A Service Marketplace is an online platform that supports initiating, facilitating, coordinating and completing the buying and selling of services between service seekers and service providers such as Uber, Lyft, Upwork, Thumbtack, TaskRabbit, and Fiverr.
Service industry is getting massive, as it provides a number of options to buyers and sellers.
Service Marketplace platforms are mostly based on a “commission based” model- which allows platforms to charge a fee from each transaction between the buyer and the supplier.
This model is a huge stepping point for startups, small entrepreneurs since, where as suppliers they pay only when they make a Profit from the marketplace.
The other popular revenue models in Service based platforms are: Lead-based and subscription fee based.
With the success of uber and airbnb, more and more entrepreneurs aspire to start a service marketplace of their own.
The popularity of on-demand service marketplaces such as Uber, Fiverr, Freelancer, Consultants 500, Urban Clap, TaskRabbit etc., is on the rise. Fiverr clocks more than 1 million transactions every month. More often than not, service marketplaces are used by businesses for two important reasons:
1.Generate leads
2.Outsource jobs to service providers.
Now, the Big question is how to start an Online Service Marketplace platform? and scale it according to your business needs.
The two very common approaches are:
-Hiring a team of programmers and paying them
-Subscribing to an out-of-the-box service marketplace platform software providers
The first approach is time intensive, expensive and higher risk as it could take months to get the platform implemented. The latter is faster, cost-effective and low risk, to build, validate and scale a service marketplace platform.