Have ideas for a marketplace but not sure what else you need?
Building a successful online marketplace business takes hard work, dedication, and passion. Take the time to look for real problems, requirements or opportunities that need real solutions – Problems that can be best solved by communities themselves. Coming up with ideas for a marketplace is just the beginning. While you don’t need to have your own inventory in the peer-to-peer market, you need to solve the chicken and egg problem: how to convince your providers to bring their products/services to your marketplace when there are no buyers yet, and how to attract the customers when you don’t have any products (yet).
“The key to growing a marketplace is to reach a virtuous cycle: high-quality providers bring in more customers, and the growing customer base, in turn, attracts more providers.- Boris Wertz”
Hitchhiking, selling second-hand clothes, borrowing tools and sharing apartments have been available in various platforms like Kijiji, Craigslist and other Classified sites long before the new wave of marketplace startups emerged. What’s new in modern solutions is how easy it is to interact with strangers.
Craigslist is being disrupted by Airbnb in apartments, Etsy in custom-made goods, Thumbtack in local services, BlaBlaCar in ridesharing, and so on. All these new players use elaborate reputation systems to build trust and technology for easy and convenient access.
Five key sectors have emerged in the sharing economy spectrum:
- Peer-to-peer accommodation: households sharing access to unused space in their home or renting out a holiday home to travelers.
- Peer-to-peer transportation: individuals sharing a ride, car, parking space, motorcycles with others.
- On-demand household services: enabling households to access on-demand support with household tasks such as food delivery, DIY, seasonal yard work.
- On-demand professional services: Enabling businesses to access on-demand support with skills such as administration, consultancy, legal and accountancy.
- Collaborative finance: individuals and businesses who invest, lend and borrow directly from each other, such as crowd-funding and peer-to-peer lending.
Value for Money
- Allowing sellers to adjust prices in real time
- Automated pricing algorithms (surge pricing)
Convenience
- Easy to match supplier and customer
- In-app messaging service for easy communication between seller and customer
- A simple and automated payment process
Trust & Security
- Verifying member identity with official ID documents
- Payment protection for freelancers
- Insuring against bad transactions
- Licensing and vetting service providers
- Customer reviews and ratings
Now, with IdyaFlow’s P2P marketplace software, the technology barrier is completely removed allowing you to focus on building a secure community!