How to build Multi-vendor Marketplace App like Amazon

Building an online marketplace like Amazon, eBay, etc., is an incredible way to generate revenue and cater to a wider audience. The trick is to build an easy-to-use, high-performance, SEO-friendly, and carefully designed portal. From the day your online marketplace goes online, it has to cater to the user’s needs and provide them with the required services.

This includes letting them search for their favorite products to different payment options, getting personalized recommendations, and so much more. Since it is going to be a big investment in terms of money and time, you need to ensure that everything is done right.

Hence, it is essential to hire a multivendor app development company that has the required experience and expertise. Before you go searching for the development company, let us help you go through the basics of multi-vendor eCommerce app development.

Must Read: The 2022 Oriented Guide to Mobile Application Development Costs

What is a Multi-Vendor Platform or Application?

Everybody knows Amazon or eBay and what they do. These two are the best examples of a multi-vendor platform. Essentially, it’s a website, application, or web app, which has several sellers selling their products to the users.

It is similar to a big vendor’s market where you can buy from multiple vendors under a single roof. An online multi-vendor marketplace uses the same principle to operate but with several additional features and functions meant to improve the customer experience.

As the eCommerce industry is growing at lightning speed. As we are in the midst of an increasing expansion, your decision to build an eCommerce application is great.

What’s the Process for an eCommerce App Development like Amazon?

We will be following a detailed process analysis associated with a marketplace. When you hunt for a multivendor app development company, asking about their process can help you make a better decision.

So, let’s begin…

Ideation and Deciding the Type of Marketplace

From the moment you have got the idea to build a marketplace, you need to start working on it’s implementation. When you go to a developer asking for their assistance, you need to present them with your requirements and the objective.

The requirements will start with the type of marketplace. You can choose from three types of marketplaces. 

• Vertical Marketplace: These are the marketplace that focus on selling products from the same industry or niche. Like a marketplace that only sells beauty products or sports products, etc.
• Horizontal Marketplace: These are the marketplaces that sell products related to one category or niche. For example, a marketplace where people can buy anything related to pets, home care, healthcare, etc.

• Global Marketplace: This is the marketplace that sells everything under the sky. From a pin to the parts of a car, they sell everything. Marketplaces like Amazon are the best example of this category.

Now, building a vertical marketplace will be the easiest out of the three, and it will also take less time. However, with a vertical or a horizontal marketplace, your target audience will also be less, which means less potential to earn. And when it comes to a global marketplace, almost everyone in the region you are serving is your potential customer.

When you are deciding on the type of marketplace, you need to work on your idea some more. The most important thing for any marketplace is the customer. You need to develop your idea around attracting more customers, delighting the existing ones with better services, and more.

You can take the assistance of an eCommerce app development company to build further correspondence. Platforms like Amazon and Alibaba have gained global popularity because they are easy to use and have kept multiple payment options. So work on these lines to provide the best-in-class services to the customers.

Designing the Marketplace

When you realize the scope of the marketplace, you will want to pay special attention to the interface and platform design. Amazon packs 1.6 million packages per day, and there are 213 million Prime members on Amazon.

These numbers will help you understand the scale at which Amazon works. Now when a platform attracts this level of business on a daily basis, it must be doing a lot of things right, isn’t it?

That is why you need to work on the design part holistically. Focus on creating a good customer and seller experience. Make it easier for everyone to find what they are looking for. And this includes products, access to customer service, profile, payment options, cart, etc.

Ultimately, the key point is not to let the customers and sellers experience any sort of issues with the interface. They should not find it hard to view the product or read its description, etc.

Identifying the Key Features of the Marketplace

Every marketplace has two types of users;

• Sellers
• Customers

The features for both are different, and we will go through them separately.

Features for Sellers

• Registration and Verification: Allow all types of sellers to register on your platform to sell the products. However, integrating a verification mechanism ensures that only credible and accountable sellers are allowed to sell. Good sellers mean your customers will have good products and quick resolution services.
• Inventory Management: Your sellers shouldn’t have to use other software for managing their inventory. Build a system in the marketplace app allowing them to track and record their inventory. As they will have access to this information, the customers won’t face “out of stock” issues. Plus, a good inventory management feature will provide the sellers with full visibility into their products, prices, history, and listings.
• Managing Orders: After launching your marketplace, the sellers will likely receive orders, and they will need a system to process them with speed. Your purpose should be to make things easier for your sellers, and adding an order management function is going to help with that purpose. You can also provide them with pre-designed templates to process orders with speed.
• Generating Reports and Data Analysis: This might be an advanced feature, so you should not add it during the initial launch. However, as the marketplace scales, you can ask the multivendor app development company to integrate some advanced features, including this one. The report generation and data analysis will allow your sellers to track their previous records, see the volume of sales, and give them visibility into their performance.
• Add Products, Descriptions, Images, and Videos: This is where the sellers can add their products with the required description, images, and videos to the platform.
• Manage Customers: Where every seller will have access to their customer base, they must also be allowed to set permissions for them. You must allow them to add, block, and allow them to add comments to the products.

Features for Customers

• Registration: Here again, you need to allow your customers to register themselves on your marketplace. Make sure that the sign-up is convenient and easy for the customers. You can add a one-click sign up system connected to Gmail or Facebook.
• User Profile Setting: With the account created, allow your users to edit and work on their profile. This includes adding name, contact information, email address, house address (for delivery), payment preferences, etc.
• Product Search and Wishlist: For any type of marketplace, it is essential to allow your customers to search for the products. Since there will be thousands of products on the platform, allowing the users to search for them is only logical. Another function to add here is letting the users add their favorite products to the wishlist.
• Shopping Cart: The shopping cart on your marketplace must be the easiest component to access and find out. Have you noticed that Amazon lets customers buy products in one click? They have allowed their customers to add their preferred payment method and lock in on a default shipping address. With a couple of clicks, the order is placed. Plus, the customers also get calculations of all the products they have added to the cart.
• Give Reviews and Ratings: Allowing the customers to give reviews and ratings to the products they have bought makes your marketplace user-friendly. This is because you are practically allowing customers to help other customers make an informed decision.
• Checkout: The checkout process has to be easy and fast. Albeit, in no circumstance, should your platform lack speed as it is crucial to ensuring a seamless customer experience. The checkout page shows the customers every item they have bought.
• Multiple Payment Options: This feature is also important to get more customers buying from your platform. Make sure to integrate several payment options, including credit card, debit card, internet banking, apple pay, etc. With more payment options, you will add to the seamless customer experience and allow users to buy products faster.
• Order Tracking: Ask your multi-vendor eCommerce app development service provider to add an order tracking feature. This will allow them to know when the ordered product will arrive exactly.
• Notifications: Make sure to send notifications from the marketplace about the products and their updates. This includes sending emails and in-app notifications to the customers when they have ordered a product, when the order has been dispatched, and when it is delivered.
• Customer Support: Another critical feature to add here is customer support services. You can either provide a helpline number to your customers or create a chatbot to assist them with the services.

Developing the Multi-Vendor Marketplace

Now that you have the designs ready and the list of features, it is time to start building the platform. For this, you need developers (and good ones) to help you build the best version of the platform.

The developers must determine the best tools and technologies to build a marketplace. Moreover, the development methodologies and standards should be set to ensure that the marketplace is easy to manage, scale, run, and grow.

For your reference, here is a list of the best technologies that can be used for this purpose. Before that, there will be three sides to the development exercise;

• Server

• Client-Side (divided into the Website or web app and mobile application). 

Here’s the tech stack:

• API: Swagger combined with Rails and Grapes Framework

• Database: PostgreSQL

• Testing: Rspec

• Client-Side: HTML and CSS

• Mobile Application: Objective-C for iOS and Swift or Kotlin for Android.

• Cross-Platform App: Xamarin or ReactJs

• Server-Side: PHP or NodeJS

Choose developers who have proven expertise in the development technologies you need for the development. To make a better decision, you can hire a chief technical officer (on a contract basis) to help you get all the basics right and move forward with the team and technology selection.

Testing and Launch

With the development part completed, you must test the application. Use the relevant testing technologies to run different types of tests. These include;

• Integration test
• Unit test
• Security test
• Performance test

Ensure you are launching the marketplace with a clean, error-free, and scalable code.

Depending on where you want to launch the marketplace, follow the guidelines and standards. If it’s an app store, practice app-store optimization as it will help improve the discoverability of the marketplace.

What is the Cost to Develop eCommerce App like Amazon?

Identifying the cost of building a marketplace requires knowing several details. But we are going to give you an overview of how it can be calculated. For the most part, the main factor in deciding the development cost is the number of hours required for developing the application or marketplace.

Roughly speaking, it can take around 500 hours of work to plan, design, develop, test, and launch a marketplace. And while talking about the cost of the same, it depends on the development team you are selecting for the job.

Most of the teams will charge by the hour. This means that if a team is charging $100 per hour for the development, the total cost will come out to be $50,000.

But the final cost can change subject to the complexity of the development and design.

Conclusion

To build a multi-vendor marketplace means competing with giants like Amazon, Alibaba, and a few more. But these platforms also had the opportunity to get their first order, get their first 100 customers, to generate the first $100,000 in sales. And now, you have the opportunity to repeat all these things only with a better mindset, more resources, and several foolproof plans to reach the top.

So, make sure to leverage every resource you have and hire the best multi-vendor app development company in the industry for the job. Because having a great product to work with means, you can focus on the business logic and think about growing the business further.