Marketplace MVP Development: Types, Features and Costs

What Are Marketplace Types?

A marketplace is a medium platform or app where vendors can offer their products or services for clients to purchase and book.

Leaning on the vendor vs customer relations there are several models:

• Business to Business (b2b)
• Peer to Peer (p2p)
• Business to Customer (b2c)
• Customer to Customer (c2c)

 The amount of marketplace types across industries is rapidly growing as more businesses go online.

Here’s the list of the most prevalent types with well-known representatives:

• Goods and Products - Amazon, Asos, AliExpress.
• Services - bolt, Booking.com, Upwork.
• Media  - Netflix, The New York Times, Spotify.
• Finance - Kickstarter, Indiegogo, CircleUp

Marketplace search feature

Marketplace MVP Purposes

A concept check

A new start is always a risk. Even though your idea appears to be a lick of the litter, it may lead you through the way from hero to zero. If early adopters don’t lean towards it, all the efforts and budget are wasted. Creating an online MVP marketplace becomes a helping hand.

MVP for marketplaces counts your pennies

Setting off an MVP is thrifty if compared to crafting full-fledged products. The money saved may be invested in post-release activities. Yep, the MVPs can be promoted and marketed. We recommend going for a marketing campaign for your MVPs and unfolding a marketing strategy alongside the project. 

Crowd Puller

Early customers define a project’s destiny. They provide feedback that gives directions for upcoming expansions, modifications, and improvements. Also, first adopters, in case they enjoy the MVP, are to remain loyal.

This writing is a single-stop source to get to the bottom of what’s needed to build an MVP for an online marketplace. We kept our shoulders on the wheel to leave no questions unanswered. Keep reading, and we’ll disclose the best developer in the field (Spoiler: Celadonsoft).

Key Elements in Marketplace MVP Development

When dealing with features and functionality, foremost, you ought to figure out the features pack that will fit the users’ needs. Pivoting on our experience in the development of an MVP for marketplaces, we highlighted the all-important ones:

User profile

Homepage

Homepage dictates the first impression as it’s the first item a user catches when opening a marketplace. Add the most significant information on this page - it may be a brief description, promotions, or greetings. Welcome the visitors in the best possible way.

Sign-in

If a homepage is the first item users encounter, the sign-in is the first interaction with the platform. It’s a gate to purchasing and vending. We recommend adding several signup alternatives. The most common are sign-in by using an e-mail, phone number, Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social media.

Vendors and customer profiles

Create a convenient-to-manage and informative vendor page so that the customer could obtain all the necessary info about the seller and provided values. While it’s clear that a vendor's account is a must-have, opinions on the importance of customer profiles may be different. If you want to ensure more safety for your vendors, then you’d like to add them.

An item page

Product and service pages are the most frequently viewed. This is a decision-making element as It’s the spot where a shopper concludes on buying. When developing an MVP for an online marketplace, we put forward to include:

• name
• pictures
• description
• characteristics

When developing a full-featured product, you may also add other handy features like video reviews, for example.

Search

Imagine shopping in a marketplace without being able to hunt out the desired item? We hardly can. Search option absence will harden maneuvering through the platform and massively complicate the shopping. Those flaws may result in user outflow.

User roles

When we’re conversing about the roles, you naturally arrive at a vendor and a customer. These are a must for MVP. More roles may be added later leaning on the marketplace kind and needs.

Payment

A marketplace is designed for selling-buying relations which require payment. We recommend adding several payment options: card, cash, e-wallets, etc. Multiple payment options are achieved by payment gateways:

• Stripe
• Braintree
• PayPal
• MANGOPAY
• Adyen
• Skrill
• Square
• Dwolla
• Google Checkout

Admin panel

The Admin panel is a handy tool for you as an entrepreneur to handle the workflow and manage all the seller-buyer interactions.

Messaging

Communication is a trouble-solving thing. Empowering communication between buyers and sellers is key to a trusted marketplace.

Feedback

Feedback enhances the product or service selling. They help to earn buyers’ trust and confidence in purchases to be made.

Notification

Notifications aid customers to stay tuned and sweetens the user experience. They alert users on new texts, order requests, promotions, updates, etc.

When your development is sailed and the first feedback is received, you can tack components and functionalities or implement adaptions to gradually upgrade an MVP into a boomy marketplace.

Product page

How to Build an Online MVP Marketplace

Celadonsoft has built a good deal of marketplaces and shaped up our own development path. 

1. Pre-production

In Celadonsoft we don’t just develop, we do our best to throw a marketplace MVP that will hit the market. Detailed research and analyses are the dress for success.  At this stage, we set goals, examine competitors, spot weaknesses, make up the roadmap of workflow, and estimate the budget.

2. Features highlight

Discovery smoothly falls into features and functionality determination. The challenge here is to create the MVP version of a custom marketplace that is sufficient and doesn’t push too hard with unnecessary functionality. We keep an MVP balanced.

3. Design

The design is a pre-coding phase. Keeping in mind the idea of the outstanding user experience, we put ourselves in the user’s place and strive to make the UX concept as much friendlier. Tip: the creation of wireframes, and clickable design mockups, make the way to the top UX.

Notifications

4. Development

It’s odd to mention that at this stage the code is written. Yet, it’s being tested and debugged. The code travels from developers to testers and back until it gets free of bugs.

5. First users’ feedback

Building an online marketplace MVP has been rounded off, but the assignment is to be run on. Once a Marketplace MVP is deployed to the world, it’s time to nose up premature adopters’ sentiments. Their reviews will guide you in the direction of how to develop online marketplace MVP down the road and what’s to be rectified.

6. Support & Maintenance

A marketplace Minimal Viable Products sets off for the long journey, and we kick-off to create a marketplace MVP for another customer. Actually, we don’t. We hold up to sustain and support the product. 

How Much Does It Cost to Build an Online Marketplace MVP

We’ve got the hang of how to build an online MVP marketplace so what about budget?  The costs to build a marketplace MVP vary for a different project and leans on the several factors:

• Features nature and quantity 
• Timeframe to get a marketplace MVP moving
• Developers selection - you may want to engage in-house, outsourced, or freelance developers. Each of them has different hourly rates. The rates are also influenced by geographical location.
• Contractual obligations

Celadonsoft has developed tons of marketplace MVPs and pivoting on our background the intermediate prices are between $15,000 and $50,000.

Read our article to dig up what affects MVP costs.

What Makes Marketplace Minimum Viable Product Be Successful

On top of everything mentioned above, let's get it across that a marketplace MVP isn’t a full-fledged product but rather a trial. The success of the experiment is measured differently. To understand if a marketplace MVP is killing, we answer these 3 questions before production and release:

• What expectations are you set to satisfy in this trial?
• What is the target data to be collected via the trial?
• What are determining factors for reaching the targets? 

If the ready-made online marketplace development KPI figures do not correspond to the answers, we review the project and search for things to be fixed so that the marketplace MVP would smash it.

Naturally, if an MVP’s KPI is satisfactory we put development back in close partnership with our clients to uphold the product and introduce new traits. 

Consider Celadonsoft's to gain ground in Marketplace MVP

Celadonsoft is an end-to-end development company that uses the most modern stack technology to deliver outstanding solutions. Our solid background includes multiple projects of marketplace MVPs that have evolved into full-fledged products. Let us spare a word about some of them:

• Construction Services Marketplace

Residential housing marketplace that originated as an MVP and build with a top-notch technology stack and complex DevOps approach. The primary goal is to make construction processes easier.  Schedule change tracking, progress reports, order inspection, completion estimates, and other features have been introduced for full control at each stage of construction. 

• Food Ordering App For Restaurants Network

Artificial Intelligence-powered food ordering app that has played a crucial role in sales elevation, business flow optimization, operating cost-cutting, bringing clients closer to the customers, and delivering other benefits. 

• Web & Mobile App Development for Book & Media Retailer

Second-hand marketplace focused on books, CDs, DVDs, and games. Our task was to bring the existing and poorly functioning website to life by redesigning, adding new functionality and features, and integrating the admin panel, and other core elements. Yet, we have developed Android and iOs applications. The main perk is ISBN and EAN scanning tool that aids to set pricing. 

• Jewelry Marketplace

Android and iOs b2c marketplace designed for jewelry selling-purchasing. The app is fitted with an admin panel for vendors and sellers, a majority of filters to optimize the search, automated pricing, wishlist, and personal accounts. 

Look at our case studies to make sure we’re the team you’d like to trust in your venture.  The cases cover the nuts and bolts of the work journeys into the MVP development world.

Still, wondering how to create a marketplace website MVP? The answer is Celadonsoft. We implement the result-focused approach and blue-sky thinking to develop high-quality MVPs. Also, we’ll care about further transformation into a full-featured marketplace with offering monetization and promotion drives. Drop a message to create an excellent and flawless marketplace MVP.