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Marketplace development services

Marketplace Development

The marketplace is a trading platform on the Internet that helps merchants and buyers find each other online and make deals. Marketplaces can be used to sell goods - like eBay or Amazon, or services - like Uber.

In terms of structure and monetization, the marketplace is similar to a shopping mall. The owner makes revenue by renting to vendors a virtual shopping space for products or services with the same functions as those of small online stores.

The additional profit comes from advertising and interest rates from transactions made by users through the site’s interface.

The Main Objectives And Structure Of The Marketplace

The popularity of marketplaces is growing because people are no longer willing to spend a lot of time shopping and ordering services. The vast majority of consumers want:

To explore the and compare offers in one browser window without rummaging from website to website;
To have guarantees that they are protected from fraud. That the seller or a service provider is reliable and there are no risks making payments;
To purchase, pay, and share opinions about a product or service without unnecessary actions or obstacles. And to be able to do it logging from different devices.

When developing a marketplace, it is important to consider not only the needs of customers but the convenience of the website itself is equally essential.

To attract as many merchants as possible it is necessary to provide:

Affiliate interface to work with a platform, preferably with pre-built features for SEO and other ways of promotion;
Marketing and advertising tools to attract and keep customers, for example, subscriptions, loyalty programs, customer support, and feedback forms, etc.;
Ability to add payment services, API for interacting with third-party products, integration with CRM and other systems.

The basic structure of the trading platform is built around the development of features that are necessary both for buyers and sellers. Although the goal of a marketplace is always the same, ways to achieve it will be different for each project - the functionality of the service that helps to find a nanny and the virtual store for used electric scooters will differ greatly. Therefore, the cost of developing a marketplace can be known only when a detailed technical task has been created and settled upon.

Who Is Involved In The Website Development?

To develop the best eCommerce solution we assemble a team of experts. This team consists of programmers, web-designer, tester and is lead by a Project Manager (PM). The PM is your personal manager who works only with you. He organizes each stage of the process and is responsible for communication with every employee involved. The Project Manager recruits as many specialists as needed to implement the requirements of the Technical Task (TT) within the time frame specified in the contract.

Programmers

Programmers, experts in software development using one or several popular PHP-frameworks.

Project Manager

A Project Manager who works only with you, on one project

Designers

Designers with UX/UI experience, good taste, and understanding of current trends.

Manual QA Testing

Manual QA Testing Engineer simulates user behavior and conducts testing based on that behavioral patterns.

DevOps

DevOps is an engineer managing the server part of the site (as well as server support). He oversees the code release from development to the distribution phase.

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How our team develops marketplace projects

We form the technical task and a dev-team

Starting from the first day, a Project Manager (PM) is in communication with the client. He finds out the goals of the project, analyzes the market together with a business analyst or product manager, forms a technical task. After that, he gathers a development team, oversees the stages and coordinates the results throughout the entire production cycle.
We estimate the cost and due date

The marketplace development cost is calculated based on the technical task. The complexity of the task, how much time specialists (developers, designer, tester) will need to spend and what technologies will be used are all affecting the price. After agreeing on the terms and conditions, the PM prepares a contract describing the rights and obligations of the parties, indicating the total cost, payment terms and launch time of the marketplace.
Prototypes and interface design development

The designer draws page prototypes based on the behavior and habits analysis of the target audience, as well as recommendations from the business analyst and the market expert. Plus designer works out the interface of the administrative panel, seller’s and buyer’s dashboards. To do this, he analyzes competitors, marketing goals, takes into account the technical task requirements. The interface of the marketplace is created based on the approved prototypes.
Marketplace development

The dev-team programs all marketplace features, adds interactive elements, develops an API. Integrates external services: payment system, data exchange with tracking and accounting programs.
Testing

The QA engineer generates manual and automatic testing programs for the project. Developers will correct the errors found during those tests so that by the launch time the marketplace works exactly as planned and described in the technical task.

Technology used in marketplace development

Marketplaces are complex web-applications with multi-level access and many subsystems. To develop them, we use the Symfony, Yii2 PHP frameworks, as well as solutions for optimal capacity balancing and speed optimization. Almost every project uses Gearman's application task distribution platform for processing large amounts of data, Zabbix and its analogs for logging, and integrated payment services.

Remodeling of the ready-made standard CMS is more expensive than the development of a custom marketplace. Plus there is a risk of getting unfixable software errors and module conflicts after making changes to the code, and there will be difficulties in implementing important options and interfaces. Marketplaces based on the PHP framework are more convenient to administer and easy to expand with the help of detailed code documentation. Besides, we report all the components of user interfaces, it simplifies maintenance and reduces the cost of upgrading features in the future.

Expandable

due to good documentation and support, it is possible to change the structure of the website if necessary. Disable or add particular features for the end-user convenience.

Stable

as developers follow strict PHP-code standards, create a well-thought-out file structure, thus minimizing the number of errors, which also benefits the overall speed.

Functional

because of the existing ready-made solutions that help implement standard features and provide integration with third-party services. For example, to add online payment system to the store or call-tracking software.