Custom Online Marketplace Solutions

Challenges for marketplace entrepreneurs

Nine out of ten marketplace startups fail, mostly due to lack of:

Product/market fit
Sufficient budget planning
Digital business experience
Effective user strategies
Technical expertise

Pitfalls of turnkey (SaaS) solutions:

Generic user experience
Inflexible user flows
Low scalability
Limited revenue options
Limited features

Why custom marketplace development?

Generic templates, offered by online marketplace builders, may not support your business goals or meet your users' needs, which can sink your marketplace. Here are four good reasons for a custom solution:

Better user customisation

Custom marketplace software allows you to create functionalities, features and user flows that best serve your users.

Identify business opportunities

A custom development process makes it easier to identify growth opportunities based on user behaviour.

Align technology & business

An experienced developer will suggest the right technology to give your marketplace concept the best chance at success.

Scale your business

Generic templates can work for quick small-scale experiments, but provide a poor foundation for later growth.

Compare custom vs off-the-shelf solutions

Popular marketplace features

we have built for our clients since 2012

Great online marketplace design allows you to grow a thriving buyer/seller community, promote diverse products, and drive sustainable revenue streams. The following features can help you achieve those goals.

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Seller onboarding

The proliferation of online marketplaces has meant stiff competition for quality sellers. Activate sellers at scale by streamlining and automating their access to your platform.

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Seller shop management

Well-designed business pages for sellers can drive traffic to your marketplace, increase seller revenue, and help buyers discover products or services.

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Buyer onboarding

Helping buyers to interact with your marketplace in a low-friction, intuitive manner is critical to high platform adoption and engagement rates.

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Product listings

The quality of your product or service listings can make or break your marketplace reputation. A well-designed and managed listing structure will attract sellers that drive sales.

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Service listings

Service industries are the next big wave of marketplace disruption. Service marketplace listings should help service providers showcase their offerings so that clients can find them easily.

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Custom Search & Navigation

Users should be able to quickly find the right product or service. This requires the marriage of a seamless user interface with complex under-the-hood technical flows.

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Booking system

Your service marketplace needs to efficiently manage service provider availability and allow clients to book services when and where they need them.

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Payment systems

Managing the flow of funds between buyers, sellers and platforms is a core function of an online marketplace. Specialised payment service providers can be customised to support your business model.

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Category management

Investing in a data-driven category structure can drive (the right) traffic, increase seller retention, and convert more product searches into sales.

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Internationalisation

Offering multiple currencies, languages or cross-border tax calculations can help expand your marketplace footprint to new markets.

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Search Engine Optimisation

SEO is an important source of traffic for marketplaces. Ensuring that your marketplace, sellers, products or services rank high in search engine results will attract more customers.

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Shopping cart

Shopping carts allow marketplace buyers to purchase products from multiple sellers in one transaction. This has major implications for customer satisfaction, conversion rates, and ultimately revenue.

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Promotions management

Promotions are a great way to drive traffic and conversions. The caveat is that they need to be aligned with what your sellers offer and what your buyers want.

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Order management

Your order management system is crucial to your marketplace’s performance. Streamlining and automating the process can minimise errors, reduce wastage and increase customer satisfaction.

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Shipping

Users will drop your marketplace if you don’t offer convenient and transparent delivery options. Shipping offers an opportunity to add extra value and create a comparative advantage.

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Transactional email management

High open and click rates make transactional emails an integral part of any marketplace payment flow. Well-designed transactional templates can increase engagement and improve the shopping experience.

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Analytics

Peter Drucker said, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” The best online marketplaces evolve constantly by collecting and analysing customer feedback and user behavior.

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Ratings & Reviews

The standing of your marketplace is built on the reputations of your sellers. A review mechanism for sellers and their products or services creates transparency and builds trust.

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Do you have a list of features in mind?

We can help you identify and create the right features for your marketplace.

Successful marketplace startups

that we have worked with

FanPass is a B2C marketplace for buying and selling tickets to sports and entertainment events worldwide. They needed advanced features, like dynamic search results based on users' prior searches and preferred event types, to help the platform grow.

+10,912%

Increase in Turnover

(year-on-year)

+340%

Increase in Conversions

(year-on-year)

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Adrien, Executive Director

“It’s really reassuring to work with a company that makes managing complexity easy and enjoyable."

Affordable Art Fair commissioned a B2C product marketplace, as an online extension of their popular international Art Fairs. A custom solution was needed, as a previous version built with Magento provided limited flexibility and functionality.

+50%

Increase in Turnover

(year-on-year)

+65%

Increase in Customer spend

(year-on-year)

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Gemma, Head of ecommerce

"Their out-of-the-box approach to marketplace design streamlines user flows that drive business goals."

Nestify ran an Airbnb property management service with outdated technology. They hired us to build and integrate a scalable on-demand mobile app (for independent cleaning contractors) with a full-service property management platform (for landlords).

50%

Improvement in landlord retention

4.8/5

Superlative UX backed by a 4.8 score on Trustpilot

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Hedi, Co-founder

"You can count on them. They won’t try to take advantage of you."

Atos is an international IT group with €12 billion in annual revenue. We were contracted as marketplace development experts to build a multi-tier project management dashboard for their client, a public sector (G2B) service marketplace (like Upwork).

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Christophe, Delivery Manager

“I was very satisfied with CobbleWeb's valuable input and their contribution to the success of our project.”

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Two-week iteration cycles

Your customers' needs will evolve over time. We use a Lean Agile process to develop flexible, scalable marketplaces that can adapt to changing user needs and grow with your business. Rapid iteration based on user analysis keeps your marketplace current and responsive.

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Powerful technologies under the hood

There are significant technical challenges to building an online marketplace that meets your users’ expectations. Complex financial flows, user onboarding, product navigation, platform performance, technical SEO and other features have to work in perfect harmony.

For the best outcomes you need a development partner that can recommend, adapt and implement technologies that will evolve with your business and users.

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