering their orders and to get restaurants to sign up you need to show that there are already customers using the app. So how do you pull this off? Rather than exhausting your entire budget on hiring a growth expert, there are measures you can take within the app.  

Hacks: 

1. Make it ultra-easy to share the app 
2. Use referral programs and provide benefits for sharing  
3. Integrate API to get promotions from other highly used platforms  

2. Make a prototype and validate your idea  

The right way to win is to learn from the users themselves. Take it from the Airbnb founders and create your MVP to launch it quickly and take users feedback. You don’t want to spend the entire budget on software development to find out that no one is interested in using it.  

Also Read: Best Web Development Frameworks In 2019

Getting that initial traction on the app is the best way to validate your marketplace app idea.  

Another benefit of launching the MVP is that you can talk to users, track their behavior and figure out what are some additional features which can be added to customize the marketplace as per your users. You can learn about the market and develop the app at the same time.  

3. Start engaging with users even before launch  

The last thing you must know about the marketplace app ecosystem is to interact with your customers even before the platform is ready. You should gain more insights into their specific needs and a problem so that the app turns out to be a perfect solution and brings the required value.  

This blog post was a quick introduction to the world of marketplace app crafting. We are sure you have many more questions and we are here for them. Just talk to our experts. And if you need more development or design inspiration check out our previous work samples we have built for our clients. 

The post Quick Insights: What You Need To Know To Build A Successful Marketplace App In 2021 appeared first on Imenso Software.