Like a rushing avalanche, the tendency to acquire miscellaneous things and services via the internet gains momentum. As a consequence of the fact that people are getting used to ordering everything online from pizza to international flight tickets, the skyrocketing demand for various goods and services spawns a plethora of digital online stores. If you can imagine how you can take your piece of cake from the table of the e-commerce industry, the expertise about marketplace app development meticulously prepared by the Purrweb team will support you in the desire to forge your own path.
How to make your marketplace app stand out
Describing the product that lives in your imagination, highlight the main distinctions from competitive offers. As you’ve remarked, a marketplace app functions as an intermediary between people who are aspiring to sell something and people who have opportunities and desire to buy it. Since the look and architecture of your marketplace app will be conditioned by its purpose and target users, sort out what it will present and for whom.
There are known three types of e-commerce solutions:
- Those that help customers to sell something to each other like Etsy;
- Those that equip companies with the opportunities to sell to other companies;
- And those that supply companies with a platform to sell customers.
As for the character of the content that a marketplace app shows, there are also three alternatives: goods, services, or a mixed variant.
Which work should be done to bring your idea to life?
When you’ve sorted out what you’re targeting to build and for which audience, it’s time to take over the questions of incorporation of the idea.
The experts who know how to make the picture of the app, you possibly have in your mind, visible are called UI designers. They will choose a color palette, fonts, and illustrations, draw buttons and sliders and add animation if the app requires elements and options of that sort. Of course, all these «details of the puzzle» should be structured, and it’s highly desirable in a way that will make the end users happy. The expert who has comprehended the magic of juggling with all the parts of a marketplace app and feels how to exceed the expectations of visitors is known as a UI designer. The UI and UX designer spend on average 150-200 hours on their work, and if their hourly rates are $50 per hour, they will charge about $7500 for their services. Is the idea to miss this piece of work teasing you? Be aware: without preliminary work and testing variables of the prototype with real users, there’s a high risk to build a marketplace app that makes visitors feel puzzled or irritated, or just indifferent to the service.
When a marketplace app becomes visible, ask for help from experts to make it «tangible»: we mean real work of all features the product contains. It’s a voluminous and tedious work that takes various timeframes in dependency on the tech stack. With React Native it’s possible to surprise investors with deliverables in three months: the marketplace app will be available on diverse devices after 800-900 hours of work. Let’s multiply this by $50 hourly rates, and we’ll see that payment for the engineers equals $40,000.
It would be a thoughtless approach to present the marketplace app to a wide public without checking if its workability is flawless. There’s a popular proverb that warns about the impossibility to make the first impression twice. Don’t try to neglect the folk wisdom, hire quality assurance specialists. Conscientious testing entails the absence of drawbacks in the app’s functioning: it’s fast and flawless. The cost of services on average is about $4000.
Among other services is product management: you need an expert who will track the process of spending time and money in accordance with a plan to reach definite results. The PM will free you from the necessity to interfere in the team’s work and decide hundreds of everyday questions: you’ll get the results of iterations at the end of every two weeks. How much does the PM charge for his work? It depends on the studio where he works. At Purrweb, the average salary of the expert is about $4500 for three months.
As you see, the most impactful factors for cost are the number of working hours and accepted company rates.
And as the Purrweb practice demonstrates, the average mobile marketplace app cost is swinging from $30,000 to $60,000.
What matters when budgeting a project
If the price of a marketplace app is perceived to be affordable, don’t hasten to plunge into despair: there’s a way to gain what you dream incrementally. Start with an MVP. You’ll avoid overpaying in the very beginning by focusing on the most significant elements of the product:
Registration form
User profile
Item listing
Catalog
Payment functionality.
The limited set of functionality entails decreasing the time the project takes and leads to cutting costs respectively. As for search bar, wishlist, video reviews, etc., plan their adding at the later stages when you win financial support from investors.
Another way to make the budget of your startup more friendly is to search for help from an offshore outsourcing agency. Since hourly rates are different in various countries, explore the offers from other regions: they can turn out to be more attractive than in your country. So, the US average hourly rates are about $150 while the specialists from eastern Europe are ready to work for $50 per hour keeping the same quality. This factor can make the price of a project vary by three times!
Now, when you are equipped with this knowledge, you’re able to combine these two ways to optimize the budget of the product. But if there are some unclear issues that make you feel hesitant, it’s reasonable to book the consultation with a high-scored agency: guys will help you find missing “puzzle elements” and you’ll see where to start clearly. When Amazon started, it wasn’t a grandiose one-stop worldwide shop. It was a trial to sell books online. And what trial would you like to realize?