Readily available practical pieces of advice on starting up one’s own marketplace from scratch is a thing a huge number of today’s entrepreneurs crave. What can really help? Competitor analysis and thorough observations of successfully operating marketplaces is the most efficient way to learn the eCommerce intricacies that could be helpful in the field.
Commencing the discussion and giving recommendations on starting one, let’s first define what a marketplace exactly is.
A Multivendor Marketplace is an online ground for a multitude of vendors to place their web sales outlets and sell goods there. Both sides make a certain share of profit at that.
The following pieces of advice will in our opinion be most helpful in your marketplace starting-up efforts.
The Proper Concept
This may sound a bit weird at first, but you should have a right idea of what you are about to take up. It’s important to delineate all of the crucial requirements, both technical and conceptual.
You should formulate a complete list of capabilities, features, and all the other specs you want your future solution to incorporate. It will also serve as a type of foundation for the composition of future technical specifications.
Plan the Budget and Expand Your Contacts
Another crucial thing to carefully consider that comes right after the previous factor. Building a budget, funding, and anything related to finance must be handled utterly precisely and judiciously.
Your main source of income to keep in mind is the profit you can potentially be making by letting numerous vendors sell products through your commercial resource.
Contacts is another crucial point because the more respect and professional connections you have, the more vendors you’ll be able to initially attract to distribute goods on your marketplace.
Select the Basic Platform
Using different eCommerce platforms, you get equally different environments and capabilities for building a web marketplace. The framework, basically, provides the supporting pillars for your future software.
In the vast majority, either SaaS platforms or open source frameworks are used most commonly.
SaaS-type of platforms are fully supported by the service provider, they are usually hosted on the dedicated corporate servers and don’t require users to download much software to their machines. Such platforms provide a defined set of customization capabilities due to the closed nature of the code.
Great examples of SaaS platforms are BigCommerce, Shopify, and 3D Cart.
Another common type, open source platforms allow you to customize everything you may wish freely, without any limitation or restrictions of the closed code. With a good team of developers and an open source framework ready, you can create a truly authentic and unique solution of your own.
However, open source software must be downloaded, stored, and hosted on your own dedicated servers, which means the necessity to rent or support the required servers.
Examples of popular open source framework solutions are WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop, etc.
Get a Top-Notch Team of Developers
It’s easy to find a team of professional developers for hire online – check some top lists of tried and tested service providers and check their websites to see how much they fit your budget and functional requirements.
These are the points that describe the means of preparing to start up a business in a nutshell. Hope it helps you see the big picture of where to start and how to start moving on with your business development.
