How to Build a Marketplace Website MVP and Not Fail
The article was originally published on Codica Blog.
Do you want to build a successful and profitable marketplace website? Start with a Minimum Viable Product approach. It allows saving a lot of time and money and receiving valuable feedback on the solution and its primary features. Building an MVP, you will surely realize whether your idea is worth investing in or not.
In this article, we want to explore the way you can build a marketplace website MVP within simple steps.
Why start with an MVP
An MVP is a version of your marketplace that includes only the most basic functions. Once the Minimum Viable Product is built, you will be able to realize what should be changed/deleted/added on the website. It becomes possible with feedback from your early users.
The approach enables you to quickly and viably create a functional solution that can further be scaled and modified.
Below you can see how the MVP approach works in product development:
The main principles to follow when building a marketplace MVP
- Narrow focus
Aim both your financial and mental efforts at covering the smaller groups of the audience in the early days.
- Users in mind
Always take into consideration the users’ pain points you solve. For example, you can try to answer the following question: why would someone need your product and what can it offer them?
- A slow, but promising start
Success always takes time. You need to build all the basic and additional features, target both consumers and sellers, and promote the platform. For sure, it cannot be performed in one day. It means that you should go on creating and expanding your product.
World-famous examples of an MVP for marketplaces
Now, let’s take a look at the most popular marketplaces that started their way as MVPs.
Amazon
To date, it is difficult to meet a person who does not know about such an e-commerce giant like Amazon. However, few do know that in 1994 the corporation began selling low-cost books with the simplest design.
It was a successful MVP as the books are easy-to-sell and easy-to-ship products. Step by step, the marketplace started expanding the product categories. This way, they became the largest online marketplace platform in the world.
Core functionality of a marketplace MVP
As stated earlier, the functionality of an MVP marketplace should provide value to your potential users. It means you need to implement features that will cover most of both platform sides’ needs. It includes providing the best user experience, easy navigation, and others.
Let’s now take a look at the main features for your MVP:
- Account page of buyers and vendors
- Product page
- Search option
- Messaging
- Payments processing
- Reviews and ratings
- Notifications
- Administration panel.
How to further develop your marketplace MVP
When you finish building the MVP version of your e-commerce platform, you will get feedback from website users. It allows you to understand what features should be improved or added.
Here comes the Build-Measure-Learn (BML) technique of Lean Startup methodology. With the help of this approach, you can make the online marketplace development process efficient. So, you create the product, analyze it and collect feedback. After that, you decide what should be added/deleted/modified. This is a cyclic process that leads to constant improvement.
Let’s now take a look at some additional marketplace features that you can build after implementing the main functionality.
- Mobile version
- Comparison of goods and services
- Social network sharing
- Wish list
- Localization.
How to build a marketplace website MVP?
There are three options you can consider:
- Team of freelancers;
- In-house custom software development team;
- Software consultancy specializing in custom marketplace website development.
The differences between them refer to the rates, delivery time and quality of the solution you will get in the end.
We recommend that you choose a software company that specializes in MVP and marketplace development.
The reason is that such an agency already has a solid experience in building and launching marketplace websites. They can also advise you on the UX and the functionality you need or not.
Technologies
At Codica, we form a list of the best possible technologies before starting a new project. It is important as different tools have their specific advantages.
Below you can see the list of tools we use in practice for custom marketplace development:
- Server-side
We work with Ruby, Ruby on Rails, ElasticSearch, Redis, i18n gem, MySQL, and Sidekiq for handling server-side operations.
- Client-side
Considering the client-side tools, we use HTML5, CSS3, JS, Ruby on Rails, React, and Vue.js in practice.
- Tools
At Codica, we prefer the following tools: AWS S3, GitLab, GitHub, Slack, Digital Ocean.
Conclusion
Marketplace web development can be a tough hill to climb, it takes a large amount of time and effort to succeed. The more efficient way is to know how to build a marketplace website MVP version that validates and verifies your ideas in the early days. This way, you collect initial feedback from potential users and investors. As a result, you can generate a client base and improve the product.
If you’re looking for a marketplace development company, follow these tips to find the right provider.
For more information about building a marketplace MVP, please read the full article in Codica Blog.
