WHY MARKETPLACES
Is a marketplace the right option for you?
Compare e-commerce vs true 3-sided marketplaces.
Do you need a marketplace?
A marketplace has three key elements: a buyer, a seller, and an admin portal. Each has a unique set of roles and responsibilities that ensure the marketplace works properly.
If you are looking to have multiple merchants sell their products or services through your website, with the ability to have buyers purchase from several merchants at one time, then creating a custom marketplace is your best option.
The level of control you have over the marketplace will be much more beneficial for your operations and sales than just having an online shop.
Buy vs build your marketplace
While many companies opt to build their marketplace in-house, this approach often brings about challenges such as high costs, longer time-to-market, and inevitable hurdles and delays. With over 11 years of experience and 500K development hours invested in perfecting marketplaces, we've conducted extensive research to understand the best solutions for each marketplace use case.
Buy
Build
Speed to market
- Rapid deployment
- Powerful out-of-the-box functionality
- Marketplace-ready API codes
- Long deployment time building from scratch
- Requires extensive project assessment (and tech stack selection, developers etc)
Cost
- Less expensive to go-to-market
- Less expensive to scale-up
- Extremely expensive labour cost to hire planning and development resources
Support
- Extensive developer resources and support
- Software maintenance included
- Post-launch support available
- Far less flexibility to change development partner once locked-in
- Software maintenance and post-launch support additional to project cost
Hosting
- Flexible security and hosting options
- Secure cloud-hosting included
- Self-hosting options available
- Hosting cost additional to project cost
Speed to market
- Flexible security and hosting options
- Some control but incomparable flexibility to scale and easily adapt
E-commerce platform vs
3-sided marketplaces
While some e-commerce platforms offer marketplace functionality, it often requires additional work and plugins, tying you to their ecosystem. In contrast, building a true 3-sided marketplace with buyer, seller, and admin portals grants you full control over the entire experience. Customise it to your exact needs, avoiding the limitations of a rigid platform.
KEY FEATURES
Customer reviews
Arcadier is a great platform for anyone looking to launch and test a marketplace MVP quickly and cost effectively. The end to end framework for a marketplace is taken care of so you can focus on building your business from day one.
Sara D.
Arcadier has truly revolutionised the e-commerce industry with their off-the-shelf marketplace templates. Arcadier helped us materialise our idea with their rental goods marketplace template, which allowed us to set up the website, payment processors etc. without any background knowledge in website design or coding.
Sue L.
Ready to build your marketplace?
Discover the power of our API-based technology and launch your fully customisable and flexible marketplace faster. Contact the Arcadier team for more information.