How Much Does It Cost To Create A Marketplace App: Cost, Features, Business Model.

What exactly are Marketplace apps? Are they the same as e-commerce on-demand applications?

The simple answer is no!

Where an on-demand e-commerce application is dedicatedly built to promote the product and services of your brands, marketplace apps provide the platform where any seller or buyer can buy and sell the products and marketplace owners can leverage the profit.

Still in a dilemma?

Let’s put it in simple words. Have you ever thought that you have too much stuff to be sold online? An extra floor that you barely enter to just dust off, a second car that you hardly drive, a property for renting or selling? If yes, then you already know the concept of a marketplace, and the idea of creating an online marketplace app can help you quickly conquer the world and enable you to become an entrepreneur.

Here, many of you may be wondering, while the idea of exchanging goods and services online isn’t new, how could it help you add an edge to your business?

If you are the one who belongs to the same and looking for the complete guide to know everything related to marketplace app development, then this blog is here to answer all your burning questions.

Here’s what this blog will answer you:

• Why You Should Invest in Marketplace App Development in 2022?
• Trendy and Popular Categories of Marketplace Apps To Invest In
• Challenges to Building a Winning Marketplace App
• How To Create a Marketplace App That Can Catch the Hype?
• How To Scale-up Your Marketplace App?
• Major Features To Include In Marketplace Application
• How Much Does It Cost To Develop a Marketplace App in 2022?

Let’s get into the deep of each point to understand that how investing in Marketplace app development can help you grow your business?

1. Why Should You Invest in Marketplace App Development?

Undoubtedly, we are currently living in such a challenging time where healthcare givers are working round the clock for saving lives, and quarantine measures are pushing businesses to the doom around the world with no hope of resuming back to their ground. In fact, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has made employees jobless and business owners are continually suffering from financial losses caused by the lockdown.

Swiftly shutting down stores has paralyzed a lot of retailers and they have no quick fixes for the recovery process. And that’s where marketplace applications outshined as the biggest opportunity for the emerging businesses and leading brands to protect their business and minimize the losses in similar sinking situations.

While the concept is not new, such app giants including Airbnb, Uber, Amazon, ebay, Esty have made marketplace a serious buzzword after proving their success stories. While the businesses are struggling hard to survive in this pandemic, the applications like Amazon, Uber, ebay have experienced a tremendous surge in their sales.

You won’t have to believe our words. Here we are sharing some surprising statistics:

• According to the market research report, 55% of all e-commerce sales are done through branded stores vs 45% of shopping has been done through the marketplace.
• And those 45% of choose these top destinations for all sales through marketplaces are
• 36% chooses Amazon
• 8% prefer eBay
• 1% Etsy and other
• 61% of users are more likely to do research brands before making a purchase online.
• The revenue generated from the marketplace applications have gone through the roof after the emergence of mobile commerce companies and have raised $200 billion last year.
• Applications such as eBay, Amazon have been downloaded more than 51 million times, localized in 10 languages and available in over 195 countries worldwide.

With all these statistics, it is fair enough to conclude that the marketplace will continue to grow in the near future without showing any sign of downwards. If you are still wondering why you should make an investment in Marketplace app development and hire a mobile app developer, then you should know about the real advantages of having marketplace applications for your business.

The Main Advantages Of Building Marketplace Application for your Business

• In comparison to other marketing channels, marketplace requires lower marketing costs;
• More opportunities to expand your business across the borders;
• Since it’s easier and convenient to access, though marketplace is loved by users;
• Businesses will get an additional channel on which they can advertise and sell their products and services without any limit;
• Leveraging independent reviews and opinions on your products or services that makes them more attractive and ultimately increases sales;
• Marketplace makes it easier to collaborate with new business partners that ultimately help you make your platform bigger;
• A well-established online marketplace improves your brand images and builds client loyalty.
• You can work 24/7 with no limits of operating time.

These are the few outstanding benefits that any entrepreneur can leverage by simply having their presence on marketplace application. If you don’t have a marketplace yet and would like to expand to the mobile market, then it is a great idea to start from understanding what type of marketplace you need to invest in.

2. Trendy and Popular Categories of Marketplace Apps To Invest In

If you have paid attention to the leading mobile app publishers in the US in 2017, you will notice that Facebook, Amazon, Walmart, eBay and Uber are the few most popular Marketplace apps.

However, many businesses often overlook the fact that these marketplace apps belong to different categories (C2C, B2C, B2B).

Each application can be divided into different categories according to customer type, selling model, market sectors and more.

In a Nutshell: Each version of the marketplace app requires a different set of features and a careful understanding of architecture. So before you drill straight into the process of hiring an app development company, it is worth having a glance over challenges that may occur while building a Marketplace app.

3. Challenges Of Building a Winning Marketplace App

No matter which version of the marketplace app you choose to develop, these are the few common challenges that bring a great hurdle to your way. And even experts have agreed upon this fact, that make a market search and learn from the other leaders, before doing something groundbreaking and investing a huge budget on the startup.

So let’s get started with the challenges to building a Marketplace Platform:

Challenge 1# Chicken-Egg Issue: For Both Buyers and Sellers

You may be aware of the fact that a marketplace is made of both customers and sellers and the real pain about entering this industry is you need to attract both buyers and sellers to fulfil the supply or demand of the platform.

“Just imagine how would you convince the users to sign up for new speedo-local delivery of the food when you have no collaboration with the local restaurants? How would you onboard the local restaurants and sign up if you have only a handful of users at the time?”

Some experts will surely guide you to invest in marketing. But what would be the use of the app if you need to spend extra bugs on the marketing. So here we reveal the tips that surely route to solve the chicken-egg issues. We’ll suggest addressing the challenge by making some changes in the app.

Pro Tips:

• The app should be attractive that immediately grabs the attention of the users.
• Should be followed by a super easy and short sign up procedure.
• Easy to share on other platforms
• Use deep linking with referral code for effective referral programs
• Use API to integrate with other apps for cross-platform promotions

Challenge 2# Little Control On Product Quality To Win The User’s Trust

We basically mean here is, as a marketplace app owner, you can impose certain limitations on provider’s services or products delivered through the platform. To make this functional flawlessly, you can implement these tips:

Pro Tips:

• Implement spam flagging systems and blacklist the seller or buyer who is trying to make fraud.
• Add only verified reviews and ratings of the products and services.
• Make reviews non-editable after some time to avoid manipulators at your platform.

Challenge 3# Restricting Your Conversation Outside the Platform

Being the owner of a marketplace application, this is the most clever thing that you have to deal with. Many businesses have ended up with the mobile app development companies experienced in developing marketplace apps, they fail to get control over conversations held between buyers and sellers off the marketplace app.

For example, would you ever like to hire a house cleaning professional from the app, if the same professional has already cleaned your house a couple of times before and you’ve established personal contact with him?

Pro Tips:

• In such cases, if you have too much supply, then you can hire an app developer that can leverage such methodologies and programmatically make it impossible to match the same buyer and provider after the first interaction.
• Another possibility is to offer buyers a discount for the next order, which stimulates them to come back to the app for new purchases.
• In case of out of the app, you can stay connected by offering guarantees or premium quality services and more.

4. How To Create a Marketplace App That Can Catch the Hype?

So now you know the reasons and challenges to build a winning marketplace app, but what are the major steps of developing a marketplace app that helps you catch the hype? So let’s rush to the main steps:

• Market Research, Analysis and Evaluation of the App Idea
• Rapid Prototyping + User Testing
• Developing an App + Testing on Multiple Platforms
• Deployment of the App + Maintenance

If you have gone through other blogs to develop marketplace applications, then probably you will find all these crucial steps, but still, there’s something different when you develop a marketplace app compared to many other mobile applications.

Everything on the app seems to be very sorted, but under the ground, it takes time, effort, budget and most important tech skills to develop all of that and make it run seamlessly on the app store.

• Step A: Start Coding the Backend of the App

Backend is the backbone of the marketplace app, where your app logic will reside and manage all the algorithms of buyers and sellers. It is a magical core engine of your marketplace app, so instead of rushing, it is worth hiring a software development company that can manage the whole process from start to finish; from the moment an order is placed to a final transaction to a service or product review.

• Step B: Build The Fancy Side Of The App

Here, the fancy stuff of the app refers to a consumer-facing marketplace app where users expect commodities. So here you have to pour some additional efforts to make your app page look polished and engaging by using:

• Description of goods or services
• Verified user reviews and rankings

Apart, other modern features you can add to make your marketplace app impressive are:

• Easy registration and authorization process
• User profile for sellers and buyers
• Product catalogue with search and filters
• In-App messaging and push notifications
• Geolocation for matching with providers

All in all, a customer-facing marketplace app is what people most focus on while developing a marketplace app. But the game does not end here, there are more pieces of this puzzle that is still yet to solve.

• Step C# Developing an App With React Native

While developing a marketplace app, make sure you build dedicated panels for drivers and providers on both iOS and Android platforms. For example, drivers need to receive ride requests with user profiles, sellers need a place to upload their products and users need their profile to keep track of everything.

And if you are working on the lean budget and timeline, then that’s another headache. So to minimize the efforts, many companies prefer using React Native, a leading cross-platform app development framework that allows you to build an application that runs seamlessly on other platforms by using a single codebase.

And of course, it goes without saying that the UX should still be well-thought-out to grab the attention of the users and keep them engaged with your app and encourage them to get registered with your app.

• Step D# Take the Legit Tech Support

Get inspired from the leading brands and learn some tech shortcuts to cut down the massive development hours. Here, I recommend you to use off-the-shelf components to implement various features.

Here are some expert tips for using SDKs and APIs for building different parts of your marketplace app:

• Authentication: Google, Facebook, Apple ID, Auth0
• Chat: Twilio, SendBird
• Mapping: Google Maps, Apple Maps, Mapbox, Carto
• Payments: Stripe, PayPal, Skrill
• Back-end: Firebase, Parse

To incorporate more APIs into your marketplace app, you can hire app developer who can really zoom in on the project requirements and make it full-filled under your limited timeline.

• Step E# Launch Your App and Maintain IT

One thing that’s different with marketplace apps, once you release your app, you will need to constantly manage the content to avoid violating the rules like spam or inappropriate imagery etc. So to avoid such hassles, you can look for engineers that can provide post-release support.

So you have developed an app that can get you an entry to the marketplace industry. But the major question is how to scale it up according to the market.

5. How To Scale-up Your Marketplace App?

No matter how brilliant an app you have developed, to keep yourself ahead in the market, you often need to scale an app accordingly.

So here are the quick tips that help you grow your marketplace apps:

• If you want to scale your app, it is important to find and work on a certain niche, even if your marketplace is vertical, you need to have something unique that distinguishes you from your competitors.
• Offer as many items under your marketplace apps.
• Focus on the side that is harder for your business that is supply or demand. If you can improve the weak point, the strong one will be even more powerful.
• Work on improving transparency, reviews and rating systems that help you win user’s trust.
• While introducing new features, focus on one at a single point of time.
• Don’t change your strategy too fast, because the results might be just around the corner.
• Define and target the most valuable users first, as they can influence others.
• Build a community around your marketplace- make events and host meetups.
• Protect the uniqueness of your offering.

Does knowing these tips are enough to scale a marketplace app? Of course not! There are key features and functionalities that are playing a major role in it. Let’s discuss:

6. Major Features To Include In Marketplace Application

As you have entered in 2022, make sure you are building marketplace apps that can meet the growing needs of the modern market. Your customers are expecting a certain level of functionality, so you should pay close attention to the details. Here are the few features that you can choose to develop with proper integration.

Before we dig deep into the modern features, let’s understand the basic features that you need to integrate at the dedicated app versions — user, seller and admin.

Note: These are the basic features that need to be considered in case you are developing an MVP and moderate version of the app.

Major Features of the Marketplace App:

• Geolocation Based Searches: This is one of the major features without a doubt as it will help you detect the location of the user from the GPS and servers. But the functionality of this feature also depends upon the user’s choice whether they want to allow the app to access the location or not. In fact, the application also offers its users to manually add the location to see the nearby stores on the map at the run time.
• Chatbot Integration: Chatbots are all the rage today for customer support and 80% of businesses have started using these chatbots in 2020. Chatbots interact with online shoppers much like an in-store sales associate and would do and answer all their queries instantly without getting frustrated.
• AI Personalised Shopping Experience: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can make it possible for the customers to have automated and personalised shopping experiences. AI is continuously collecting data on how the customer behaves at your platform, what type of products they purchase, how long they stay and what products they like to buy.
• Voice Searches: It is predicted that 75% of purchase will be made through voice search commands by 2025. The rise of voice search creates an opportunity for marketplace owners in terms of keywords and content.
• Engaging Social Media: Along with the reviews and ratings, the option of sharing on social media is another key driver to sales success and a feature that is expected on any online portal in 2022.
• Personal Notification: One of the best tools to keep your users informed and engaged with your app is to use personal notifications. When your vendor will have any special deals, free shipping, or seasonal offers, the customer must get a notification in no time.

How Much Does It Cost To Develop a Marketplace App in 2022?

So how much does it cost to build a marketplace app in 2022? We have finally arrived at the main point of this article that always bothered startups and businesses when it comes to developing an app. Now that you know the classifications, approaches, processes, features, let’s talk about the budget.

Let’s breakdown the budget: Marketplace App Development Cost

• Basic App Budget With $5000 to $10,000+

Building a platform from a scratch with a hired team of app developers can be a great option, but with the lean budget so can here choose to build the MVP model integrated with all basic functionalities. It can be a great idea for startups, to begin with, a basic model and after analyzing the user needs and market’s requirement, they can accordingly scale up the app.

• Modern App With $10,000- $15,000+ Budget

Modern marketplace application is integrated with additional features and advanced UI/UX that makes your app works seamlessly and ensure an excellent user experience. Hiring react native app developer can be a great option here as they help you develop a cross-platform app by leveraging the wide choice of RN features including a single codebase, cross-platform compatibility, hot reload, and more that saves you on budget and development time.

• Large and Complex App With $15,000 to $50,000+ Budget

Large and complex applications are referred to as full-featured apps that leverage AI, Ml, Deep Data learning and more. With all these advanced features, you can better understand the user behaviour and market trends, and accordingly able to implement the business strategies. Hiring a top app development company to build a custom marketplace app right from the scratch with all the necessary and modern features can be a perfect option to rely. All you need is to have a brilliant idea, and the team will transform it into a robust, scalable and flexible product.

To sum up, it is fair enough to say that the marketplace startup costs depends on the features and the number of integrations you choose. On average, the functional cost will come from around $10,000 to $15,000+. But again, infusing all the features will lead to the development cost for one platform from $20,000 to $25,000+. To get a detailed breakdown of marketplace app development cost, we always recommend you get in touch with experts.

Conclusion

At the end of this blog, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that marketplace applications have quickly become a hot topic of the town. And if you are also planning to be a part of this thriving industry, then now is the right time to hire a mobile app development company. They will analyse your idea, budget, and goals, and accordingly deliver you a solution that best fits your needs.

Being experienced in customising and designing excellent apps, the team of developers can better understand the changing needs of the market.

Hopefully, this blog has cleared all your doubts related to the marketplace app development. Still, if you have any query in your mind, then you can drop a comment below.

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