Accelerating the Growth of Your Marketplace: 11 Tips to Know
Marketplaces are on the rise! These are multiplying at high speed, in all markets and all sectors. Whether they are marketplaces between individuals like Leboncoin, ParuVendu or Vinted, BtoC marketplaces like Cdiscount or Amazon, or even BtoB like Hellopro or Ankorstore, this model is massively adopted.
Getting started today therefore requires making the right choices in order to position yourself effectively while generating income. Here are our tips to help you.
1 - Understand your market as well as the users you want to attract
This seems obvious, but it is not always so! A perfect understanding of your market and your customers will allow you to significantly accelerate your growth. We can only advise you enough to put in place effective monitoring tools in order to follow all the trends in your market and anticipate the needs of your customers.
For monitoring, do not hesitate, for example, to set up a whole series of Google alerts in order to receive all the news relating to your sector directly in your mailbox, using keywords. This can be the name of your products, your sector, your competitors… Knowledge is the key!
This general understanding will allow you to position your marketplace. Find differentiating factors, and avoid head-on confrontation with market behemoths. It is essential to generate strong engagement from the community of users that you wish to attract to your marketplace, so do not hesitate to highlight your skills and advanced expertise in order to generate attention and trust.
This study and positioning work will prevent you from getting lost, and will give you a guideline, both in terms of offer and communication. Make sure to always work on the coherence of your offer, in order to avoid confusing your messages. It will also allow you to capitalize on your specific strengths which will allow you both to be attractive but also to generate a solid base of loyal customers who recognize themselves in what you offer, both in terms of products and services and in terms of quality. user experience.
2 – Meet user expectations in terms of functionality
Always ask yourself these two questions, before thinking about new features and services to deploy on your marketplace:
What features would allow me to attract more sellers to my marketplace, and effectively retain them by allowing them to increase their sales?
What features would allow me to attract more buyers to my marketplace, and effectively retain them by offering them an optimal purchasing experience?
Each feature should be a direct answer to these two questions, in a balanced way. Do not favor sellers or buyers, it is the balance between these two types of users that will make your marketplace a success.
Don’t hesitate to search forums or other discussion spaces, especially if these discussion spaces are linked to your competitors! Understanding the expectations of your buyers and sellers will allow you to prioritize your developments, maintain a coherent roadmap, while providing new features that will hit the mark every time.
Favor a constant development logic, in order to always release small new features that will please your users, and regularly put major features online that will have a “wow” effect.
And don't be shy! Take the time to survey your users, integrate them into your development logic and ask them what they expect. You will greatly reduce the risk of making a mistake and create a strong sense of belonging.
3 – Implement a new user acquisition strategy
Natural referencing (SEO) is undoubtedly one of the most important levers in which you will always have to invest.
Choice of keywords, user experience, netlinking, content strategy... We have written a complete article which will allow you to deploy an effective strategy in order to increase the natural referencing of your marketplace.
You should also study setting up an advertising budget in order to position yourself directly on a search engine or on display, and thus effectively target the customers you wish to attract.
Finally, acquisition also involves encouraging use. So don’t hesitate to also put a budget on commercial activations, such as promotional codes or other forms of discounts, which will encourage users attracted to your marketplace to switch to the act of purchase.
4 – Capitalize on trust and reputation
Without trust, no customers. Without customers, no marketplace. Your users must have confidence in you, and more broadly in all the users with whom they will trade.
As for you, maximize your efforts to provide top-notch user support. Quickly handle user requests, provide detailed and comprehensively answered FAQs.
Allow your customers to rate each other and review products. Setting up a rating and review system will, on the one hand, show your purchase volumes, and on the other hand, inform the choice of buyers before moving on to the purchasing phase. Letting your users express themselves is a real necessity in this process of acquiring the trust of a community.
And what’s better than recommendation to generate trust? So don’t hesitate to set up a sponsorship program to encourage your users to invite their loved ones to join them.
Also offer ergonomics and a clear user experience that allows your users to easily access the information they need. Everything must be simple and practical, without this degrading the level of service you offer.
Trust comes through the richness of the functionalities, but also through the payment experience, a very crucial point on an online sales platform. If your users don't have trust, they will never risk entering their payment method, let alone making a transaction. So try to offer suitable payment methods, within a careful design.
A marketplace is a trusted third party, it’s in its name. So your success depends on it.
5 – Put considerable effort into the security of users and their data
Even if this point is directly linked to trust, it is important to emphasize the capital importance that the processing of their data has for users. You must fully secure them, and let them know.
Make sure you respect the GDPR to the letter, and secure all digital spaces that contain the data of your customers and their transactions. Limit access to this data to only those who actually need to know it. A poorly secured database can have extremely negative, if not highly harmful, consequences.
Work hard on combating fraud and verifying your customers. If one of your users is the victim of a scam on your marketplace, your reputation will be seriously and permanently damaged.
Be sure to set up alerts to report any suspicious behavior to internal teams, such as excessive transaction velocity, inconsistent amounts, etc.
6 – Work on the data you collect
Your data is a real gold mine. Use it to understand the behavior of your users and the trends that emerge.
Indeed, your data is an excellent decision-making tool and will allow you to implement monitoring that will prove very useful:
KPIs table: Your data can allow you to enrich your monitoring table with key performance indicators. This can be the frequency, recency and amount of purchases, the attractiveness of the offer available on your marketplace, etc. Monitoring these KPIs will also allow you to evaluate the relevance and effectiveness of the strategies you put in place (SEO, SEM, commercial and promotional offers, content, etc.).
Behavioral analysis and user experience: Do not hesitate to carefully study the time spent on the pages, the paths your users take, or your shopping cart success or abandonment rates. This data will allow you to optimize your interfaces in order to increase their efficiency and have a better conversion rate.
Sales support tools: Understanding through data what works and what doesn't can be very effective in attracting and retaining sellers in your marketplace. Provide them with key data to enable them to optimize the way they sell, the sales pitch, product sheets, etc. And more sales from your sellers means more revenue for your platform.
7 - Expand the product and service offering
What users of your marketplace sell to you can allow you to sell goods or services that are affiliated with it.
Do you sell products? Offer insurance and delivery.
Do you sell cars? Offer warranty extensions and why not partner garage services or spare parts.
Do you offer homes for rental? Cleaning services or deposit tools will inevitably make people happy.
Be creative and don’t hesitate to expand your range to meet user needs and expectations. They will thank you.
8 – Deploy on a continental scale
Your buyers and sellers are everywhere! So think big quickly, and translate your marketplace so you can reach new countries with high potential. Even if this internationalization step generally comes later, it is recommended to carry out your developments so that deployment is facilitated when it is appropriate to do so.
9 - Adapt your business model to the specificities of your market
Just because a platform offers such pricing does not mean it is suitable for your business. Don’t hesitate to test the prices you apply, in order to find the right balance between your income objectives and what your users are willing to pay.
Even if what you offer is exceptional, both your buyers and your sellers probably won't want to be commissioned too heavily.
Explore several remuneration logics (fixed and/or variable commissions, subscriptions, etc.) in order to be able to find the most equitable distribution possible between you and your users, and thus create healthy growth for all stakeholders in your activity . Don’t forget that it is better to earn 10,000 times €1 than 100 times €100 when you are a marketplace.
Generating and maintaining your traffic requires a well-thought-out business model.
10 - Don’t just rely on others, innovate!
Get your brain going and innovate in terms of offers and services in order to surprise your market and create unique experiences for your users. It’s easier said than done, but betting on innovation always pays off.
Taking inspiration from the big names in your market is of course necessary, but you must also create your own new products and work on your unique character.
11 - Save time and money on your transactional infrastructure
Your priority is the user experience and your key features. Transactional management is essential to the success of a marketplace but requires specialized and specific expertise. It takes a lot of time and money.
Opting for an all-in-one solution like Obvy will allow you to accelerate your growth by very simply providing you with all the services you need (payment, delivery, insurance, marketing, security, analytics, user interfaces, etc.) and avoiding managing all the complexity that this generates.
With Obvy, you deploy a complete solution that meets all the needs of a marketplace and its users, avoiding all technical and regulatory burdens, in order to allocate all your resources to your marketplace.