How do you build a successful marketplace?
Strategic infrastructure (selecting the right platform and hosting infrastructure) ranks as the single most important criterion in successfully building an international marketplace platform. It’s not as simple as allowing others to display products on the company’s website or offering to ship products internationally. There are language and cultural barriers, tax codes and compliance issues, possible price wars on marketplace platforms among vendors, and other issues.
What is the best online marketplace?
There are a lot of big and successful marketplaces. Alibaba.com, eBay.com, Amazon.com, goAfrica.com, Etsy.com, and Craigslist.com are just a few of the most popular. There are very few platforms that can scale to what’s needed for an implementation like those. Clarity eCommerce is used for goAfrica.com, and we have clients with well over 1 million SKUs in their marketplace. Many of the ones listed above aren’t a “purchased platform” but a custom-built, in-house platform that cost them well over $10 million to build. They’ve even written books about how they architected and built their platforms. Clarity has launched marketplaces for their clients for $50k to $500k; much cheaper than building your own marketplace.
What is marketplace business model?
Marketplace business model is often referred to as C2C or consumer to consumer, B2C or business to consumer, B2B or business to business, or D2C or direct to consumer. eBay was mostly C2C, but then many businesses started selling on eBay as well, so it’s now B2C as well as C2C. Craigslist and Etsy are really the only mainly C2C marketplaces left, while businesses have all jumped into the marketplaces now. The model allows sellers to upload and sell their own products to consumers through the marketplace platform. This allows them to get their products in front of many potential consumers, and usually means giving up a percent of each transaction for the privilege of both exposure and using the marketplace platform.
What are the most important things for an international marketplace?
For an international marketplace, making sure the platform or website has the necessary capabilities is essential. Without the ability to customize marketing and presentation styles for different customers, your audience won’t be engaged in your marketplace platform. If you don’t have multilingual and multicurrency software, then your customer base will remain limited. There are many facets to consider for an international marketplace, so it’s best to work with an experienced partner for developing your platform.