This IT age provides us with an uncountable number of opportunities. New tools and technologies emerge, attract and bring revenue in an unexpected way. But sometimes, you don’t have to follow the cutting-edge approaches to succeed. You can just turn your head towards the good old eCommerce industry and think over launching your own online marketplace.
To inspire you for new achievements, just take a look at significant facts about the world’s greatest web marketplace:
- Amazon net income has reached more than $3 billion;
- There are more than 5 billion sellers on Amazon;
- These numbers grow on a daily basis: for example, in 2019, more than a million new sellers joined the platform.
And now, instead of watching after someone else’s success, it’s time for you to start your own journey to the world of marketplace development. We will guide you through 5 the most important stages and provide you with a full understanding of how splendid solutions are born.
How to launch a profitable marketplace
Several minutes of reading, some time devoted to planning and a few months of hard work will bring the desired result. Ready to begin it right now? Clockwise Software team has shared the essetial stages of maketplace development:
Start from thorough planning
If you have come here, you already have the idea of launching a great marketplace. It is time to grow it:
Augment your idea
It is not enough to say “I’d like to run my own online selling platformâ€. You need to have a vision of what type of products you’d like to sell there, how to find sellers and what is unique about your solution. Remember that our century is a time of great opportunities as well as the intense competition so emphasize your advantages at the very beginning.
Investigate and analyze
In order to successfully break into the viable eCommerce industry, find out the most important things about both local and global market. Discover how viable the industry is, get acquainted with your potential competitors’ products and analyze their behavior. There are companies that worth following so make sure you know them and avoid rough edges and risky methods.
Design a prototype
Together with your development partner, build a prototype with the upcoming eCommerce product. This is helpful for 2 primary reasons:
- The prototype is a way to make sure your development team understands you correctly;
- This is a chance to attract investments and potential user’s attention before the actual website is launch.
Besides, this allows you to see your own idea from a different prospect.
Technology stack
Once your prototype is ready, you together with the development team lead and project manager can pick the suitable technology stack. Here, we mean top programming languages and respective frameworks, useful plugins and tools for QA purposes as well as project and task management.
Here are the significant results you’ll get on this stage:
- A clear vision of a marketplace;
- Software product’s logic;
- Well-defined requirements;
- Approximate estimations, both technical and financial.
2. Design your marketplace
UI/UX design is a significant component of the process. This stage requires either a deep understanding of the latest design techniques or the cooperation with an experienced web designer. Here, you will create:
- UI design
Long story short, it will be your marketplace’s interface with all the elements, visual effects, colors, fonts etc. Here, you need to focus on attractiveness: random users will pay their attention to your marketplace design first, so make it lovely.
- UX Design
UX or user experience describes everything that happens to a user once he or she opens your website. From a convenient placement of important buttons to seamless checkout, from fast page load to intuitiveness – it is all about UX design. Providing hassle-free journeys for potential users, you increase the chances they will visit your marketplace again and again.
What about the results of your efforts on this stage? You will get a well-thought marketplace UI/UX design that will come alive soon.
3. Build this software solution
This is a momentous stage and a cornerstone of your success. Here, coding and all other software development peculiarities take place. And once it starts, make sure you are aware of the following things:
Development team
These are people who take care of the technical implementation of your idea. Typically, the development team includes front-end, back-end and mobile developers. Front-end engineers develop the interface agreed previously on a design stage back-end specialists are responsible for constructing strong and bugless server side of your marketplace. In turn, mobile developers make your eCommerce platform run seamlessly on mobile devices.
Scrum methodology
Scrum is the way to organize and optimize your development processes in the best way. It requires dividing your project to iterations and 2-weeks sprints. Its feature is the active communication between all the members of the process. The team gathers for daily and demo meetings, meetings for spring planning and review, retrospective meetings etc to discuss achievements, issues and plans. Being present on at least some of these meetings, you keep a hand on a pulse of development.
After this stage, you will get your up-and-running marketplace.
4. Test the product
There are numerous ordinary marketplaces, and the point is to launch an outstanding one. Thus, focus on quality. A team of competent QA/ QC engineers may give you a hand with that.
Manual testing
It is about manually checking each marketplace’s feature in order to make sure it meets the requirements and works properly.
Automation testing
It requires programming skills. Automation quality assurance engineer develops functionality that tests your marketplace without tester’s participation.
Testing takes place on each level of the software development lifecycle and provides you with the confidence you’ve built a powerful product.
5. Grow and improve
After a successful launch, the maintenance stage comes. Here, you need to deal with possible bugs quickly, provide the assistance to your users and improve the available functionality. Users always demand more; so after such a long journey to the excellent marketplace launch, don’t get into the pitfall of indifference. Your product needs you, so devote your full dedication and skills to take it to the top. Listen to users, employ marketing strategies, upgrade the features and join the team of the successful online marketplaces’ owners.
Marketplace development: in conclusion
This is it! You are now aware of 5 key stages of marketplace development and possess the essentials for the start. Waste no more time and start turning your idea to reality.
Do you need more tips on how to build a prosperous solution? Just drop us a line and we’ll provide you with them.
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