How to Build a Marketplace Mobile app: Guide

However, people often misunderstand the concept of marketplaces. Is Amazon a marketplace? What about Uber? Walmart? How do I solve the chicken/egg problem? Which market should I target? What is my USP and Buyer Persona Portrait?

Your main goal as a Startup is to define customers’ pain-points and build a convenient online platform (web, mobile or both) where their needs can be satisfied by many different sellers.

We think those questions are as important as the technical side of development. That’s why we dedicated a separate paragraph to the strategic points of developing marketplace apps. Let’s dive in!

If you think that your strategy is already pretty well-developed and you would like to move straight to the technical aspects, click here!

🗂 Types of Marketplace Apps

Defining your marketplace type may help you in many ways. You have more chances to develop a successful strategy if you know what, how and to whom you’re selling.

When it comes to what, there are two possible options. You can create a marketplace app that is either:

• a marketplace for goods;
• or a marketplace for services.

Marketplaces for goods usually come to mind first when you hear the word “marketplace.” Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Wish, Alibaba, AliExpress are just some of the most popular examples.

Here are a few tips in terms of Product Design:

1. Pay lots of attention to live support within the application since customers will probably have many questions regarding shipping, refunds and return policies.
2. The Product Screen, its UI, and functionality will mean a lot to the success of your application. Make sure sellers are able to upload HD photos and fill in all of the essential info about their products to encourage users to buy goods through your platform.

Finally, depending on your customers, the marketplace may be:

• B2B — when businesses sell their products or services to other businesses.
• B2C — when businesses sell their products or services to private customers.
• C2C — when private “customers” sell their goods or services to other private customers.

However, before diving into the details of marketplace app development, let’s check a few essential strategy tips on finding your Product-Market Fit.

👍 Top 3 Strategy Tips for Marketplace Startups

Tip # 1: Step into your customers’ shoes 👞

The inability to understand customers’ real problems has led many Startups to the dead end. Michael Seibel, the CEO of Y Combinator, perfectly explained this idea in a few sentences:

• You should clearly understand who your most typical customers are.
• You should be able to state their problem in 2 sentences.
• Key metrics regarding the problem are intensity and frequency.
  • Does your audience face it frequently (the so-called toothbrush test)?
  • Are they desperate to solve it or not?

If you’ve answered yes to both questions, you’re moving in the right direction. Otherwise, you’ve selected a hard usecase and niche.

Even if you create a marketplace app with a solid tech side, you shouldn’t be in a hurry to scale. Yet, how do you know it’s the right moment to grow?

• You already have a PoC (Proof of Concept). In other words, you have already proven that you understand the pain-points of your customers and are able to satisfy them with your product.
• You have enough funding. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to put all of your money into scaling and have no backup plan. Before growing, make sure you have some funding to rely on: either paying customers or an investor.
• Your Tech-Foundation is prepared. Scaling means reaching a wider audience and thus storing bigger amounts of data, sending more push notifications, handling more transactions, etc. Make sure your service is prepared from the tech perspective.
• Your Dev Team is ready. Do you have enough employees to tackle new tasks? Are your developers open to introducing innovations? People are your main resource.

✅ Marketplace App Development: Key Challenges & Solutions

Challenge # 1

We hope the tips above will help to avoid mistakes and develop the right business strategy as you make own marketplace app. However, what are the possible technical ways to build a marketplace mobile app? Let’s take a closer look!

🛠 Tech Approaches to Develop a Marketplace App

That’s an important stop since technical performance means a lot to the success of your project. You won’t go far without a Product-Market fit but neither will you succeed with an app that has many bugs, a templated or tatty UI and offers poor Customer Experience.

At a higher level, all possible approaches can be divided into 2 groups:

• Non-custom app development.
• Custom marketplace app development.

Which one should you choose to develop a marketplace app? Let’s think!

Non-custom solutions

Some Startups choose non-custom options when it comes to choosing the way of developing marketplace apps. These are either SaaS or ready-made solutions. While they’re rather fast and often don’t require any technical knowledge, don’t expect many customization possibilities and outstanding quality.

SaaS, which is also known as Software as a Service, involves online services that allow creating marketplace websites and applications with little or no development experience. Some examples are Sharetribe, Near Me, Marketplacer, Arcadier and many others which provide the same or almost the same functionality.

It is easy to set up but offers quite limited possibilities when it comes to customizing your Customer Experience and making a Product that will look fresh and unique for your specific market.

Another option is to use app builders like OpenCart, Magneto, Durpal or any similar one. They weren’t designed specifically for marketplace app development but have some extensions that let you set up a marketplace.

Such app builders can be hardly called a good option when it comes to developing marketplace apps since it’s not even their main focus. SaaS solutions will definitely be a better choice in this category.

When should you go for a non-custom or template-based approach?

It only makes sense if you need to build a PoC very quickly and the features which the template or SaaS offers you are fully covering your needs. Sometimes, a quick and dirty PoC is the key to receiving angel funding, so you can build a custom Marketplace app, which will then be customizable and scalable.

Custom App Product development

If you don’t want to use any ready-made solutions and want to provide your users with a tailor-made application, or you have already successfully pitched your PoC to investors and have raised the funding for your MVP, then, custom app development should definitely be your choice. To put it simply, custom app development basically means coding your application from scratch, tailor-made to your business model and buyer journey of your customers.

In this case, you can either go with Native or React Native development. What’s the difference, though?

The Native approach is used when you want to develop separate applications for iOS and Android using their officially supported languages: for example, Swift or Java/Kotlin accordingly.

Alternatively, you may choose the React Native framework to develop a marketplace app with. It allows creating a single codebase in JavaScript that can be reused for both apps and make up to 70-80% of them. To put it simply, you code once and get two applications that require small platform adjustments.

Moreover, later on, it’s far easier to reuse a codebase to launch a Web-Version of your Marketplace, using ReactJS.

Nevertheless, no matter what option you choose, your future application should include a basic set of marketplace app features. Let’s review them so you don’t miss anything important.

📱 Must-Have Marketplace App Features

As we figured out earlier, there are many different types of marketplace apps. Airbnb, eBay, and Uber are all marketplaces but they have rather different functionalities.

But before we move to the features itself, let's clear one more thing. Due to the way marketplaces work — many independent sellers offer their goods or services to many customers — you should create a marketplace app that will be a comfortable platform for both.

You options narrow down to 2 solutions:

• Build separate apps for sellers and buyers. This is a more common soulton for service marketplaces (for example, Uber has a separate app for drivers and Handy — for cleaners). However, goods marketplaces sometimes also go this way. For example, Etsy has developed different applications for buyers and sellers.

• But you can also develop a single app in which users can both buy goods/services from others and place their own offers. Users either can do both things using the same account or re-login as a customer and a seller. Want examples? BlaBlaCar, Airbnb, eBay, OLX are just a few to mention.

We don't know what way you'll choose so our features list will be split in two — for customers and for sellers. However, since we describe flows the list below should fit your project anyways.

Thus, we tried to pick out the most common features that make up the backbone of any marketplace application. Let’s take a look!

Seller's Flow

# 1: Sign Up 🔐

Sign Up is a must-have for sellers since you can't offer your goods or services anonymosly.

How long and strict should this process be? It depends on the type of application.

In some cases, you may just ask for name and email, and let users handle everything else on their own. It works the best for “everyone sells to everyone” types of marketplaces where you can be a buyer and a seller at the same time.

What technical tools can help you to integrate Push Notifications and create a marketplace app in general? Check out the list below!

⚙️ Tech Stack

• As you make own marketplace app, you will definitely need a payment gateway to accept online transactions. Apple Pay, Android Pay, PayPal, Braintree, and Stripe APIs could all be useful for this purpose.
• Our favorite Push Notification service is Firebase Cloud Messaging. Some other good options are OneSignal, Urban Airship, and Amazon SNS.
• Social Login can be introduced through Facebook Mobile, Twitter, and Instagram SDKs.
• Auth0 can be used to provide even more authorization options — SMS-auth, passwordless email, and so on.
• To introduce a chat feature, we recommend using the Sendbird SDK.

💰 Cost to Build a Marketplace Mobile App

As usually, we made up a rough estimate of marketplace app development costs.

However, as we've already mentioned, "marketplace" is quite a wide concept so it's impossible to provide an accurate estimate that will cover Airbnb-like, BlaBlaCar-like and eBay-like apps at the same time. So if you want us to prepare a precise estimate for your own marketplace project, please, drop us a line and we'll help!

In this estimate we considered developing one application for both sellers and customers:

So the approximate costs to create a marketplace app are $35,000-44,000. To calculate this, we used the average hourly rate for Easter Europe - $45/hour (western companies usually charge more for the same work).

To get an accurate estimate of costs to develop a marketplace application, please, drop us a line 🙂

💡 Takeaways

Well, dear friends. We truly hope that now you’re actually prepared for marketplace app development and have everything to launch your Marketplace Startup.

We really tried to cover all the key sides — from the strategy for finding your Product-Market Fit to giving some tips on how you can provide your audience with a better UX design.

However, there’s still one important thing left - you should find a Tech Partner, who will help you at all stages — developing a PoC, MVP, validating your business model, acting as an interim-CTO, scaling your Product, etc.

Luckily, you have already found us! Drop us a line using the button below and we’ll be your Tech-Partner-in-Crime for your Marketplace Product!