A Service Marketplace is an online platform that supports initiating, facilitating, coordinating, and completing the buying and selling of services between clients and service providers such as Uber, Lyft, Upwork, Thumbtack, TaskRabbit, and Fiverr.
For a Service Marketplace Entrepreneur, it is extremely important to continuously monitor and scale the marketplace platform according to changing trends. After going through the process of creating a marketplace, now it’s time to make the Business idea successful. Be it, adding new features or addressing the niche needs of the providers, you should be ready with strategies to face the inevitable and make the service marketplace platform successful.
Here are the top strategies to make your marketplace platform successful:
Trust and Convenience
Besides providing the service, the marketplace should provide value on the demand side in three ways which are, discovery, trust, and convenience. This means the marketplace platform should be built up in such a way that clients’’ are able to identify the right provider (discovery), provide the assurance that the provider is legitimate (trust), and make it easier to connect directly with a provider (convenience).
Value for both suppliers and customers:
The marketplace platform should create additional value for both suppliers and consumers. This prevents either side from abandoning the platform for the transaction. For example, on Elance (Upwork), before making a hiring decision, clients have the opportunity to speak live with freelancers using built-in messaging tools. Freelancers can evaluate prospective clients based on data such as a client’s track record for awarding posted jobs, history of job feedback, and how much a client has spent hiring on Elance.
Platform Reputation:
Reputation is an added source of value that ensures user retention on any platform. The built-in rating system should allow making two-way (providers and customers rate each other) ratings. Over time, ratings help increase credibility for both service providers and clients. There should be ways to set up both strict (for more restrictive cancellations) or relaxed (for 100% refunds). Customer reimbursements should be fully automated and remove all overheard efforts by rules set by the marketplace owners.
Essential Features:
The platform should have all the essential features. As the marketplace grows, you should cater to the demand of both the providers and clients for additional features and be ready to add more tailored functionality. Once you understand your community behavior, adding powerful, customized features should be a good way to boost customer lifetime and more value to the platform.
Along with all the above, you should also have the capability to track inside sales, abilities like customizing on-page search engine fields for products – Title, Description, and Keywords.
IdyaFlow is Saas based Marketplace software. IdyaFlow’s features consist of all the tools which can make it very easy to track the growth of your marketplace platform. With IdyaFlow, You 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.