The Four-step process on how to create your own two-sided marketplace

How to start planning to create a two-sided marketplace

After seeing how cleancult doubled their sales even during COVID-19, many entrepreneurs are turning to build a two-sided Online Marketplace Platform—one they can leverage to enable their community to monetize not just their possessions, but also their resources and passions to create a marketplace website.

Once you have validated your marketplace idea, it is very important to choose the right target market and the revenue model to build two sided marketplace website.

Understand the demand “market” and how your product or service is going to be different from your competitors. Depending on whether you are building a rental, service, delivery, or e-commerce marketplace, the two-sided marketplace brings out a different mentality—less consumerism, less materialism, and more of a community-building approach. So, put on your collaborative glasses and look at the world around you.

Creating and Validating Your Idea

Coming up with ideas is just the beginning to create a two-sided online marketplace, you need to find an efficient way to how to grow a two sided marketplace.

Now that you have validated the business idea and model, start building the marketplace platform. There are essentially three different ways of building an online marketplace:

To code a marketplace website from scratch, you require knowledge of coding languages and other technical details. With this approach, you can make the marketplace platform look exactly as you wish.

As tempting, it may sound but building a two sided marketplace platform with a flawless transaction flow from scratch will take time—a lot of it. Whereas, the easiest way to start and succeed in your business would be to launch your online marketplace as soon as possible.

Self-hosted marketplace software provides more customization and complete control over the platform with the help of different kinds of extensions.

For example, the woo-commerce plugin with WordPress helps to build an e-commerce marketplace store. If you know one of these tools and its plugins like the back of your hand, you can use them to build a marketplace. 

This approach means you need to design your marketplace user experience and then find the right plugins, install them, and test and optimize every stage. To provide the seamless, today’s users expect, this solution might take a lot of time.

Marketplace owners can choose a marketplace software, according to their business needs and revenue model. The software providers will manage and support your platforms and you get to be in full control over your own business.

Using marketplace software is the fastest way to launch an online marketplace platform. Launching fast helps in validating your business idea in the market and identify the features important for your customers and suppliers. The marketplace software provider ensures data accuracy, privacy, access and security and you focus on building your business.

Scaling Your Two-Sided Marketplace

Choose the right features to match your business idea. With marketplace software like  IdyaFlow, there is Core Package, Basic package and Premium package offering features like Admin Portal, Escrow Accounts, In App messaging, Availability Management, Auction Management and Inventory Management.

Now its time to launch the two-sided marketplace platform and get suppliers on board. Launch your Marketplace before its ready, listen, and engage with your consumers to improve. Based on the feedback improvise your marketplace website to add more features. Personalize to meet the specific needs and create your online marketplace accordingly.

Monitoring

Marketplace owners need to track the sales of their online marketplace with accurate metrics. For example, by incorporating the Ratings and Review feature marketplace owner can see which services are in demand and know which vendors are most preferred. As a result, the owner can promote goods and services that truly matter to its users.

With IdyaFlow Add On Features like External Analytics and SEO management, Marketplace owners have the ability to add on-page search engine fields for products – Title, Description, and Keywords. They can also integrate the marketplace with Google Analytics and Facebook pixels to track and report analytics on marketing and ad campaigns. Thus, empowering the Marketplace Owners to learn and improvise their strategies and scale their two sided online marketplace platform.