How To Develop A Marketplace App — Cost and Features

Online marketplaces are growing in number and popularity. They deliver great user experiences, help complete the purchase cycle, share traditional customer visits and purchases, and deliver business value.

Concepts and business models have received enough hype for their convenience, and the pandemic has given enough impetus to online marketplaces.

If you are an entrepreneur and wondering how to build a marketplace app and how to make revenue.

What Is A Marketplace App?

The Marketplace app is an electronic platform for buyers and sellers of products and services. It can serve as an online extension of a brick-and-mortar business like Walmart, or have an entirely “digital” existence like Etsy, Upwork, and Udemy.

Due to easy user experience, online payment options and delivery tracking features, these marketplace apps are becoming more and more popular.

The Marketplace app is pretty much all the online stores that work under one digital umbrella.

Types Of Marketplace Apps

• Global Marketplaces

Global Markets is the largest buying and selling platform offering all products and services for all types of industries. Common examples of marketplaces are Amazon, Alibaba, and Walmart. From a keto supplement to a productivity planner, users can find everything on the platform, from basics to luxuries.

• Horizontal Marketplaces

Horizontal market is the average of products, services, target audience and overall reach. These marketplaces provide specific products and services for a variety of industries, sectors and sub-sectors, occupations, and more.

Grailed is one of the most common examples of a horizontal market. It is an application to buy and sell men’s clothing. Men can find a wide variety, from tuxedo and moccasins, to casio watches and work uniforms.

• Vertical Marketplaces

Vertical markets are great niches. They sell specific products and/or services to a specific group of users. Tee Mates is a social media platform whose marketplace and entire app is dedicated to golfers worldwide. Likewise, we have Uber, which brings together drivers with cars and users who want to book rides for personal or business trips on a small scale.

Researching The Market Before Creating A Marketplace App

Be it an app-based business, a consultancy firm or even a small blogging website, market research is the key to pre-execution success.

Here are the key factors you need to assess during your market research

Idea Evaluation

Do I want to start a market for a specific product or service or a range of products or services?

Do I want to sell to a smaller or general target audience?

Do I have a specific buyer in mind? (Demographics age location medical or psycho graphic history of my target app users)

Do I have special salesperson profiles in mind? (Demographic age location or background

Cost And Time Required For Marketplace App Development

Once you have your basic application idea, the problem it will solve, and the market it will target, it’s time to dive into the financial aspects.

How much does it cost to develop a marketplace app?

Marketplace app development starting at $20,000 for basic apps. Apps with mid-tier configurations and features can cost anywhere from $45,000 to $55,000. Advanced apps that display custom reports, merchant statistics, offer offline mode, and more costs between $75,000 and $90,000.

How much time does it take to develop a marketplace app?

A basic market application can be developed in 4 months. As the complexity of features increases, so does development time. However, if you are planning to develop an application for the large market, it can still be developed in 6 months if you choose to take advantage of cross-platform development frameworks, front-end APIs for features core functionality and minimalist design.

Marketplace App Competitors

Although you won’t technically have many equivalent competitors if you choose to invest in horizontal or vertical marketplaces. It’s still perfect for testing your favorite business UI, UX, delivery channels, payment options, and app streams for inspiration.

Business Models Of Marketplace Apps

Check the operation and profitability of different applications. They may have central warehouses, pickup or delivery points, local or independent delivery channels, discount options, reward systems, and affiliates.

The business potential section has three main types of business models, and all markets and e-commerce applications fall into any of these categories.

Monetization Strategy For Marketplace Apps

Listing the top 5 ideas for your marketplace app monetization:

• Launch a free app. Then earn through sponsored advertisements.
• Charge registration and listing fees and earn sales commission from sellers.
• Launch a paid app that earns through a subscription model.
• Launch a free app, and earn through affiliate coupons and discounts.
• Develop a freemium app. that provides basic features and limited transactions for free, and charges a membership fee for premium features.

How to build a marketplace app — Simple 5 steps process

• Choose The Type Of Marketplace App You Want To Develop

Horizontal and vertical markets differ in the concentration/concentration of products and services and target end users. Your decision to develop a market application should mainly depend on these factors.

Horizontal online markets showcase diverse products and services, so they attract a larger user base. This means that the application should have a stronger user experience, database, and capacity to accommodate a large number of users at any given time. A smooth user experience and a strong technical architecture are the most important. These are the main factors that affect the cost.

The vertical market is severely segmented. Compared with the horizontal market, they provide less diversity of products and services, and relatively cater to a smaller user group. The magnitude of the load, user profile, database, and function is relatively small, and the cost is relatively small.

• Create A Development Strategy

Once you’ve decided what type of app to invest in, it’s time to hire an app development team and discuss the agile methodology they would apply to your project. The development strategy includes the following factors:

• Platform/device the app is for — Android, iOS, web application, or cross-platform
• The magnitude of the app project — MVP, fully-functional app, advanced functionalities, etc.
• Goals behind app development (important for feature specification)
• Technology stack, database, and APIs the development team will use
• Milestones and development completion timelines
• Monetization models and innovation strategies

If you have already documented a business plan, you can skip this step, especially if you are not a technical trainee. This is because app development companies are already working on comprehensive proposals and documents on the effort. While ideal, do a rough homework map of these factors before your first counseling or on boarding session.

• Decide Marketplace App Features You Want To Add

You can choose to skip or add as many app features as you need, but it’s a good idea to minimize your apps, align your app’s scope with your app’s goals, and reduce features that aren’t directly useful to your goals. increase. Improve the user experience.

• Delivery tracking
• Guest signup features with Google, Facebook and Apple
• Two factor authentication
• Multiple payment methods like Google Pay, Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, Stripe
• Push notifications and social media integration
• Instant Add to cart or Wishlist
• Customer support chatbots
• Detailed product listing pages and seller profiles
• Advanced search options and filters
• Product rating and review options

Alibaba and Udemy have the above common features.

• Complete Technical Specifications

Most entrepreneurs, especially those who want to apply for third-party funding, request a prototype of their app before developing a working digital product. These prototypes are ideal visual models for startups and are important for marketing to investors.

Prototyping is currently a very optional option, and you can start developing technology with or without prototypes, depending on your taste and budget.

Technology development for marketplace applications can be divided into three tiers:

Back-end Development: This part of the marketplace application is server-side and holds sensitive and practical data obtained from seller and buyer profiles. All important payment details, order management, SKUs and other product information are stored in placeholders. These placeholders are coded on the back-end, which is the core architecture of your app. To achieve a smooth user experience, developers need to accurately code the back-end of their app.

Front-end development: This part of the market application directly interacts with the application user-hence the name client. All operations performed by the user on the application screen, such as browsing drop-down menus, adding to shopping carts, wish lists, product filtering, mainly occur on the front end, and instructions to complete the operation are passed to the back end.

API integration: API, also known as application programming interface, is the middle layer between the back-end and the front-end. API exchanges data and makes development easier and more time-saving. The most common API example is the registration function: register with Google, register with Facebook, etc.

marketplace development

• Test The App And Deploy

For testing, there are usually two approaches:

Developers complete the application and then submit it to their QA department to validate user acceptability, speed, performance, and bugs.

The developers complete the MVP, then send it to the client, who then distributes it to the community and seeks feedback on the improvement in the real user environment.

Each of these test scales has its advantages and is used together. Though, the latter helps in marketing the app as well. Despite this, this is only recommended when you are confident in the performance of the market app and it will not attract negative publicity.

Identify the application problems in the above five areas and forward them to the development team for repair and improvement. Repeat the test steps until the application is error-free and deployable. Once approved by the QA tester, the application will be delivered to the customer along with its source code, digital assets, brand elements and design resources. All these assets belong to the application owner legally, unless they are developed by a third party for commercial use.

After delivery, the entrepreneur can choose to deploy the application through its native development team, hire dedicated professionals or apply for application patents.

In any case, the deployment starts with the purchase of the developer’s account. Google Play account for Android applications and Apple developer account for iOS applications. The Google Play account is charged at a one-time fee of US$25, while the App Store charges US$99 per year.

Concluding with

Marketplace applications, including B2B and B2C, have significantly improved the global online shopping experience. More importantly, these marketing applications are lucrative business ventures for entrepreneurs who don’t want to manage supply chains and inventory but still want to take advantage of users’ growing online shopping needs.

If you have an epic market idea, ApproLabs has marketplace developers to have key business insights to successfully launch your application and drive your business to grow rapidly.