Marketplaces have firmly engrained themselves into the shopping habits of consumers. They have become ubiquitous and commonplace. This is why standing out and engaging customers and sellers with custom functionality is a natural next stage of competition. Custom marketplace development services are what sets the tone of the competitive game. Imagine doing a marketplace for re-selling luxury items. Off-the-shelf solutions often have pre-set filters like brand, price range, year, etc. Each of these needs manual input by the user. Pretty static and boring. However, imagine an AI-driven filter that picks up preferences from user searches. After some time of using the marketplace, the user stops searching and starts mainly browsing highly interesting offers. And this hyper-personalized dynamic AI filter can be done fast. In one to two weeks of development. So, another point is just that off-the-shelf solutions will not be able to keep up with competition. Not even speaking of staying ahead of the game which is what custom marketplace development is about.
Custom eCommerce Development Benefits
All custom eCommerce Development benefits boil down to business viability. Anyone can create a standard marketplace in a few clicks for free just like a Youtube account. To continue with the comparison, only 0.3% of Youtube accounts make decent money. Similarly, there are dozens of marketplaces started with off-the-shelf solutions with little to no investment. They all follow the same playbook, have access to the same functionality, and virtually have zero differentiation points.
So, here are the benefits of custom marketplace development in the table below.
Table Benefits of Custom Marketplace Development
| Benefit #1 | Unique Selling Point | In off-the-shelf solutions, the bet is made on the selection of goods on the marketplace that is rarely enough for a USP. With custom marketplace development, your marketplace will have strong tailor-made user experiences for both sellers and customers. |
| Benefit #2 | Higher ROI | With off-the-shelf solutions, there are still costs involved, but they grow if your marketplace becomes successful. It continues to the point, where a custom marketplace would be actually less costly in the long-run. Custom marketplace development services often involve higher upfront investment; however, they are often able to capture higher economic value and fine-tune product-market fit in addition to lower maintenance costs. |
| Benefit #3 | Higher success rate | The ugly statistic is that the success rate of startups is at 10% according to Forbes. With a solid marketplace development company, the chances go up from 1 out of 10 to 4 out of 7. |
| Benefit #4 | Ownership & flexibility | Off-the-shelf solutions often lock you in their ecosystem and you don’t always have access to the codebase. With custom marketplace development, you are free to choose third-party integrations, and you get your codebase with documentation. |
| Benefit #5 | Competitive edge | With floods of research into how speed converts into purchases while slow performance into losses, even being a few milliseconds faster than a competitor pays off greatly. Below is the executive summary from Deloitte’s report on the matter. It states that 0.1s change equals +8% conversion. If you use the same platform to run your marketplace with the same often standard functionality that comes as a package, there is little room to optimize for loading times. With a custom marketplace app development company, it is easily achievable. |
Features of a Successful Custom Marketplace
According to Pendo findings: “80 percent of features in the average software product are rarely or never used.” This is why off-the-shelf vendors may claim that custom development is a large investment. If you compare the packaged functionality of off-the-shelf solutions, then yes, the amount is great. But what if you follow a lean MVP development path and build only what makes your users love and use your marketplace? So, here is the 20% that makes your custom marketplace successful:
- Haptics & micro-interactions for user feedback. This is how users stay engaged and how they perceive the responsiveness of your marketplace. Haptics is the physical feedback produced by a device. For instance, when a user gets a time-sensitive offer, the phone pleasantly vibrates. Or, when the user adds something to the cart, they sense a pulsation.
- Hyper-personalized dynamic AI filters. Users love suggestions, but only when they align with their preferences. It has been observed that social media without ads loses in engagement. So, similarly, marketplaces simply with listings are just as boring and disengaging. When you think about off-the-shelf solutions, they have this header banner, left aside with pre-defined static filters, a search bar somewhere in the midst of that, and trending items that show up the same for all users. Ideally, you just need a smart search bar and offerings field that improves with usage in terms of personalization.
- Multi-vendor checkout with price optimization. Cart abandonment issues in marketplaces are driven by the complex checkout process when a user adds items from different sellers to a cart. A custom marketplace would be able to auto-split payments allowing users a one-click payment.
- Optimization for loading times & loss of connectivity. In terms of the mobile marketplace, this point costs your marketplace 80% of the user base. And, off-the-shelf solutions for mobile are simply rare and expensive. They often only come with enterprise-level plans or premium ones.
