How to Start an Online Marketplace: Types, Costs, and Resources

Are you interested in building your own digital marketplace? But do you have a clear enough idea as for how to build an online marketplace that would outshine many of its competitors? Then the following guide is just what you need. Let's start from the basics.

How to Build a Marketplace Website

It may now seem that creating your own marketplace is not as difficult as creating some web application. To some extent, this is definitely so. Nonetheless, when we are talking about marketplaces, you need to be prepared for facing a wide range of problems that can ruin your venture from the very start.

You might be confronted with such questions as what model of marketing to choose and how to attract both merchants and customers. What's even more important is the question of how you will retain them. All these issues are very important and should be considered before starting your own business. There are many other problems faced by startup entrepreneurs and it is not always easy to deal with them effectively.

In fact, there are several steps that you should take in the process of building your own marketplace. Here are the basic ones.

Steps of creating a marketplace

• Choose an online platform for your marketplace website. The options are multiple. One of them is Sharetribe. It offers a credible and cost-effective way for businesspeople to launch their own marketplaces. That's because creating it from scratch by hiring web developers is likely to cost a big fortune, while such platforms as Sharetribe will help you save substantial capital.
• Choose an online marketplace niche. The success of renowned digital marketplaces is explained by the fact that they offer services in a particular niche. This means that the first thing you need to do is to think of what kind of industry segment you would like to work in. Without it, your website would have no target or direction to follow, so make sure you think of a specific segment that you'll stick to when creating your solution.
• Choose a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for your website. When you are only starting your business, we suggest that you concentrate your effort on an MVP so that you have a small part of the chosen industry segment to start from. By creating an MVP marketplace, you won't feel overwhelmed by how much you have to do. Instead, you'll stick to only one idea or concept that your entire marketplace will be based on.
• Calculate the expenses and focus on the results. At this point, you need to think of how much it will cost to build a resource and focus on what you want to get as a result. After you establish your startup budget and find out how much this venture will cost you, it is necessary to think of what you want to achieve with the help of your marketplace. The ultimate goal of any digital marketplace is to unite sellers and buyers within one particular niche and help them sell or buy products and services. That's why you need to thoroughly think of what your aspirations regarding the marketplace are.