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How to Build a Marketplace MVP: A Comprehensive Guide

How to Build a Marketplace MVP: A Comprehensive Guide

Volodymyr Haievyi

Volodymyr Haievyi

Chief Operating Officer

Updated: November 20, 2024 | Published: November 20, 2024
How to Build a Marketplace MVP: A Comprehensive Guide

Creating a marketplace is a challenge in itself, as the majority of companies overlook obvious barriers to success, such as:

  • Viewing the marketplace as a feature;
  • Considering it to be a centerpiece of the cost structure;
  • Focusing on building rock-solid long-term strategies;
  • Avoiding addressing issues such as limited resources and timing fit.

These challenges exist and require consideration, but you can overcome them as a startup founder, entrepreneur, or established business owner. This guide will provide you with information on what you should consider when launching a marketplace MVP and how to do it properly. 

What is a Marketplace MVP?

To understand how to build a marketplace MVP (Minimum Viable Product), you need to understand the idea of an MVP. An MVP is a barebones version of a solution with only core functionalities used to validate a business idea and attract customers.

In contrast to a fully-featured marketplace product, an MVP is focused on essential things. This includes connecting buyers and sellers, conducting transactions, and gathering user feedback. All in all, a marketplace MVP is an excellent way to minimize the initial investments and test an idea before going full-deep into it.

Starting with an MVP offers several benefits that include:

  • Validating demand;
  • Refining the product based on user feedback;
  • Establishing an initial user base;
  • Reducing risks of overbuilding features.

DBB Software can cut the development time by 50%, allowing you to launch faster than competitors. This way, you can capitalize on capturing early users and use your MVP to start iterating towards a complete software product.

Key Types of Marketplaces

Marketplaces differ based on business models and target audiences. Each serves a distinct purpose, and understanding these differences is essential to having a clear idea of how to build an online marketplace MVP that aligns with your requirements and industry specifics.

B2B Marketplaces

These marketplaces connect businesses with other businesses. They often focus on high-value transactions requiring bulk orders, contracts, and custom pricing. 

Amazon Business is one of the most obvious examples of B2B marketplaces. It is designed to meet the needs of customers of all sizes. Users have access to bulk pricing, business-only selection, and multi-user accounts. Amazon Business also offers detailed analytics and reporting for better budget and spending management.

B2C Marketplaces

These are the most recognizable marketplaces. A B2C model involves businesses selling goods and services directly to consumers. Essential elements of a B2C marketplace MVP include product listings, shopping carts, payment processing, and reviews.

Amazon and eBay are the most popular and famous B2C marketplaces. These are prime examples of such marketplaces, and using these two examples can give a general idea of what a B2C solution should look like or include.

P2P Marketplaces

These marketplaces are focused on transactions between individuals. In this case, a platform is an intermediary between users that provides transaction mechanisms. Some of the most well-known P2P marketplaces are Airbnb and Uber. These solutions connect independent service providers with clients while providing them with payment and other tools.

Vertical vs. Horizontal Marketplaces

Marketplaces can also be distinguished into vertical and horizontal.

  • A vertical marketplace focuses on a single industry and/or product type and offers specialized products and services. Think of Zappos and StockX as specialized shoe-focused companies. A vertical market is about providing personalized experiences for a niche target audience.
  • A horizontal marketplace is the opposite – it offers its users a large variety of products and services. Craigslist, Amazon, and eBay are horizontal marketplaces focusing on considerably wider target audiences. They often require more scalable infrastructure to support their diverse product categories.

Essential Features for a Marketplace MVP

When addressing the question of how to build a marketplace MVP, it is vital to understand that you need to focus on features that solve your users' core problems. You connect buyers with sellers and provide grounds for seamless transactions. 

Here is a detailed breakdown of must-have features that any marketplace MVP should have.

Core Features

User Management

This is a fundamental functionality of any marketplace. Your users need to be able to register, interact, and access other features based on their roles. 

  • Registration and authentication – To ensure an easy onboarding process, a simple but robust registration system must be implemented. It should include features like signing up via email or social media platforms. DBBS Pre-Built Solutions features ready-to-use registration/authentication services for instant implementation.

  • User profiles – This functionality provides users space to showcase their information. Sellers can include details about their offerings, location, and contact information, while buyers can showcase their history and saved items.

  • Role management – A marketplace MVP should clearly set up roles for users. You must provide buyers and sellers with unique role-specific tools and dashboards. A seller can access listings management, while a buyer can access wishlists and carts.

Listing Management

This is the heart of any marketplace. It allows sellers to showcase their products and services and buyers to explore available offerings.

  • Product and Service Listings—Sellers require a user-friendly interface to create, edit, and manage their listings. Listings should include all the basic information about a product/service, along with descriptions, images, prices, and availability.

  • Search and filters – This basic functionality is imperative if you want to know how to build a marketplace MVP. It allows buyers to locate items of interest quickly through filters such as price, location, category, etc.

  • Categories and tags – you want to organize listings into categories and tags to simplify the navigation and research process for users. Here’s an example of a category-based search bar from Amazon.

Transaction Handling

You want to ensure that your transaction handling is efficient and secure. This piece converts user interactions into revenue and generates customer loyalty. 

  • Payment integration – A secure and straightforward payment gateway is essential to any marketplace. You can add complex payment systems along the way, but it is important to set up the core functionality. With DBBS Pre-Built Solutions, you can add a payment system such as Stripe easily.

  • Order management – A simple yet essential functionality that allows sellers to monitor and track orders, including pending, shipped, and delivered statutes. Buyers should track their order statuses and expected delivery dates.

  • Checkout process – This functionality reduces cart abandonment and provides a seamless purchasing experience. An MVP needs to include steps to prioritize essential information regarding purchases to make it easy for buyers to complete their purchases.

Communication

Transactions have to be handled both efficiently and securely in order to ensure a means of converting interactions into revenue on a trustful basis.

  • Basic Messaging System – Since the possibility of direct messaging is enabled, buyers and sellers can share questions, negotiate terms, and organize details in P2P or B2B marketplace contexts. An MVP messaging system does not have to be complex but should make sure that messages are securely exchanged.

Optional Features to Consider

Consider improving your marketplace MVP's user experience by implementing the following features. They are not critical but can secure a more enjoyable experience for your target audience.

  • Ratings and reviews – This function allows buyers to rate and review a seller or a particular product. This feature would be invaluable to the seller for feedback and help other buyers make better purchase decisions. But this can be added post-MVP launch, so the focus is initially on core features.

  • Basic analytics – Analytics provided will be insightful into the user behavior and help the marketplace owners understand the trendiest products, demographics, and usage patterns. The number of visits, conversion rates, and most-viewed listings can do basic analytics.
  • Admin panel – The admin panel allows marketplace managers to oversee platform activity, manage listings, and track user interactions. This feature simplifies the management of the whole platform because the platform owner would be able to attend to all issues or concerns and quality control.

  • Mobile responsiveness – More mobile devices are starting to be used for online shopping, the marketplace should be responsive to these mobile devices. While creating a mobile application is not a necessity in an MVP, optimization for mobile browsers will multiply the user experience, especially for users on-the-go.
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Partner with DBB Software to develop your marketplace MVP up to 50% faster than the competition.

Development Process

When approaching the question of how to build a marketplace MVP, it is important to understand that you need a structured approach to development. It is divided into several phases.

Planning Phase

A successful marketplace MVP starts with a good plan. You want to focus on understanding the target market, defining technical requirements, and designing a user flow according to the needs of your users.

Market Research

  • Marketplace research – This is the bedrock of creating a marketplace that will resonate with the audience. What's required is to assure the founders, through clear research, that they know who they are serving, what their competitors are up to, and how their marketplace will make a difference.
  • Target Audience Analysis – The demographic details, psychographics, and behavioral attributes of the target audience are essential pieces of information. This will help in understanding users’ preferences, buying habits, and the challenges they face in having a truly need-fulfilling platform for its users.
  • Competitor Analysis—By researching other existing marketplaces, a team may learn about active features, user pain points, and areas for improvement. Founders identify gaps in other competitors' offerings while developing this unique approach.
  • Unique Selling Proposition – A marketplace that has a value proposition that differentiates it in a competitive market. This may be a feature, smoother user experience, or maybe smoothness of the transaction process. This unique value's definition at the outset sets the marketplace apart and will help guide feature prioritization in the MVP.

Technical Requirements

Technical requirements must be drafted to ensure the technical viability of the marketplace MVP and accommodate scaling and agility in the future. The significant considerations will be as follows:

  • Choice of Platform – Founders must decide whether to launch an MVP as a web platform, a mobile app, or both. This is entirely dependent on the preference of the target audience. For example, if the audience is more mobile-based, there should be a mobile-friendly design.
  • Selection of Technology Stack—The technology stack should be selected early to ensure the platform's stability, security, and scalability. It could be a front-end framework like React or Angular, a back-end solution that includes Node.js or Django, or databases such as PostgreSQL or MongoDB.
  • Infrastructure Requirements – Hosting, scaling, and data storage are infrastructural requirements. Cloud services, including AWS and Azure, help your infrastructure scale up and down according to user demand through adjustable solutions.
  • Software Development Document—This document constitutes all the project goals, technical specifications, timeline, and responsibilities. The DBBS team provides a detailed document to keep all the team members on the same page, which also works as a roadmap for the whole project.

User Flow Design

Intuitive user flows for buyers, sellers, and transactions are essential for building marketplaces that feel natural and easy to use. While designing user flows, you should concentrate on charting each phase of user journey to understand how they will move the platform to ensure seamless navigation.

  • Buyer Journey – A marketplace should provide effortless, frictionless journeys through which the user gets navigated from registering and browsing through listings to making purchases and confirming an order. With a seamless buyer experience, user satisfaction and retention go up.
  • Seller Journey – In the case of the seller, the process should be optimized for listing products, managing orders, and tracking sales. The seller needs to have all those tools to manage listings, track inventory, and communicate with buyers effortlessly.
  • Transaction flow – Everything from the time a buyer purchases the point where the seller confirms delivery forms one long chain. The design of transaction flow should be in a manner that allows for seamless, secure payment and visibility of the order status to assist in building transparent relations between counteragents.

Development Approach

Startups and companies addressing how to build a marketplace MVP should pay considerable attention to the development approach after completing the planning preparation phase. A structured approach guarantees that the resulting MVP meets your requirements and users’ needs.

Timeline and Phases

By breaking down the development process into phases, the development team can make sure that each stage is planned and executed thoroughly while reducing any risks related to delays and technical issues.

  • Design phase – This part is about wireframing and designing UI and UX. A well-designed UI/UX is an essential part of an efficient marketplace MVP platform. It has to be intuitive, user-friendly, and offer clear purchase flow.
  • Development phase – During this part, specialists do their work. Frontend and backend developers work on features outlined in the software development document and implement them.
  • Testing phase – Testing is one of the most important parts of the development timeline. It ensures that the MVP is secure, functional, and user-friendly. Manual and automated testing methods can identify bugs, performance issues, and usability problems.
  • DBBS Pre-Built Solutions – This is a unique repository of tools and elements that the DBB Software team uses to speed up the development process by up to 50%. It includes:
    • Application generators;
    • Templates for the CI/CD pipelines;
    • Cloud Hosting Integration;
    • Configured environments;
    • Unit, Integration, and E2E Testing tools;
    • Pre-built UI components;
    • Ready-to-use plugins for integration. 

Technology Stack Options

Picking the right tech stack is a solid way to ensure that your MVP is stable, secure, scalable, and easy to use. That is why you should consider:

  • Frontend frameworks – Some of the most popular frameworks include React, Angular, and Vue.js. Each offers its own unique advantages in terms of flexibility, speed, and scalability.
  • Backend solutions – This is the foundation of your MVP. If you want to know how to create a marketplace website MVP, you must consider your backend options. Node.js and Django offer ways to build secure and scalable backends for projects of any complexity.
  • Database choices – Databases store essential information such as user data, listings, and transaction records. Options such as PostgreSQL are best for solutions with structured data, while NoSQL databases such as MongoDB provide flexibility in terms of handling unstructured data and can scale more dynamically. 
  • Third-party integrations – These integrations can play a pivotal role in improving the core functionality of a marketplace MVP. Some of the most common integrations include payment systems such as Stripe. DBBS Pre-Built Solutions feature ready-to-use integrations for maximum efficiency that include:
    • CMS and CRM;
    • Authentication systems;
    • Payment systems such as Stripe;
    • Transaction handling;
    • Secure data management;
    • API connections.

Cost and Resource Considerations

To develop and launch an online marketplace MVP, you need to properly allocate budget and resources to ensure smooth development and launch. The main idea is to understand and align your key cost categories with your goals and available resources.

  • Development costs breakdown – These costs can vary considerably depending on the tech stack. The platform of choice and complexity of functionalities affect the cost of development. With DBBS Pre-Built Solutions, you can reduce these costs as they utilize customizable modules and tools to streamline the coding process.
  • Infrastructure costs – These expenses cover things like hosting, server management, and database storage. Infrastructure is essential for a smooth user experience and MVP stability. The most popular services include AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. DBBS Pre-Built Solutions feature ready-to-deploy AWS services, including S3 and SQS.

Maintenance costs – Post-launch maintenance is essential for maintaining the solution’s stability and effectively implementing updates based on user feedback. This process includes regular updates, security patches, and minor improvements and should be considered during the budgeting phase.

Need to estimate your MVP marketplace development cost?

Contact Mido, our Business Development Manager, to receive a detailed cost breakdown for your marketplace MVP.

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Launch Strategy

A robust launch strategy has to include pre-launch preparations and a structured post-launch plan to capture early users and respond to their needs effectively. It is possible to achieve this through testing, security assessment, performance optimization, and legal preparations.

  • Testing – testing is essential for any system to be launched into the market. These include functional, performance, and security testing to find and fix bugs and other usability problems. This step is crucial in avoiding issues after launching that may affect user experience. With DBBS Pre-Built Solutions, you gain access to readily available:
    • Cypress and Playwright for web apps;
    • Detox for mobile apps;
    • Unit tests, E2E testing, and A/B testing.
  • Security considerations – Security forms a very important aspect of protection against data breaches for users and their transactions. The platform can be secure for buyers and sellers through secure authentications, encrypted data storage, and regular security audits.
  • Performance optimization – Optimization of page loading speed, transaction handling, and search functionality is paramount for a smooth user experience. That is why performance improvements such as caching and content delivery networks (CDNs) can effectively reduce loading time and improve the responsiveness of an MVP.
  • Legal requirements – Compliance with data protection laws such as GDPR and terms of service is imperative to launch a marketplace MVP. The development team has to prepare the solution to cover all the required policies in terms of privacy, terms of use, and user rights to launch it.

Post Launch Activities

After the marketplace MVP is live, you must monitor its performance and gather feedback to continue improving the solution and turning it into a full-fledged product.

Monitoring and Analytics

  • Key metrics to track – You want to track key metrics to ensure that your MVP covers the core needs of your user base. The metrics can include:
    • Use acquisition;
    • Retention rate;
    • Transaction volume;
    • Customer satisfaction.
  • User feedback collection – You want to gather feedback from your users directly. It is vital to set up feedback loops to acquire insights regarding the users’ experience with your marketplace MVP. This information is invaluable for future iterations of your solution. Some of the most common methods of collecting feedback are:
    • Direct surveys;
    • “Rate us” metrics;
    • Review channels.
  • Performance monitoring – Set up real-time monitoring of your solution’s server uptime, loading speed, and transaction processing. This way, you can ensure the marketplace remains functional and highly responsive.
  • Market response analysis – You should analyze user responses, behavior, and engagement to determine how well the marketplace performs and meets user expectations. This way, you can better understand the competitive landscape and adjust your strategy accordingly. 

Iteration Plan

This plan keeps your marketplace MVP evolving after launch. You will need to meet user needs to ensure the competitiveness of your product.

  • Feature prioritization – You should prioritize adjusting features and adding new ones based on user feedback, market trends, and your goals. Focus on improving core features during the early iterations and adding new ones later.
  • Scaling considerations – You want to plan your expansion based on the growth of the user base. That is why it is important to consider vertical scaling (improving existing resources) and horizontal scaling (adding more servers) to support your long-term growth.
  • Improvement cycles – Focus on regular monthly or quarterly update cycles to ensure your platform is relevant and responds to user demand.
  • Long-term roadmap – You want a clear roadmap to achieve your long-term goals and set solid milestones for future expansion. This roadmap should include considerations such as:
    • Market trends;
    • Emerging technologies;
    • Potential opportunities.

DBB Software Case Study: A Sustainable Book E-Commerce Platform

DBB Software specialists assisted an e-commerce company selling and exchanging books by developing their main product into a comprehensive platform. They added additional features and improved user experience through quality-of-life improvements.

Challenges:

  • Provide users better access to the company’s products;
  • Implement advanced search and filtering capabilities;
  • Promote sustainability and affordability through book trading.

Solutions:

  • Books catalog update from the feed using serverless functions, implemented package tracking using local postal services, and integrated email, SMS, and payment third-party services;
  • Migrated the web app from Angular to Vue.js and utilized DBBS Pre-Built Solutions to create the book details page. We also used Strapi as an admin panel and integrated e-ID digital identification signature for authors’ verification;
  • Developed a React Native-based app;
  • Implemented a common business logic for web and mobile applications.

Conclusion

To sum up, knowing how to build a marketplace MVP is quite complicated but not impossible. You want to pick your type of marketplace and select core features for your future product.

The next step is to focus on the development process and things such as the planning phase, development approach, cost and resource considerations, launch strategy, and post-launch activities.

With this information in mind, you now understand how to develop an online marketplace MVP and make it truly work.

Contact us to learn more about MVP development and start working on your marketplace solution.

FAQ

How long does it typically take to develop a marketplace MVP?

Usually, it takes around 3 to 6 months to develop an MVP. With DBB Solutions as your partner, this time can be reduced by up to 50% as we use the DBBS Pre-Built Solutions to speed up the development process.


An estimated cost range for developing an MVP is $25,000-75,000. However, the cost depends on the complexity of a required product, including essential and non-essential features.


DBB Software specializes in developing MVPs and complete products up to 50% faster than the competition. We can use DBBS Pre-Built Components, a repository of pre-configured tools and elements, to speed up the development process.


The DBBS Pre-Built Solutions is our unique repository of pre-configured tools and elements that we use to speed up planning and development processes by up to 50%. They include:

  • Application generators;
  • Templates for the CI/CD pipelines;
  • Cloud Hosting Integration;
  • Configured environments;
  • Unit, Integration, and E2E Testing tools;
  • Pre-built UI components;
  • Ready-to-use plugins for integration with CMS, ERP, CRM, Payment providers, Delivery providers, Analytics, etc.

Table of contents

What is a Marketplace MVP?

Key Types of Marketplaces

Essential Features for a Marketplace MVP

Development Process

Cost and Resource Considerations

Launch Strategy

Post Launch Activities

DBB Software Case Study: A Sustainable Book E-Commerce Platform

Conclusion

FAQ

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Cut your MVP development time by 50% with our DBBS Pre-Built Solutions.


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