February 15, 2018 (Powerhomebiz.net) Within the last few years, Marketplaces dedicated to various fields, products, or groups of products became extremely popular. They are being created by people or companies belonging to a certain field, as well as by those outside of the particular sphere who simply want to make their and other people’s lives easier.
But with so many options to choose from, how to make sure that your Marketplace is going to be really successful? How to create something that is usable and to the point? First of all, you need to make sure you understand what you want to deal with, what is it that you can suggest to the modern market. And below are a few things you need to pay attention to when choosing a desirable field for your Marketplace.
Your interests can bring you a fortune
We are so often told that if we do what we love we won’t have to work a day. Something that you enjoy doing or have a very good knowledge of can give you an advantage. For starters, you will be more interested in developing the project. You wouldn’t want to invest your time and money into something that quickly becomes too boring for you. Another point is that your existing skill set and knowledge will definitely benefit your business. So, you can keep doing what you enjoy, except now, it will start bringing you money.
Let others make use of it
A Marketplace which is interesting for you is great, of course. But if you want it to be profitable it needs to be useful to other people as well. You can invest tons of money and resources into your Marketplace and end up losing money if what you’re focusing on does not bring value to your target audience.
How do you actually know what is important to your users? What do they care about? A bit of the market research can come in handy. Check reviews on similar platforms, find out what are the main features requested by users, what are their main complaints. Process this information and turn it into the relevant, advanced features for your application. Additionally, think about something you have always felt the lack of on other platforms. Later on, you can use these as your USPs.
Slice the elephant
Don’t try to go all big at once, better make it small but good. This way you can initially introduce your Marketplace as a quality product, and it will be easier to deal with any issues which are going to arise on the way. Depending on what exactly is your Marketplace about you can limit yourself to a few products, locations or partners to work with. Further on, this will help you make sure that anything you add is developed based on lessons learned and feedback received.
Get to know the market
We already mentioned earlier that to achieve a successful product you need to know what’s out there. There is only so much you can do as you start. But knowing who you are dealing with is an essential part of building a business. Get into those competitors’ Marketplaces, see what they can do, how they work. But most importantly, listen to those who use these services, they are the ones who will be showing you the direction. Look at the reviews, make surveys, collect data. And make sure to keep doing that after you launch if you want to keep up with the flow.
Conclusion
A quick recap of what we have listed above is – when building your Marketplace, think, analyze, and deliver. Think if you would have wanted to use your Marketplace had it been built by someone else. Analyze what are the most wanted but at the same time required and possible to implement features on the market. Deliver the solution to your users. Once this is done, collect their feedback and repeat those three steps based on the newly obtained information.
Resource Box
We’re all living in the era of the sharing economy. We get around with uber and lyft, rent our vacation residences via Airbnb and home away, shop through Etsy. At Roobykon Software we know how to bring your business into the sharing economy by building your marketplace. We guide our customers right from the idea initiation phase, using our experience to help choose the best platform for the project, before leading development through to a successful release – and beyond.
https://roobykon.com/