Online marketplaces are reshaping the way we buy and sell, creating massive opportunities for entrepreneurs. With global retail e-commerce sales expected to hit $7.9 trillion in 2027, up from $6.3 trillion this year, it’s clear that digital commerce is booming. If you’re considering creating a marketplace website, this is the time to tap into this lucrative market. So, read on to learn how to develop a marketplace website.
Building an online marketplace requires more than just a great idea—it involves strategic planning, smart design, and staying ahead of the competition.
In this article, we’ll take you through the entire process, from picking a niche to launching your platform successfully.
What is an online marketplace?
Marketplace websites connect buyers and sellers, offering a space where vendors can showcase their products and services. Customers benefit from the ease of digital shopping, complete with secure payment processing.
Marketplaces might look similar to traditional e-commerce platforms, but there are multiple distinctions. An online marketplace is a medium for different sellers within particular niches. It promotes competition among sellers and enables buyers to find desirable products based on their price, reviews, and quality.
Regular e-commerce platforms, on the other hand, are typically developed by particular brands. They offer a more controlled environment but a narrower choice of products.
Why should you build an online marketplace?
Starting an online marketplace opens up quite a few opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs. Let’s explore several key benefits of creating a marketplace and discover why it’s a smart choice in today’s competitive online environment.
Business scalability
A marketplace website is a venture that offers impressive scalability. Once you decide it’s time for your business to grow, it’s relatively easy to expand product offerings and attract new sellers, reaching a wider audience as demand increases.
In fact, this flexibility becomes quite useful if you want to explore other niches as well as in case there’s a need to quickly respond to changes in market trends.
Low operating costs
Compared to traditional retail, the cost of creating an online marketplace is noticeably lower. Since you don’t need to manage inventory, logistics, or the functioning of warehouses, these tasks fall to the sellers. This allows you to focus on growing your platform rather than keeping operating costs in check.
Access to the global market
By learning how to build a multi-vendor marketplace website, you gain access to a global audience of buyers and sellers. This opens up opportunities to reach new markets, expand your customer base, and grow your business worldwide.
Diverse revenue streams
Creating an online marketplace allows you to tap into multiple revenue sources. You can earn from commissions, subscription fees, or premium listings, to name a few. This is an excellent opportunity to increase your business’s resilience and prepare it to weather shifts in market demand or the global economy.
Steps of building an online marketplace
The success of your marketplace depends on how you tackle its development. Let’s break down the core development milestones.
1. Select the type
The first step is to settle on the online marketplace business model and who you plan to target. Here are the four most widely used options:
- Business-to-business (B2B): B2B marketplaces, such as Amazon Business and eWorldTrade, function as a bridge between companies that sell goods or services to other businesses.
- Business-to-customer (B2C): B2C platforms help businesses bring their offers to interested individuals, rather than to other companies. Amazon and Booking are well-known examples of this method.
- Customer-to-customer (C2C): C2C platforms act as a middleman between individuals. Such marketplaces mainly focus on the selling of goods, and, unlike B2C platforms, they feature individual sellers rather than companies.
- Peer-to-peer (P2P): P2P marketplaces resemble C2C platforms, but they mainly focus on individuals who offer and seek services. Think about platforms like Airbnb and Uber that enable direct interactions between users.
Also, remember that selecting one of these models helps guide your general business decisions and marketing efforts, but it still leaves enough room to cater to various audiences. If your platform is primarily B2C, like Booking, you can still double as a P2P marketplace, as long as you enable corresponding functionality.
2. Choose your niche
It’s certainly tempting to go all in and envision a cross-industry marketplace, but such a venture comes with significant challenges. First, it will have you competing with giants like Amazon, which goes hand in hand with hefty investments in ads. In addition to strong competition, you may also face strict regulatory requirements and the need to implement broad quality control mechanisms.
Instead, consider targeting a particular niche when you start your own online marketplace. This enables you to connect with your target audience more effectively without needing a massive capital investment.
And if you’re worried about missing out on potential customers, take a look at Poshmark, for example. This fashion-focused marketplace has built a strong base of 80 million registered users, and it’s thriving.
Besides, you can always experiment with how specialized you want your marketplace to be and try diving deeper into your niche. For instance, if you’re thinking about a fashion-oriented website, consider zeroing in on vintage clothes specifically.
By doing so, you create a space where buyers can discover unique finds, while sellers can easily connect with their ideal customers. And if you want to expand your marketplace at some point, it’s never too late to branch out from a narrow niche.
3. Settle on the features
Deciding on the right features to include is one of the pillars of online marketplace development. Well-designed functionality that’s useful to sellers and buyers is the heart of your platform and it can earn you returning customers.
While the specific features will vary to fit your particular solution, here are several common ones to include:
- User registration and profiles: Consider implementing different kinds of user profiles for sellers and buyers. They can feature personal information, as well as previous reviews or purchases.
- Search and filter: Customers should be able to use text, image, and voice search to find various items by keywords. Also, they should be able to filter products by price, rating, and other relevant factors.
- Product listings: This allows sellers to create and manage listings (with descriptions, prices, and images) of their products.
- Personalized recommendations: This feature should help customers find relevant products or services based on their preferences and previous activity on the platform.
- Shopping cart and payment processing: Being a standard part of any online marketplace, a shopping cart enables customers to gather their desired products and purchase them quickly with integrated payment options.
- Order management: Allow both buyers and sellers to track order progress, view shipping details, and receive real-time updates about their deliveries.
- Customer support and chatbots: Granting users the option to receive quick help with any issue goes a long way toward winning customers’ loyalty. Consider incorporating chatbots to streamline the process.
- Ratings and reviews: Providing customers with a way to rate sellers and products helps all platform users make more informed decisions.
- Communication tools: Let buyers and sellers communicate to facilitate order clarifications and post-purchase support.
- Admin dashboard: Analyzing their performance is crucial for sellers, so it’s a good idea to integrate a suite of tools to manage listings and monitor sales.
At Eastern Peak, we have the expertise to help you create a scalable, secure platform that connects buyers and sellers seamlessly. Looking to build an online marketplace?
4. Design, develop, and test
When it comes to development, you have a few solid options based on your goals, budget, and in-house skills. Building a platform from the ground up is one approach—it’s a more involved process, but it gives you complete control over the features, design, and underlying framework of your marketplace. And if you’re looking for a faster way to start, you can choose to use a pre-built platform instead.
Even with pre-built platforms, however, you will need specialized expertise to implement the functionality you envision. A reliable custom marketplace development company can guide you through all development stages, including
- planning;
- analyzing your requirements to select the appropriate toolkit;
- sketching the design;
- developing a minimum viable product (MVP) with the core features to test your concept;
- coding;
- continuous QA and testing;
- deployment; and
- maintenance.
5. Launch, market, and iterate
When you’re confident that your marketplace works smoothly across all target devices, it’s time to go live and start spreading the word. Building a marketing plan with social media and engaging content will help draw in those early users.
Additionally, launching your platform is just one phase of building a marketplace startup—after comes a process of continuous analysis and improvement. Post-launch, gather user feedback and monitor how the platform performs. You can use this information to determine which new features to add or what fine-tuning is still required.
Iterating quickly based on real user behavior and preferences is key to staying competitive and scaling your platform effectively in the long run.
Things to consider when developing an online marketplace
Creating a marketplace website is a rewarding process when you focus on several factors from the start. Here are key aspects to keep in mind when developing marketplace websites:
- Mobile-friendly design. The reality of modern digital retail is that most users shop on their phones. Your marketplace website will be much more successful if it offers a seamless experience on smartphones and other mobile devices.
- Scalability and flexibility. Talking about overall scalability, it’s vital to ensure you can scale your platform up and down without a hitch as your customer base grows. If your marketplace is flexible, any increase in users or shifts in market demand can be an opportunity rather than a burden.
- Internationalization. At some point, you may start planning to expand globally, and it’s a good idea to prepare for it early. To cater to different regions, make sure your platform supports multiple languages and currencies.
- Integrations. By leveraging third-party integrations and APIs, you can save time and decrease operating costs. A couple of handy integrations may include payment gateways, analytical tools, and shipping services.
- Security and compliance. Trust is everything in e-commerce. Prioritize data protection, safe payments, and robust security for your marketplace. Also, consider specific legal requirements to meet based on what products can be listed on your platform. For instance, if you allow food vendors to sell through the marketplace, they will usually be responsible for meeting all regulatory requirements for storage and quality. However, you might still need to develop and publish related policies for such sellers to follow.
How to get started?
Creating a marketplace from the ground up is an ambitious but rewarding undertaking. This endeavor not only enables you to reach customers worldwide but also unlocks multiple revenue channels.
While it’s an exciting venture, ensuring a seamless development process—one that prioritizes scalability, robust security, and adaptable integrations—can be challenging.
Experts at Eastern Peak specialize in marketplace website development tailored to your business needs: whether you’re scaling or starting from scratch, our team has the expertise to guide you every step of the way.
Ready to bring your marketplace idea to life? Contact us today for a consultation and see how we can help you build a platform that stands out in the market.
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About the author:
Alexey Shalimov, CEO at Eastern Peak
As CEO at Eastern Peak, a professional software consulting and development company, Alexey ensures top quality and cost-effective services to clients from all over the world. Alexey is also a founder and technology evangelist at several technology companies. Previously, as a CEO of the Gett (GetTaxi) technology company, Alexey was in charge of developing the revolutionary Gett service from ground up and deploying the operation across the globe from New York to London and Tel Aviv.
