How To Build A Marketplace Website For Your Business

Let’s delve into how to create a marketplace site, how to estimate your budget and what you can do right now to make your service prosperous.

How to start an online marketplace

The process of building a compelling marketplace business consists of a number of stages that can’t be omitted.

Research that includes diving into basics of building a marketplace startup: separating the types of marketplaces, your idea validation, choosing the right business model.

Planning. Project manager of the chosen team helps you elaborate the specification document with all requirements, wireframes and estimated budget.

MVP marketplace development. Based on the project plan, developers implement the product’s functionality.

A marketing strategy creation which is grounded in building supply and demand models.

Launch and performance tracking

Research: Getting and validating your idea

So, you’ve decided to build your own online marketplace. Before you get down to choosing the right marketplace type, platform or technologies, take some time to research whether there is a demand on the software you want to build.

That is why the first step should be defining the value proposition for your potential users. As for marketplaces, it’s usually solving a real problem. For example, Airbnb solves the problem of expensive hotel rooms for travelers, BlaBlaCar is a response to inflexible routes and schedules, and so on.

When you define a problem worth solving, take a look at competitors and market leaders. In a broad sense, all potential niches may be already covered. So you will have to think narrower and find your focus in a preferable niche. For example, Amazon started by only selling books. In case, your idea seems perfect for you as you have the right background and industry-changing intentions but the competition is too high, narrow your focus, both geographically and in terms of the offered products or services.

The next step when you start your own online marketplace is to know your target audience. Careful analysis and research are worth efforts and time as in the result you get a segmented audience, the list of their expectations that can be easily turned into features, and prove of demand.

How to validate your marketplace idea

After you got an idea to build an online marketplace of a certain type, it’s time to validate it in order to ensure that you’re moving in the right direction. Such kind of research takes a considerable amount of time but it pays off at it lets you avoid some of the common mistakes. So, here is a list of questions you should be able to answer honestly before moving to a planning stage.

• Would you use this product and how often?
• What is the feedback from the interviewed a group of potential customers
• How well they understand the purpose of your product?
• What is the size of the total addressable market?
• How dependent are you on the external resources?

How dependent are you on the external resources?

To answer the questions above, you will have to brainstorm with your partner(s) if you have one, gain feedback through interviewing your potential customers and make some manual research. Note, you shouldn’t involve your family and friends to the interview if you want to get unbiased insight and find out how to build a successful marketplace.

Cost of building a marketplace website

So, how much does it cost to build a marketplace website? Roughly speaking, you may expect to be charged from $30,000 to $150,000 depending on the desired functionality and vendors you cooperate with.

Let’s review where these numbers come from.

Development cost is based on the development and non-development time required to implement product’s features. The number of hours is estimated with the regard of the complexity of features, including frontend and backend development.

Sergey Lypchenko is a technical writer at a href=https://www.cleveroad.comCleveroad. My mission is to provide people with interesting material about innovations in the world of IT.