How does marketplace MVP development increase your project success chances?

Online marketplace development is a time-consuming process that requires investment. To launch a marketplace, a software engineering firm has to create at least three modules—that can be considered as separate apps—to fulfill the needs of vendors, customers, and platform owners.

Thus, it is important to conduct competitor analysis, research the target audience’s pain points, and prioritize features. By implementing only the key functionality necessary to address user issues, an organization can get a working solution in less than six months while significantly increasing project success chances.

This article considers the main advantages of building an online marketplace MVP. We have also described a few success stories of world-famous companies that start out by making a minimum viable product. Take a look.

What is a minimum viable product?

A minimum viable product is a software solution that contains the minimum functionality necessary to address end-user challenges.

Agile Alliance describes an MVP as “the smallest set of features or requirements to deliver value to stakeholders and satisfy early adopters in the shortest time possible. It focuses on core features sufficient to deploy and deliver stakeholder value and no more.”

The MVP approach to software engineering became popular after the publication of “The Lean Startup” book written by Eric Ries. The author defines an MVP as “a version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort”.

Marketplace MVP development consists of three stages:

Build — Software experts create an online marketplace containing the key features to attract early users, test hypotheses, and showcase the app to stakeholders, for example, investors.

Measure — The organization collects user feedback through polls, surveys, comments, testimonials, and/or other sources.

Learn — After conducting research, the company finds out how to improve a digital marketplace platform and customizes it to the expectations of vendors and consumers. Therefore, the underlying idea behind an online marketplace MVP is to deliver a minimum set of features to gather user feedback and keep fine-tuning a software solution to meet end-user preferences.

Why should you start marketplace development with an MVP?

Analysts at CB Insights revealed that a software product that doesn’t meet market needs is the primary reason for startup failure (42%).

Running out of cash (29%), high competition (19%), cost issues (18%), user-unfriendly solutions (17%), ignoring customer feedback (14%) are other common reasons for project collapse, according to CB Insights. However, MVP development allows for preventing these issues.

The creation of an online marketplace MVP offers the following advantages:

reduced expenses

faster time to market

learning from the audience feedback and introducing prompt customizations

hypotheses tested in action

solution concept showcased to stakeholders

Thanks to the MVP approach, an organization receives the first app version in 3-6 months depending on system size and complexity. At Arateg, for instance, our designers and engineers need 3,000-3600 hours to create an online marketplace MVP.

This is much faster in comparison with making a fully-fledged platform, which generally takes 9-12 months. Therefore, it is possible to improve time to market by more than 2-3 times while reducing costs.

By building an MVP, you avoid the risk of implementing functionality that end-users do not actually need. For example, a chatbot may be a great feature for request automation and 24/7 customer support but in your case, a few consultants or managers may be enough to swiftly answer questions and provide the required assistance online.

Through validated learning, you explore end-user suggestions and proposals, this way getting an understanding of how to meet market demand. An MVP is also used to showcase the product concept to investors and raise funds.

It is worth noting that many globally renowned organizations started out by implementing the key online marketplace functionality only, for example, Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb.

To learn more about the MVP development approach—including feature prioritization techniques—read our article “MVP for startups: why building an MVP is a great idea”.

What are the key marketplace MVP features?

A digital marketplace platform aims to enable consumers to make purchases from multiple providers. Vendors, in their turn, add goods and services to the system, accept and track payments, analyze sales reports, and receive customer feedback.

Marketplace owners should have the possibility to verify the identity and banking details of sellers, change pricing, as well as manage listings. Therefore, it is crucial to implement online marketplace functionality that will satisfy the needs of each party.

1. Registration and authorization

To create the profiles of consumers and organizations or individual experts, MVP marketplace developers need to provide the possibility to sign in and sign up. After collecting the feedback of end-users, you will be able to deliver various authorization methods according to their preferences, for example, via social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn.

2. Profiles

Vendor profiles generally include information like company address, open hours, contacts, description, terms of delivery. Customer profiles contain data such as name, age, payment, shipping, and billing details.

3. Catalogs

Businesses should be able to add their goods or services to a marketplace website or application, upload images, create product descriptions, and edit information.

4. Search

When building a marketplace website or application, it is crucial to incorporate various filters and categories to facilitate search. Designers should organize content in such a way that users can find the information they need with a few clicks.

5. Order placement and tracking

To make purchases, consumers have to make orders that will be further processed by a digital marketplace platform. Additionally, it will be reasonable to enable order tracking, so that buyers can monitor its status at any stage of delivery. Continue reading...