How to Build a Marketplace Website

As Oberlo stated in their research, more than 2B people (which is more than ⅓ of the world’s population and 700M more than it was 5 years ago) will make an online purchase by the end of the current year.

It shows us that the demand increases every year and will be in the nearest future.

The marketplace business model has transformed world trade. If you want to be a part of this great globalization process and create an online marketplace — stay with us, we’ll show you how :)

📚 Types of marketplace websites

Marketplaces can be different in several ways — in the number and types of products and the people who trade on the platform.

Thus, defining what and how you sell might be the first thing you’d want to tackle when building a marketplace website.

Goods & Services 📺

When it comes to the definition of trade, “goods and services” is what you’ll see at every turn. This entails these two types of marketplaces:

• For goods.
• For services.

Let’s start with goods — the first thing that comes to mind when hearing the expression “website marketplace.”

Basically, the name speaks for itself. It’s a place where people trade goods (clothes, furniture, jewelry, food, and so on).

Forms of Trade 💸

Depending on customers that cooperate on your marketplace, the website can be:

• B2B — business model, where businesses trade with other businesses.
• B2C — business-to-customer model.
• C2C — when individuals sell goods and services to other individuals.

Let’s be more precise. There’s a B2B marketplace called chembid. They offer chemicals and plastics worldwide.

The Facebook Marketplace is one of the most famous B2C marketplaces.

The most known C2C platform on the Internet is eBay. Here every customer is a peer to another which is why this platform is also called P2P (peer-to-peer)

📈 How Do You Know Your Idea Has Potential?

Before starting to grow a business, you really need to plan your strategy and find out many things about your potential product.

These things can include:

• What pain-point does it solve?
• What’s your target audience?
• Is there an existing market for your idea?
• How do you monetize it?

Let’s follow the list and start by discussing the first aspect.

Pain-points 📛

To successfully develop a new product you should understand what problems you can solve with its help.

You should also be able to state the problem in 1-2 sentences. For instance, “My idea helps people reach point B from point A fastly”.

And finally, you should be able to answer the following two questions:

• Does your audience often face it (“the toothbrush test”)?
• Do they usually desperately need to solve it or not?

These principles were derived by Michael Seibel, the CEO of Y Combinator. The answers should be “Yes” to both questions. Then it signals that you’re on the right path.

Let’s think of Booking as an example. It’s an online travel agency for reserving hotels and other places to stay at while traveling.

Do people often need places to stay while traveling? Of course they do. Is this need essential? Sure thing, otherwise they’d have to sleep under the stars.

✅ Top Features of a Marketplace Website (For Sellers)

When building an online marketplace website, you should take into account that the different features should work differently for buyers and sellers.

To know how to make a marketplace website, you should take into account that there are two options for how you can organize it:

• Create separate solutions for buyers and sellers. It’s more common for service marketplaces to use this strategy but, of course, the ones for goods also follow this way.
• Build a website for both buyers and sellers. You can either allow them to both sell their products and buy within one account or make them re-login for each type of action.

Sure thing, we can’t know what you’ll prefer. However, what we can do is separate features for sellers and buyers.

Thus, in this section, we’ll review the basic marketplace features for sellers (contractors) you might need to make your marketplace website.

# 1: Sign Up & Profiles 🔐

This is an obligatory stage since you’re not going to sell and provide services anonymously.

Try to find balance here and don’t require too much information so that it’s not repellent for users.

Nevertheless, you can consider asking something more than name and email or phone number as and when required.

That is, to check out the functionality and how it all works, name and email should be enough. However, to actually start selling or providing services, users might need to somehow (via attaching ID or driver’s license, for example) confirm their identity and provide more detailed information.

It’s not necessary to make this feature entertaining, so you don’t have to worry about adding stickers, in-website emojis, gifs, etc.

However, we’d recommend you to make sure that it’s not possible to make an agreement outside of your app for your customers’ safety and since it can be a loss of revenue for you as well.

You can also add a chatbot — an artificial intelligence that’s intended to answer simple questions and deal with little technical problems. It’ll serve you as a Customer Support and definitely improve user experience.

Besides, via chat you can provide:

• FAQs.
• Phone support for emergencies.
• List of contacts (phone numbers, email, links to messengers like Telegram, WhatsApp, Viber, etc.)

🔝 Top Features of a Marketplace Website (For Byers)

In this section, we’ll review the main marketplace features for buyers.

# 1: Sign Up & Profiles 🔑

Since buyers have relatively less responsibility than sellers do, their Sign Up & Profiles features can be simplified.

First of all, you shouldn’t ask for too much information. Only for what’s really necessary to "seal the deal."

Besides, you should only do it when it comes to this deal. Before that, you can even renounce asking for information.

If you want to build one for services, it can consist of:

• Personal details of performers (name, phone number,etc.).
• Hourly rate.
• Ratings and comments from previous customers.
• The providers' experiences.

# 5: Payment Gateway 💱

Every item and service has its price. Thus, to buy something, users should have a secure, reliable, and user-friendly Payment Gateway.

So when creating a marketplace website, try to make sure that it:

• Is consistent with your website and various OS options.
• Allows using all popular payment methods like a credit card, PayPal, Google & Apple Pay, etc.
• Works fast, with no delays.
• Strongly protects users’ personal data.

# 6: Chat 💬

The chat for buyers isn’t that different from the one for sellers.

However, the list of FAQs might be different as they will most likely have different questions compared to sellers.

But as for the chat between customer and seller — it’s all the same.

⚙️ Tech Stack

To make your custom marketplace more functional and convenient to use, you can integrate various APIs and SDKs to your website.

• For the Payment Gateway, you can use Braintree, Stripe, or Google Pay.
• To enable Social Media Sign Up, you can use Twitter
  or Instagram SDKs.
• For the chat feature, you can use Sendbird or TalkJS.
• Another useful technology you can integrate is VR (Virtual Reality) to enable a 3D visualization of your product. A great example of such a technology can be VividWorks.
• There are some marketplace software options like Magento, Multimerch, CS-Cart, etc., that can help with multi-vendor marketplace development.

💡 Takeaways

So now that you know how to create a marketplace website let’s summarize the main steps you should take up to start an online marketplace:

• Decide on what is a marketplace website type is right for you — goods or services.
• Choose a form of trade (B2B, B2C, C2C).
• Choose the features you want to add to your platform.
• Find a Tech Partner and start your journey.

Have any other questions on how to build a marketplace website? Feel free to drop us a line — we’ll find a way to help you!