Best Strategies to Build a Competitive Marketplace App in 2023
Expectation: You will develop an attractive, robust, and interesting marketplace app in 3 months, release an MVP, speak to the investors, and get the best of the feedback before launching your app. Then, you expect your app to get downloaded millions of times and rank at the top of the Google Play or AppStore.
Reality: You just have an excellent idea in hand, and you’re still wondering how much everything will cost? How can I get the best hired for this task? What all does it take to build a robust marketplace app, and what features should I choose to build an app that beats the competition?
With these questions inhabited in your mind – the decision-making process usually goes dull.
So, what to do?
Marketplace App Development is not as easy as it seems —- it involves costs, efforts, planning, clarity of business, a motive, understanding of the target market.
And most importantly —- a reliable app development team to manage all development-related activities from starting till the end.
But do you know how your competitors are pacing? They follow these strategies (and you should follow them too) to stay competitive in the marketplace.
Practical Strategies to Build a Competitive Marketplace App in 2023
You might have an idea about how to do that. And, here are some more points to add to your knowledge base.
What you already know is:
- You’ll need to thoroughly research your market, competitors, trends, and consumer behavior.
- Rapid prototyping, which includes designing it beautifully for the target market. Plus, testing the app whether it is being developed the right way for the right people or not.
- Actual development and testing of the marketplace happens.
- The final release and maintenance of the app.
What you might not know is that you need to:
- Start Building the Backend First
It is something that’s not going to take place in the front end. So this block is the back end with an admin interface.
Here’s where your marketplace app will reside in the marketplace mobile app development process.
That’s even the place where all the intelligent algorithms will run — better to call it the ‘core engine’ of your marketplace app.
Next, the admin surface allows you to manage the complete process. Like, right from when the order is placed to a transaction and finally to review your products or services.
- Then, Build the More Interesting Stuff
We’ll now build all the fancy stuff for the consumer app. For instance, the ones we use on the apps, such as rides, ordering a pizza or a meal, or salon services.
These features need to be captivating enough to capture the users’ attention.
Also, it must smoothly work since the customers expect it to. They probably won’t wait for the features to open. Or, if it doesn’t look good, they might not open it in the first place.
Hence, the commodity has to be brilliant. Customers are not just expecting the features to be good, but the content too. So, here’s what you can do:
- Write descriptive, easy-to-understand, and catchy descriptions for the products or services on your app.
- Make the design and features so interesting that the customers are hooked to the screen when they open your app.
- Use the reviews and ranking section to help them give their feedback.
What else they might expect is:
- Proper registration and authorization
- East to make user profiles for both the sellers and buyers
- Easy to navigate catalog of all essential services and products with filters and searches
- Geolocation, to match with the providers
- And, most importantly, the in-app messaging and notifications
Note: Consider the core engine to be so good that it orchestrates the entire app seamlessly.
- Next, Developing for Sellers and Drivers
Even sellers and drivers will utilize the app platform for business. Sellers need to make profiles on the app, and drivers need to receive ride requests with user profiles. Sellers even need to add the products, pictures, and much more.
Besides, you need to keep in mind that you need to create these profile-filling features while keeping everything within budget.
You’ll even need to work on messaging and order requests — and almost all activities related to delivering the products or services in this step. The task is to find the accurate place for every piece of information in the app.
Plan to make your UX so engaging that it hooks all — the customers, sellers, drivers, and even your competitors.
You need to give sellers and users reasons to come to your marketplace, stay, do business, and make you a profit.
If your marketplace app is a platform that supports a steady flow of orders while making it easy for them to navigate it all— your app is going to win the market.
- Time to Know About Some Legit Tech-Related Shortcuts
We recommend you use the off-shelf components to implement different features in your marketplace app.
You can use the following APIs and SDKs in different parts of your marketplace app to ensure it attracts users:
- Payments – Skrill, Stripe, and Paypal
- Chat – SendBird, Twilio
- Authentication – Facebook, Apple ID, Auth0, and Google
- Mapping – Apple Maps, Carto, Google Maps, Mapbox
- Back-end – Parse, Firebase
These are just examples! You can always use many other available as per your project’s demand and business needs.
Also, your app must know how to manage its content to curb rules violations, including inappropriate content, images, or spam.
Everything should be readily available in the dashboard application, the core engine we mentioned above.
And, after you have released the app, you must keep it up-to-date with new versions of the OS. Finally, analyze the app usage metrics for the best experience for all the marketplace app users.
You must know development is not complete – if the app is not maintained at every step.
Conclusion
Building an on-demand delivery marketplace app is not easy — it can be quite challenging.
The question is, who will develop the app for you? Since it is a critical business decision, you can’t go wrong.
So, take your time to find a valuable development team for yourself — so that there are no regrets later. Also, all your customers are content with your app!
The on-demand marketplace app is growing in 2023, and ahead, it is time you build one for you too!
All the best!
THE AUTHOR
Giandeep Singh
I am a writer and marketing specialist who loves to explore new digital strategies to boost business growth online.
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