There are so many solutions for the online marketplace. You've probably seen some of them and already thought about which one you should pick. We know, it's a tough choice to make, but don't you want to create that marketplace? It's a wonderful opportunity to start your own business that will bring you much joy and profit. And all you have to start with getting off the most appropriate choice.
What Is a Marketplace Platform?
So what is a marketplace platform after all? It's an online multi-store that connects buyers and sellers. It all happens on one platform without any additional parties. This is where people can buy, rent or swap products, or negotiate the price. In other words, it's an online shopping mall.
Some of the best examples of such marketplace are Amazon, eBay, and many others. You've definitely seen those platforms sell different categories of goods within one marketplace website.
It can also come in the form of an app, which seems to be more common these days. But it all depends on your target audience, of course.
The owner of the marketplace doesn't own any of those goods that are sold on the market. They simply sign the contract with vendors and sell their goods. Thus, they don't need to stack lots of things at home and just can pay more attention to their business.
There are three types of marketplaces:
- a global marketplace that sells everything;
- a vertical marketplace that sells only one type of product;
- a horizontal marketplace that sells goods from different categories, but all of them have similar features.
What Is a Marketplace Platform Advisor?
So you have decided to set up a marketplace. Congratulations! Building a marketplace business is an incredible adventure and a journey full of learning, no matter the outcome.
A marketplace platform advisor is a unique tool that helps you select the online marketplace CSS best suited for your needs.
The advisor helps you to create an online marketplace where you can sell goods or services. There are plenty of online marketplace platforms, and the advisor helps you to pick the one you really need. The CSS that the advisor will choose will suit all your preferences, budget, and other criteria. They start with Wordpress and end at Sharetribe.
Below, we will give our recommendation on picking a platform and share with you all the information the platform advisor can help you with. Our main goal is to make all the work with the marketplace platform advisor easier.
Which Platforms Are Best for Building an Online Marketplace?
Have you been thinking who you want to see as your advisor? At first, the advisor can be literally any person you know. But after some time you will need to pay attention to more details, so an experienced advisor is a must. An advisor not only picks the best among online marketplace platforms but also tells you exactly what you need to do.
So let's get to the reason why you are here. Most entrepreneurs find it cumbersome to find the product that they need. So we did some of the work for you. Our team at Roobykon have spent a lot of time and effort in developing our marketplace platform advisor.
We work with several popular marketplace solutions such as Sharetribe, Magento, SaaS, and Opencart. We know that they all sound the same to you for now, but that's why we are here. And it is the work of marketplace platform advisor to pick the best variant for your business.
How to Choose the Best Online Marketplace Platform?
Here we will talk about the best online marketplace platforms that we use in our work and pick the best one for creating your marketplace.
Sharetribe
It works great with any type of a marketplace, whether it is peer-to-peer rentals, booking services or a regular multi-store where you sell goods.
It has a built-in payment system that works straight between bank accounts. It supports 20+ currencies, works in 190+ countries and you can pick the payment method between a regular credit card or PayPal.
The fact that the sellers only receive money when the buyers get their goods is just great. It lowers the risk that the sellers will engage in fraud, and the buyers won't pay at all.
Magento
The Magento platform is famous for its extensions. It has a big variety of those that may be handy in any type of marketplace.
The customer support extensions include live chat, phone support, help center, and many more.
It offers several great extensions for advertising, CRM, SEO, email marketing, and marketing automation.
Also, it has everything for the optimization of your marketing platform, like monitoring, hosting, and performance tracking.
Opencart
It has a great administrator dashboard that helps to observe all the important things such as orders, sales, customers, sales analytics, and many more.
Opencart allows different groups of users, so it will be easier to set privileges and different access rules for different users. It is a very handy option that simplifies the experience.
SaaS
This is a marketplace component that brings two or more parties together so they can make a transaction and bring a profit to your business.
It also costs less, cuts operational costs, brings a consistent working process, facilitates access to data, saves the time needed for training, and much more.
Here, at Roobykon, we find these the best online marketplace solutions at the moment.
So to pick the variant you need to answer several questions with your marketplace platform advisor:
- What is your budget?
- What technical skills do you have?
- How quickly do you want to see the ready-to-go marketplace?
What is your budget?
If you have less than $5,000 to work on the recourses for an online marketplace, then finding an existing marketplace software or coding from scratch is your best option. You can't do much with the help of others with this budget.
If your budget is between $5,000-$50,000, you can find a freelancer on Upwork or other similar services. They should be able to build a simple marketplace on top of the already existing software.
If your budget is more than $50,000, you can find a company that can help you with building your marketplace from scratch. It will be a high-quality custom marketplace that you will be proud of. The options for that are infinite and you'll just have to pick the ones you really need.
What technical skills do you have?
Just be honest with yourself and know your skills. If you can't code, try to find someone who can. There must be different options for every budget. The world is full of nice people and maybe some of those nice people can code.
If you've ever used a WordPress blog, and you know that HTML and CSS are not programming languages, you can try to create your own marketplace. And with that, you'll expand your own coding skills which is a great tool to have these days.
If you want to create a marketplace from scratch and you know how to do it great. You will save loads of money. All your marketplace fantasies will depend on you. However, you can work along with an agency to speed up this process.
How quickly do you want to see the ready-to-go marketplace?
Having one month or even less before release seriously limits your possibilities. All you can do here is to use a SaaS solution since it has all the essential options like easy transactions, hosting, dashboard, reviews, and others. Even if you offer someone a big sum of money for something else, they are not likely to accept your offer. There is no way to build an online marketplace from scratch in one month.
If you have up to three months, you might be able to build a marketplace from scratch and customize it the way you want. But only with a team of several very skilled developers, who have built many marketplaces like yours.
If you have more than three months, you have all the cards. And it's up to you here to pick the suitable option depending on your budget and your tech skills.
But to build a great development strategy, you will need to work with marketplace platform adviser for sure. They know who is the best in this game.
What Are the Best First Steps to Develop an Online Platform?
Now that you know what's going on, you need to start with simple steps you can make yourself to achieve your dream. Here are the best first steps to develop your online marketplace:
- decide what you want. Draw a picture of the thing you want to see in your marketplace;
- contact the platform advisor and a developer.
Here at Roobykon, we have both platform advisors and developers. This advisor can help you with building a development strategy and setting everything right. Each recommendation is valuable and can bring you peace since you don't need to walk this road alone. And all of our developers are skilled enough to build a marketplace platform from scratch for a reasonable price.
Make sure you've answered every question before starting a marketplace platform. We hope that one day we'll help you to create an online marketplace of your dreams.
We're keen to emphasize that this is the first release of Marketplace Platform Advisor and any feedback you may have is extremely welcome! We intend to continually develop and improve our service and we hope that you will find it a useful asset as you begin your journey into the sharing economy!
Start working with Marketplace Platform Advisor:https://roobykon.com/marketplace-advisor
