What is marketplace and how to build your own PrestaShop marketplace?

A quick introduction to an online marketplace

The online marketplace is an app and website that provides facilities for shopping from several sources. It is a type of e-commerce site where services, products and information are provided through multiple parties.

The operators running the marketplace do not have physical inventory and the business is present in other people’s inventory and facilitates the transaction. One can consider it as an exchange platform. Some examples of online marketplaces are Amazon, PayPay mall, eBay, Mercado Libre, Lending Club, Airbnb, and Uber.

The purpose of the online marketplace is to facilitate the customers and make the transaction easy between the users. The users and service providers of the online marketplace are committed and engaged with the platform. These marketplaces are specially organized to deliver high-quality demand, high-quality supply, and services to buyers in an effective and efficient manner. In simple words, the marketplace is as good as its trading liquidity.

What are a marketplace and its key features?

An online marketplace is a type of e-commerce site where different products and services are provided to the customers. These online marketplaces are the primary type of multichannel e-commerce and the production process is under streamline.

In the online marketplace, the customers are provided with the facilities and it includes auctioning off services through catalogs, ordering, trading exchange functionality, capabilities, and wanted advertisements. Such a business runs online and allows the customers and users to register and sell items with the post-selling fee.

Let’s consider, how the items are provided in such stores. Different products are provided with a wide array of providers and the selection of items is wide with higher availability of vendor-specific online retail stores. When it becomes trendy in the market in 2014 online marketplaces become abundant with a wide range of general interest products that normal customer needs.

Considering different services and service providers it is obvious that online marketplaces are the information technology companies that act as intermediaries between consumers and sellers.

Some examples of online marketplaces are retailing consumer goods and services through Taobao, eBay, and Amazon. Potential customers and users search, browse and select the goods directly from the sellers on the online website.

Online marketplaces are characterized by low setup costs as they reduce the cost of items. The services are efficient for information about the quality of goods and products. Consumers can make better purchasing decisions and are hampered by different facts that allow examining the quality of the product.

Different types of marketplace

Online marketplaces facilitate customers to shop from different sources and the operator handles online inventory for the customers to facilitate the shopping.

There are different ways that participants interact with each other and develop relations. The main types of marketplaces include on-demand, managed, community-driven, SAAS, and decentralized marketplaces.

1. On-demand

The on-demand marketplace can scale only through the continuous growth of two different user groups that are buyers and sellers. Both parties give value immediacy and depend on the facilities of the transaction. In such a type of business, the seller provides products and services to the buyer.

In the digital marketplace, the rising demand for online goods and services is higher and there is nothing more beneficial and advantageous than the on-demand marketplace. They guide us to have products and services for homes in the crowded market.

2. Managed

Over the past many years, the managed marketplace is becoming widely used and making a benchmark for other types of marketplaces. Managed marketplaces such as Opendoor and Honor are taking steps ahead to provide a traditional platform to providers and customers. Customers place their orders with trust in the platform and make a transaction.

3. Community-driven

Community-driven marketplaces are often fashion brands that are developed to focus on the needs of people. They never invest a lot of money to attract customers. The main consideration is to serve the communities instead of relying on the markets and to tell them what the community-based people want.

4. SAAS

Different from others, SAAS marketplace is an application marketplace where customers can go to the online store to check, find, select, purchase and manage the cloud-based SAAS application. It is a software-as-a-service marketplace that distributes software models to provide services to customers through the Internet.

5. Decentralized

In the decentralized marketplace, the technology is used so investors can directly deal with others and operate from the centralized exchange. The virtual market is used in such types of marketplace as cryptocurrencies and decentralized currency.

The advantages of an online marketplace

Selling through the online marketplace provides facilities to have flexible business opportunities that are relatively low start-up costs such as Amazon and eBay. Online marketplaces are popular with customers and it is convenient to place an order at reasonable prices of the products. The potential benefits of the online marketplace are listed below:

1. It provides the service provider with an additional channel to sell and market the products.

2. The online platforms provide reduced marketing costs as compared to the other methods of selling services.

3. It provides new opportunities for overseas sales and the growth of services increases from national to international users.

4. Through online services, it is possible to operate the business round the clock as there are no significant time constraints and problems associated with international trading hours.

5. The opportunities are provided to establish new trading partnerships with the suppliers and traders. They also provide a level of trust between the buyer and service providers.

Build your own PrestaShop marketplace

PrestaShop is providing the services of the designing and development of the online store through coding. Furthermore, an online store can be developed based on the demand of store owners from scratch. If you want to build a PrestaShop marketplace for yourself, there are 2 methods to consider: build your marketplace from scratch or install a marketplace (multi-vendor) module on your existing PrestaShop site.

PrestaShop marketplace module

PrestaShop marketplace module is supported by the addons as a perfect solution and they will convert the store into an online marketplace. Administration of these marketplaces provides functionalities to sellers from adding different features, attributes, products, tags, and shipping methods to the store locators, pack product, mass upload, seller price comparison, auction, and wallet.

There are various types of shipping methods such as Correios, FedEx, UPS, and USPS. Multiple types of payment methods are applied such as Stripe, PayPal, WePay, Braintree, and MANGOPAY. Some responsive themes are used for the advanced search box, product management, buyer-seller chat, post-buy request, and responsive methods. These methods are used by the admin to improve the performance of stores.

Read more: Looking for an all-in-one marketplace (multi-vendor) module for your site? Let's take a look at Marketplace Builder - our powerful marketplace tool!

Design your store 

Search and select the right storefront that is according to your brand, PrestaShop provides a standard theme so you can get started quickly. The eCommerce templates will help in designing a beautiful online store experience.

Create a product catalog

The development of the catalog is the heart of the business therefore it is important to manage and build the business catalog with hundreds of categories and products. This will organize all things in the entire inventory of products and services.

Customize the shopping

Select different ways of payment solutions and gateways. The best strategy is to accept direct payments through gift cards, debit cards, credit cards, and electronic wallets. Provide customers with the offer to have reliable shipping under controlled logistics and discounts directly on different items and services.

Use mobile commerce

In order to grow your business rapidly, it is important to stay close to your customers. the best default template is to use mobile-optimized shopping carts. The store will display all things beautifully and customers can browse and purchase items easily.

Advanced multivendor marketplace

Initially, the online business will start growing slowly and then it will get more customers and users. At that point, it is recommended to convert the PrestaShop store into a multi-vendor marketplace and to allow the customers to reach multiple items.

Marketplace builder makes PrestaShop a marketplace with ease. Consider that the marketplace module installation is an easy way to develop a marketplace for the sellers and buyers in the least time possible.

Conclusion

The online marketplaces are having multiple advantages as they can be characterized by simple retail stores and low setup costs for dealers. In the case of customers, the online marketplace reduces the search cost and makes it easy to reach the final products easily. The consumer can purchase items and take decisions by looking at the pictures of the product, but it hampered them from the identification of the quality of the product.