If compared to ready-made solutions, building a custom marketplace tailored to your needs gives you much more advantages: higher usability, better control over the system functionality, scalability, and security. But at the same time, managers and CEOs may think that a custom solution can be too costly for them. Today specialists in marketplace development at Fively custom software company will help us figure out the real marketplace development cost depending on your personal needs.
* – additional functionalityThus, taken roughly, the final cost for a custom marketplace with basic functionality starts at $100,000, while with some additional functionality it starts at $200,000 and depends on the chosen business model, features needed, and technologies used. of the chosen team, clear development processes, and transparent communication. Choose a trusted software vendor which can help you build a custom marketplace development strategy, and use your budget in the most beneficial way.
Contents
Possible Types of Marketplaces
Your custom marketplace development price will depend on several variabilities like its type, features, specialists involved, and technologies used. Let’s consider first the possible marketplace types and tell the difference between them:- By participants
- B2B: here businesses sell products or services in bulk to other businesses, automating the selling processes and improving deal transparency between companies (example: Alibaba). Monetization here includes commissions, subscription fees, or listing fees;
- B2C: such marketplaces sell from businesses to customers, and are monetized through commissions, subscription fees, and listing fees (example: AliExpress);
- P2P or C2C: connect customers to sell products or exchange them for other products, helping people use resources optimally; are usually monetized through paid promotions (example: BlaBlaCar);
- eCommerce: enable businesses or people to sell their products and services to any other people or companies (example: Amazon, OLX);
- mCommerce: these are eCommerce marketplaces built with the mobile-first approach to enhance mobile shopping; are monetized through commissions, subscription fees, listing fees, and lead fees (example: Jumia, Sephora);
- Crowdfunding: let participants raise funds for a particular project, monetization involves commissions and transaction fees (example: Kickstarter);
- Auction platforms: encourage customers to compete for the product or service by bidding, allows getting the highest price for a product (example: eBay, Artsy).
- By business model
- Horizontal: sell various products to numerous buyers, has a vast audience driving thousands of transactions, but the competition is high (Etsy, OLX);
- Vertical: focused on niche products instead of selling everything, so you experience less competition and can provide better personalization (Airbnb, TrueFacet);
- Global: here various goods are exchanged regardless of users’ geographical location. It has the biggest audience and revenue potential, but you should be ready for language barriers (Amazon, eBay).
Features and Their Approximate Cost
Now, let’s consider the basic marketplace features you may need and their corresponding development costs in two different system types: Amazon-like (a global eCommerce marketplace) and Airbnb-like (a P2P vertically integrated marketplace).Project stage/Feature | Amazon-like marketplace | Airbnb-like marketplace |
Business analysis | $9,000–$25,000 | $9,000–$21,000 |
System design | $5,000–$15,000 | $4,000–$12,000 |
Front-end development | $24,000–$78,000 | $19,000–$60,000 |
Back-end development | $40,000–$115,000 | $32,000–$100,000 |
QA and maintenance | $15,000–$65,000 | $12,000–$50,000 |
Authentication and login | $5,000–$21,000 | $5,000–$21,000 |
Profiles (host, guest, admin) | $18,000–$25,000 | $18,000–$25,000 |
Product/Apartment pages | $10,000–$14,000 | $8,000–$10,000 |
Product/Apartment details* | $3,000–$5,000 | $2,000–$4,000 |
Search and filters | $15,000–$20,000 | $15,000–$20,000 |
Shopping cart | $12,000–$17,000 | $12,000–$15,000 |
Customer reviews* | $12,000–$18,000 | $12,000–$18,000 |
Email notifications | $10,000–$20,000 | $10,000–$20,000 |
Messaging system* | $10,000–$20,000 | $10,000–$20,000 |
Payment system integration | $20,000–$25,000 | $14,000–$20,000 |
CRM integration | $10,000–$15,000 | $10,000–$15,000 |
Wish list* | $5,000–$10,000 | $5,000–$10,000 |
Product comparison* | $10,000–$15,000 | $10,000–$15,000 |
Product recommendations* | $10,000–$40,000 | $10,000–$40,000 |
Geolocation* | $10,000–$16,000 | $10,000–$16,000 |
Customer reviews* | $13,000–$20,000 | $12,000–$18,000 |
Total cost | $266,000–$599,000 | $239,000–$530,000 |
Tech Stack for Your Marketplace
Choosing a fitting tech stack to cover front-end, back-end, and QA operations needed for a marketplace development, allows implementation of the desired functionality and optimizes marketplace development costs:- Back-end: we recommend using Ruby, Node.js, PHP, or Python, with their corresponding frameworks to create website logic, and for client requests management, it’s good to choose PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, and other similar databases;
- Front-end: use HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and TypeScript with their libraries jQuery, React, or Vue to create a user interface with all the product pages and regarding details;
- QA services: testers need to combine manual and automation testing tools, performing tests on different environments to evaluate software behavior, improve its quality, and timely remove bottlenecks.