

There’s plenty of online literature documenting how ecommerce entrepreneurs can start their own online businesses, but those online businesses tend to focus on solo entrepreneurs who are interested in selling their own products on their own websites.
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And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.” – Tom Goodwin How to Create an Online Marketplace Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content.

“Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Since merchants sell or rent their goods or services on ecommerce marketplaces, they source the inventory. This makes them an attractive option for entrepreneurs who want to provide a service or solve a pain point without investing a lot of their own capital into the business. Starting online marketplaces is great because you don’t have to own any inventory to run one. Online marketplace sellers benefit from you creating a place where they can sell goods, spaces or services online at a cheaper price, better quality, or in a more convenient way. One of the main reasons to start an online marketplace is to either help third-party sellers sell more product and to help shoppers get access to goods or services more easily. Why You Should Create an Online Marketplace It can also referred to as a “Collaborative Economy” or a “Sharing Economy” because it’s usually made up of merchants who work together to share or sell their idle assets on a community-accessible marketplace. When they center around one niche, it’s likely to become successful because it gives consumers a reason to shop there and when they do shop there, they know what to expect from the online sellers. Facebook Marketplace started a profile for users, which eventually lead to building a big userbase, which made online shopping possible. Airbnb started as an online marketplace to rent rooms in San Francisco. Amazon, for example, started as an ecommerce marketplace of booksellers.

This means that although a customer can complete just one transaction when purchasing from multiple different sellers, their products will be shipped from each seller individually meaning they’ll receive a shipping package from each merchant they ordered a product from.Įssentially, for online shoppers the experience is like shopping from several different online sellers at once, while being able to pay all the merchants in one transaction rather than in many transactions.Īnother thing that unites online marketplaces together is that they usually are focused around one particular niche. When customers make purchases from sites like Facebook Marketplace or Amazon, the merchants they purchase from get a notification that someone has purchased their product, and then each online seller can individually ship and send the customer the products that were ordered from them. When customers shop on an ecommerce marketplace, they don’t need to click away to different websites to complete the transaction, they can purchase from many different merchants on the marketplace at once, even if the merchants aren’t associated with one another. What unites all the online sellers together is that there’s one checkout process.

One of the main advantages of online marketplaces is that they draw in lots of digital foot-traffic, which can mean greater exposure for the merchants on their site. They have a greater product offering which can draw more visitors to browse the website. Traditional ecommerce stores sell the goods and services of one brand, but not ecommerce marketplaces, which have many marketplace sellers who sell online on their site. These online stores are considered to be online marketplaces because there are many merchants (hundreds of thousands, in fact) who can sell their products to the customers that browse the online shopping website. Examples of online marketplaces include Facebook Marketplace, Amazon, Etsy, Airbnb, and eBay. What is an Online Marketplace?Īn online marketplace is an ecommerce store where multiple sellers can sell goods or services to customers. In this article, you’ll learn all about online marketplaces, what they are, how to start one and how to become marketplace sellers. If you’ve ever thought of doing some online selling like the marketplaces you see online already such as Facebook Marketplace, Amazon, Etsy, or Airbnb then this is the perfect article to start off with. An online marketplace is a type of ecommerce business that can be rewarding to create, however, it comes with its own unique set of challenges.
