Things to keep in mind while building a marketplace

Get more vendors on board. Imagine going to a supermarket and you end up not finding most of the items ( or all) you want. Or walking into an empty supermarket? Boring, you wouldn’t visit the same place again. Along the same lines if you are a marketplace-based business then strengthening the vendor side is very pivotal at the start. If you are having to pay for vendor acquisition at the start, well it’s not really a good sign. It’s okay to have a small acquisition cost but you cannot afford to continue paying for it, in the long run, so try getting more creative in order to optimize organic acquisition i.e having zero vendor acquisition cost. Also, having a larger space to display more items on the shelf is eye-catching as you would attract a wider range of customers. So try having more vendors offering the service at all price ranges. Short Retention Period When is your customer coming back to your platform again to avail your service? If you haven’t thought of this question, you are missing out on something big. Acquiring customers is all difficult and high but when you have acquired them when are they coming back? Do you have to spend again to acquire them? You will not have to if you can understand your customer behavior. Try to get them back, and be the first one to tell them that you are ready with the solution. Be the 1st brand that your customer recalls when there is a need for the service you offer, amongst your competitors. The most frequent customers are the most valued customers, do not ignore them. If your customers are not coming back, you have to find out the WHY? And correcting that is your next goal. If you still don’t find an answer then you should work on creating more value for the customer. GMV ( Gross Merchandise Value ) This is the best metric to check in the initial stage for any marketplace business. GMV is the total sales volume of merchandise transactions in a given period. So get more orders or customers or bookings or whatever just keep the numbers growing. This can be achieved only if there is a good volume of users and vendors, on the platform. Supermarkets with more products and more customers walking in look like a promising businesses. Having a good number of active users on the platform (website, app, or social media pages) is a sign of a healthy business so try to optimize your growth channels (like google, and social media) to increase active users.