What’s the Quickest Way to Build a Marketplace MVP?

Why should you start with an MVP?

If you want to build a successful marketplace website, starting with a Minimum Viable Product approach is a sound idea. It allows saving a lot of time and money and receiving valuable feedback on the solution and its primary features. With this approach, you will surely realize whether your idea is worth investing in or not.

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 understand what should be changed/deleted/added on the website. It becomes possible with useful feedback from your early users.

The approach enables you to quickly and viably create a functional solution that can further be scaled and modified.

What are the main principles you should 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 do they 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.

The 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.

• 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 implement 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

Below you can see the list of tools we use for custom marketplace development:

Server-side: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, ElasticSearch, Redis, i18n gem, MySQL, and Sidekiq for handling server-side operations.

Client-side: HTML5, CSS3, JS, Ruby on Rails, React, and Vue.js.

Other tools: AWS S3, GitLab, GitHub, Slack, Digital Ocean.

Conclusion

Marketplace web development is a tough hill to climb which 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 want to learn more about marketplace MVP development, read our full article.