One of the instant benefits for the consumers is that Online Shopping Centre Marketplace provides an opportunity to get their usual shopping done online, under one umbrella bringing more convenience and optimising delivery time and costs.

“The success of a marketplace comes from the ability of the marketplace to offer buyers and sellers something unique, a new way of exploring, engaging and transacting, that improves the experience for everyone. Omnyfy offers a turn-key marketplace platform with extensive customisation capability and flexibility to create any marketplace you want “, said Alexis Susser, GM Sales and Marketing at Omnyfy.

Learn how Omnyfy helps retailers, shopping centres, airports to build an online distribution channel by creating a multi-vendor digital marketplace.

Successful marketplaces such as Etsy, Airbnb, and Fiverr, prove that the marketplace platform is highly scalable and flexible to any business industry and niche. One of the reasons behind the rapid growth of online marketplaces is that retailers do not need an inventory list. With a collaborative economy, retailers can develop a booming business without spending a lot of money to purchase initial inventory which involves many risks.

We will continue to see more innovation when it comes to building and running online marketplaces. With today’s technology, anyone can launch their marketplace in a matter of weeks. However, the launch is just a start and more factors need to be considered for marketplaces to be successful. Among those factors are platform functionalities that vendors and businesses look out for. Let’s have a closer look at the criteria you should consider when choosing the best marketplace platform provider for your business.

1. Seamless vendor onboarding

Wide assortment provides a competitive advantage to the marketplace and often becomes the main reason why customers prefer to shop from your multi-vendor e-commerce platform. That’s why the success of your marketplace largely depends on the number of high-quality vendors and products you manage to acquire.

However, the vendor acquisition process is often not as easy as it seems. Successful vendors with a good range of competitive products usually don’t have an urge to joining additional distribution channels, especially if getting on your marketplace requires a lot of time or resources.

To remove this entry barrier, it is highly recommended to make sure the vendor onboarding process is simple and fast. Integration with third-party e-commerce software allows your marketplace to seamlessly fit into the vendor’s existing business ecosystem. With such integration, the marketplace owner and vendors won’t have to spend hours or days manually uploading their list of products, updating pricing and inventory levels. Instead, they will be able to simply pull all the products from their existing online store (e.g. Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento). Such a seamless onboarding process is one of the key factors, if not the main one, for getting more vendors on the platform and allowing the marketplace to scale.

2. Vendor order management

We believe that a powerful marketplace platform must also be easy for Vendors to use. A good marketplace software should provide you with tools, to make vendor order management seamless and efficient.

For example, Omnyfy offers a comprehensive management interface for Vendors to receive and fulfil their orders with complete control over the pick-and-pack process. Vendors receive notifications via email or through the Omnyfy Closer Vendor app every time a new order comes through. They can print out pick-and-pack slips for individual items or the entire order. Meanwhile, customers receive notifications at every stage of the fulfilment, staying informed throughout the process.

On top of that, thanks to the integration capabilities, vendor-owned stores (e.g. Shopify) get automatically updated with the marketplace orders, pulling in the orders from the marketplace, automatically updating the fulfilment status and adjusting inventory levels.

3. Vendor payout management

Payout refers to disbursing or paying out of funds received from a customer to Vendors. The ability of the platform to accommodate multiple fee types (commissions, fixed disbursement fees, transaction fees, transaction fee surcharge, category commission) is key to organise an effective vendor payout process. The flexible fee structure at an individual vendor level is also an important factor, especially for the marketplaces that want to tailor the fees and charges for individual Vendors based on negotiated rates.

4. Multiple shipping options

When a vendor sells a product or service on a multi-vendor marketplace platform, the business will take part in its fulfillment. 

When building a marketplace, owners must make sure platforms have the ability to integrate courier services to provide flexible fulfilment options. This ensures that vendors have a seamless experience when fulfilling orders for their customers. By identifying target vendors, the marketplace owner can come up with a list of necessary shipping options. The drop-shipping model and centralised delivery are the two most popular variations of the fulfilment model, however, if the marketplace platform can support a combination of both – that is the best scenario.

It’s also good to note what couriers the marketplace will support. Not all courier services will serve the user’s immediate vicinity of the proximity of the ideal customer base. Providing logistics services in the provider’s area or at least offering a way to inject a supported courier into the process is highly beneficial.

5. Comprehensive product management

Offering great product management features such as advanced search, should be a priority to help vendors and customers reach their goals with ease.

A sophisticated, multi-layered product catalogue is a must for any e-commerce store and marketplace. Advanced marketplace-specific catalogue features can help navigate site visitors through multiple vendors and hundreds or even thousands of products. For instance, Omnyfy’s marketplace catalogue allows a customer to compare products across different vendors based on defined product attributes and comparable values, which enables the marketplace to provide an excellent customer experience and help buyers find exactly what they are searching for.

Another thing to consider is product pages. Sellers on your marketplace should be able to quickly and easily create new product catalogues. Make sure that your sellers include descriptions, images, and details including availability, variations, delivery information, and more.

6. Multiple payment options

At the heart of e-commerce is commerce – and commerce cannot happen without an exchange of value. That puts a premium on payment gateways and payout terms, which is one of the main considerations when finding the right e-commerce software for vendors.

The preferred payment method of global online shoppers is eWallets, with 36% using this form of payment. Setting up a marketplace that supports multiple payment options, like a credit card, PayPal, or bank transfer, is a must.

In case the marketplace is in the business of selling subscription-based products and services, providing recurring payment systems can be a great solution. It enables automated payments so that the marketplace operator does not have to bill clients manually every month or so.

7. Scalability

One of the biggest challenges in developing an online marketplace is figuring out which business model works best for a particular business. Hence, if a marketplace owner needs to spend more time learning and improving their business, they can start with a Minimum Viable Platform. A lot of marketplaces choose to start small, while refining their unique value proposition, designing their transaction flow and expanding their vendor network.

However, it is important to think long-term and not get trapped in this initial stage. Once the business passes through the Proof of Concept Stage, the growth stage begins. It is extremely important that technology doesn’t become a constraint. The platform should be flexible enough to allow the business to build on functionality, pivot, and even branch out into other markets or geographies.

To make it possible, a marketplace owner should consider the flexibility of the platform at the start to make sure the tech has enough features to support all the possible scenarios the business may adopt in the future. 

8. Platform maintenance

There are a few other aspects of the platform that are hard to account for at the planning stage. However, such invisibility can sometimes make or break the marketplace.

One aspect is platform maintenance and sustainability. Before locking your business with a particular marketplace solution provider, it is important to explore how easy is it to operate and make changes to the marketplace after it is launched. You should ask yourself – how much can I do with the marketplace without involving the entire team of developers. This often comes to specific details on the platform. Can you do product-based marketing? How detailed can be SEO optimisation of vendor stores and product pages? Can you manage the content, e.g. update text or images on the marketplace by yourself, without engaging the tech team?

Here at Omnyfy, we see an increasing number of requests from businesses with already existing marketplaces. Only after the launch of a newly created marketplace, they discover that their marketplace platform has significant limitations or is difficult to manage. Sometimes, in this case, building a new platform with the right provider is easier and even cheaper than carrying monthly maintenance costs of a non-flexible marketplace technology. A lot of these businesses eventually decide to write off their marketplace as a sunk cost, while investing in a new one with more granular functionality. 

To avoid such waste, spend more time upfront, going through all the possible scenarios of your business, learning about the technology you are planning to use, its capabilities, risks, and limitations.

9. Security

Platform safety and privacy are important criteria, especially for larger companies and enterprises. This aspect depends on the technology provider’s internal policies, as well as the environment each marketplace uses. With SaaS marketplace software, all marketplaces are built on a shared environment. This means that any minor change to the platform may affect all clients and their marketplaces. While PaaS model provides each marketplace with its environment, ensuring the maximum level of security, privacy, and a lot of room for customisations.

There are a lot more criteria to consider when choosing between SaaS and PaaS model marketplace platforms. Read one of our articles to dive deeper and decide which one works best for your business.

10. Technical support

It’s always safe for us to assume that any technology will require technical support at some point. Therefore, the software you sign up for must have good customer support. Check reviews from other users to ascertain a marketplace platform’s level of responsiveness and level of technical support.  Doing this small but significant task will help you avoid anxiety and save you a lot of time in the future.

11. Pricing

Sometimes expensive does not equal quality. Quality of the platform versus the price point varies across the industry based on the business model and the strategy of the technology providers. Depending on what the marketplace provider’s go-to-market model is, your price might include huge markups passed from sales and marketing, while the platform itself might not satisfy your needs. To get the best value for money, look for product-focused companies that are constantly investing in their marketplace technology, adding new features and capabilities and, improving user experience. The right platform will provide you with a solid basis to build a successful and scalable marketplace.

If you have a marketplace project or would like to learn more about Omnyfy’s marketplace technology and its applications, reach out to have a chat.

Professional services marketplaces are one of the fastest growing and most lucrative types of multi-vendor marketplace business models. Research from 2017 indicate that the market was slated to grow by 5.4% YoY, reaching almost $5 trillion globally, by 2020. This rise can be attributed to several key factors including:

1. Increased trust and quality of providers on professional service marketplaces
2. An open and transparent review and recognition mechanism that rewards performance and highlights poor quality work, enabling the cream to rise to the top
3. Increase in professionals working remotely.
4. Finding the best person at the best rate rather than having to rely on someone locally, especially for highly specialised workloads including development, design, content production, research services, tax services, accounting etc.

For anyone looking to either offer or obtain specialized services, marketplaces provide a great opportunity to find the best person for the job, at a price point that the customer can afford. In addition to connecting professionals and businesses, these platforms also allow for secure payment transactions, where funds are held in an escrow facility and only released when the service is delivered or the work has been completed to a satisfactory level of quality.

This way, service providers have peace of mind knowing they’ll receive payment for the work they’ve done. From the buyer’s perspective, marketplaces allow businesses to reduce risks of online scams, especially after receiving a subpar service.

According to Forbes, the value of the B2B marketplace commerce in the U.S. alone will be worth of $1.2Tn. With that in mind, demand for having a specialized marketplace is higher than ever. This provides a great opportunity for anyone who plans to launch such a platform.

Types of professional services marketplaces

Services Marketplaces include a range of sectors and levels of jobs, from trades jobs such as finding electricians and plumbers or locksmiths through to high-end professional services such as developers, accountants, legal practitioners or conveyancers.

There’s generally two paths that can be take by professional services marketplaces, depending on how sophisticated or accessible the supply side (online sellers) can be:

Generic professional service marketplaces land up becoming listing sites or directories. Apart from providing the contact details of the provider and behaving as a low-quality lead generation mechanism, these marketplaces do not usually offer any additional value. Directories such as Yellow Pages, fall into this category. View this video to see how marketplaces have evolved, especially with professional service marketplaces.

Generally speaking there are two three types of functional marketplaces that you can create when considering a professional service marketplace.

1. One way is to allow professionals to create their own profile and state what kind of services they’re able to offer. Businesses can then search your marketplace and look for people who are able to provide the exact service they need.
2. The other solution is to build a platform that goes allows businesses to request services they need. By looking at the job description, professionals can see what kind of work the business requires and in what time frame. If they think they’re able to fulfill such a request, a professional can then submit their proposal and wait for the feedback.
3. Of course, there’s a third option to consider as well, which combines both of these models. Although this can make your marketplace pretty versatile, it can also increase its complexity. Naturally, you can solve this by optimizing the user experience for your marketplace, making it a breeze to work with.

The 5 Most Important Features Your Marketplace Should Have

1) Advanced Search Options

The ability to quickly and easily find a service provider online is key to developing a winning professional services marketplace. When looking for a specific service for your business needs, it would be quite inconvenient to have to scroll through all the service listings.

To provide a good user experience, having a powerful search engine is a must. Besides that, it also needs to have various filters which can include service categories, subcategories, and specializations, for example. It’s also important to be able to search listings by other criteria, such as charge per hour, availability, location, language, etc.

Wizard type searches such as those used on Serviceseeking.com.au are a great way to guide your users in making selections, leading them to a search outcome.

2) Payment Processing

Once you enable professionals and businesses to connect with each other, the next step is to provide secure payment processing. By allowing your users to charge and pay for the services directly through your marketplace, you eliminate any additional work they’d have otherwise. This creates a stress-free environment, both for those paying for services and those that charge for providing them. Of course, this directly feeds to your business case as well, since you’ll collect a marketplace fee from these transactions.

Service marketplace billing is the next most important feature to look for. Billing for service marketplace must a range of billing options including fixed price billing, hourly based billing and billing on quote.

Payment processing on a marketplace involves holding the funds in escrow until the service is delivered. This offers confidence to both seller and buyer, that their funds are being held and will be released once both parties are satisfied with the service delivery.

3) Service and product listing

The Service or Product listing page is the page that customers use to make their decision on whether or not to engage with the provider..

Service listing should be a top consideration and must allow service providers to clearly showcase their offering. The page should include a detailed description of the service, examples of previous work, display of past reviews and tagging with a range of attributes that are used by customers when conducting searches.

4) Notifications and Messaging

Performing highly-skilled tasks requires seamless communication between two parties. That is why your marketplace must include an internal messaging system to keep all the communication on your platform. This will allow for proper business communication between users, eliminating the need to use e-mail or any other form of communication.

Besides being able to chat between each other, your users also need to exchange documents and files. Another feature worth pointing out is the chat history, which serves as proof of any previous conversations.

5) User Profiles

Along with job postings or service offers, each user in your marketplace needs their own profile page. For professionals, this will allow them to provide information about the services they offer. This is also the place where they can show their previous experience, special skills, and how much they charge per hour. For businesses, a profile page can allow professionals to understand what their company works on, what kind of services they require, and how often they hire professionals.

6) Scoring System

Reviews and ratings are an important part of any marketplace. This allows the users to provide relevant feedback about their partners, as well as choose a professional or company that’s in good standing. Although you can rely solely on the feedback and comments, it’s best to introduce some kind of a scoring system as well. One of the most common examples is star rating, which goes from one to five stars, with the latter being the highest mark.

Learn from the Existing Examples

With so many online marketplaces already in place, it’s essential to use this opportunity and learn from the best. Two of the most popular platforms that provide all kinds of services are Upwork and Freelancer.

Both cover a wide range of professions and mostly focus on businesses posting job offers. This allows service providers to pick and choose jobs they’d like to work on. Of course, once they submit their proposals, it’s on the business owner to decide who they’ll hire.

If you’re planning to create a specialized marketplace for high-end services, you can check out some of the top online marketplaces for professional services below.

To get a better insight into how this works for particular professions, the list below features examples for Legal, Accounting, and Web Development services.

Legal Services

• UpCounsel

UpCounsel enables entrepreneurs and businesses to locate and hire attorneys. Depending on the business’ requirements and their budget, the platform will provide three to four attorneys that look like the best fit.

After attorneys send their proposals, the business owner can select one to work with. The main benefit of this system is that businesses don’t have to sign expensive contracts with law firms. Instead, they can choose an attorney for a single task if they want, without wasting time on complex paperwork, meetings, and negotiations.

• Avvo

With Avvo, things work a little differently. First of all, the main component of their marketplace model is scraping the internet to find licensed attorneys and include them in their listings. Creating a huge number of lawyer profiles this way, they can easily service any kind of legal need for businesses. Avvo boasts that their marketplace includes over 97% of all licensed attorneys in the U.S.

Accounting Services

• InHomeAccountants

Providing on-demand services in the accounting profession, this platform connects independent accountants with businesses that require such services. The process is quite simple.

First, an accountant creates a profile and enters their accounting and software skills, as well as the licenses they have. Next, a company defines their project by entering its scope, deliverables, and deadline.

They may also require a specific skill set or a license. Finally, the platform matches accountants with the existing projects, allowing everyone an equal chance to bid for the job.

• Shngli

Being another accounting marketplace, Shngli approaches the game differently to others. In order to provide the best accounting services on their platform, they go the extra mile in their process. Focusing only on southern Florida for now, Shngli interviews and validates each accountant they bring to their platform. Although not a world-wide marketplace at the moment, this is a great example of how to think out of the box and approach your niche directly with an added value.

Web Development

• Toptal

Working in one of the most sought-after professions at the moment, web developers can use Toptal to easily connect with businesses. Thanks to the online tests, Toptal is able to initially screen developers that come to their platform. Using skill, personality, and language testing, businesses can be sure they’re looking at the prime selection of online talent. Especially since Toptal chooses only around 3% of the several thousand applications they receive each month.

• Expert360

Based in Australia, this global marketplace provides an opportunity for a large number of highly-skilled developers to find remote work. Just like Toptal, Expert360 has a rigorous screening process, making sure their talent pool is at the highest level. This goes as far as organizing interviews with their applicants.

The best marketplace platform for launching a professional services marketplace

Omnyfy provides a comprehensive marketplace platform on which to build and launch your professional services marketplace vision.

With a comprehensive suite of functionality our PaaS Marketplace Platform delivers everything you need and is backed by our amazing customer service.

If you choose the Omnyfy platform, you’ll receive a host of specialized features that cater to the requirements of a professional services marketplace. It provides a flexible payment system which covers all types of payments, be it fixed, milestone based, or anything in between. To allow your users to properly plan their work time, Omnyfy provides the booking and appointments feature as well.

Besides these options, Omnyfy marketplaces include many others, all essential for the success of your endeavour. You can check out the full list of features specifically for professional services marketplace here.

Relating to your target audience is a relatively wide statement and can range from the type of Fashion you’re selling to the values that your marketplace ensconces. Marketplaces can stand out by focusing on specific segments such as specifically street wear, high-fashion, party fashion or just jeans, or for specific values such as independent brands, co-ops, second hand clothing or sustainable manufacturing. The more precise you are with your positioning and target “tribe”, the more successful you’ll be in acquiring and growing a customer base.

And this is a great time to start. In a recent Round Table interview with McKinsey, Boris Ewenstein of Zalando stated, in response to the boom in online sales driven by the Covid19 lockdown, “But after March 30, the landscape changed again. People who would have bought offline before are now moving into online. Of our 32 million active customers as of March 31, 17 percent are new (year over year). We sold one million items just over Easter via our direct-to-consumer partner program, which is up more than 100 percent from last year. Similarly, new sign-ups to the Partner Program were up 150 percent from February to March.”

This week, in our ongoing Spotlight Series of articles where we focus on specific industry niches and provide advise to new startup entrepreneurs or existing businesses in the sector who want to launch and online marketplace, we are taking a look at the specific challenges of creating a Fashion marketplace. You will learn what customer needs you should really focus on and how a to accelerate your go to market with a PaaS Marketplace Platform. Plus, you’ll see what the best in the business is doing, and why it works.

The Types of Online Fashion Websites

When looking to launch an online marketplace, where the need to create the network effects are critical to success, first identify precisely what your positioning will be and evaluate if there is a sufficiently large Total Addressable Market in your segment, for your marketplace to be successful. Remember the closer the shared interest between your vendors (sellers) and buyers, the more network effects it generates – i.e. more sellers attract more buyers and vice versa, which will ensure organic growth of your marketplace.

Broadly speaking, fashion vendors can be broken down into anywhere from five to ten segments.

The value market is the lowest on the ladder. Essentially, brands in the value market focus on volume sales. Their products do not need to meet high-quality standards, but consumers expect to get something affordable. Fast-Fashion falls in this segment and there is a large and growing collection of marketplaces and brands that meet the needs of this sector.

Fast Fashion is however seeing push back in countries where customers are recognising the impact that cheap fashion is having on the environment as well as the terrible conditions in which producers of Fast Fashion clothing operate – especially in countries such as Bangladesh and Sri-Lanka where a large volume of these clothing are produced.

High street brands: mass market, mid-level, and high-end. Without delving deeply into each, high street brands are those that have a specific aesthetic and cater to a defined group of consumers. These brands can span the gamut of price and value, but the defining characteristic is their core customer profile, which reflect interest in the latest fashion trends and an age range that skews towards teenagers through to early-stage professionals.

The number of brands in this category are in the thousands and include both owned brand department stores like H&M, Uniqlo and M&S through to designer labels such as Chloé, Furla, Max Mara etc. We’re simply not doing this category justice in naming brands, as this is widely considered the largest sector of the fashion market.

Luxury fashion and the haute couture segment follow high-end mass market brands, with a focus on designer labels, premium production and exclusive distribution, usually through top fashion retailers or direct to consumer channels.

In many cases brands in this category do not showcase their pricing online in the retail channel, but are regularly featured in the second-hand resale fashion marketplaces, where top brands such as Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Prada and the like are regularly sold. Marketplace such as Vestiaire Collective (https://www.vestiairecollective.com/), Cocoon Club (https://www.cocoon.club/) and Edit Second Hand (https://editsecondhand.com/) are examples of marketplaces that provide a secondary market for people to sell prized high-end luxury fashion and accessories.

The handmade market segment is one of the most popular on some online marketplaces, such as Etsy. Prices can vary widely among handmade vendors and the quality of products depends on the source.

Lastly, the bespoke fashion segment is one of the fastest growing in the online fashion marketplace scene. Although the term bespoke typically indicates high-end products, there are many vendors who specialise in affordable bespoke clothing. Examples of bespoke brands or made-to-measure fashion include Indochino (https://www.indochino.com/) and Sumussura (https://www.sumissura.com/)

Picking a Marketplace Platform Solution to Meet Your Customers’ Needs

Now that we’ve looked at the different types of segments in Fashion, primarily based on Fashion type, rather than the aforementioned “Values” proposition, and you’ve identified the specific segment of customer based that is large enough to sustain the marketplace, let’s look at what you need to create a winning one.

We will be following a structure in all our Showcase articles when discussing functional requirements of a marketplace for a specific sector:

1)     The Hygiene Factors – these are the requirements that you simply cannot live without and should not compromise on. In most cases these functional capabilities of your marketplace will also align with general best-practices when developing a high-performance, UX optimised website.

2)     The Winning Factors – These functionalities will differentiate you from the pack and is where your selected platform on which you choose to build your marketplace must support customisation and extension

3)     The Cream on the Cake – This is where your innovation comes in – based on your experience in the sector, working with vendors in the industry or simply a functionality that will draw a large number of users, both vendor side or buyer side, to your platform.

The Hygiene factors

Here are some of the basic Hygiene Factors that fashion consumers want from an online marketplace:

For buyers

• Simple product listing and navigation.
• Faceted search – the ability to search everything and have filters that are relevant to the category that they are viewed
• Fast search with instant lookup – remember, customers all approach search differently, some prefer to browse hundreds of category pages searching for what they want, while others want to get straight to the product or brand they are looking for
• Category pages with the ability to add category descriptions, critical for SEO
• Human readable URL’s – a URL structure that uses the category names and hierarchy to display the categories so that it can be crawled better by search engines
• Beautiful, informative and usable product pages. If there are unique aspects of the products on your marketplace, consider using iconography to highlight which products deliver on these specifications. This could include Organic, Cruelty Free, Co-Op produced, Supports fight against modern slavery etc. Do not forget that your customers will want to quickly get to products that match their values and buying requirements, so make it easy for them
• Reviews and ratings that are immediately visible to customers
• The ability to easily configure their intended purchase with size, colours etc with an accompanying size chart for every product to minimise the chance of customers buying the wrong size and having to return the product
• The ability for customers to immediately see who is selling the product
• Beautiful seller pages that showcase the seller’s differentiating factors as well as their products on one page

• A fully integrated online payment solution with the ability to use multiple payment methods including local payment methods around the world.

For Sellers

• A streamlined onboarding process for your vendors, to allow them to onboard, get verified and start selling easily
• Social media integration for sharing
• Quick and easy product listing for approved sellers.
•  Effective messaging channels between buyers and sellers.
• A friction-free order system and comprehensive analytics.
•  Responsive online shopping – without a mobile-friendly marketplace, you will have a serious uphill battle reaching fashion vendors.
• Reliable uptime – missing out on sales during an important product drop because a site is down can mean crippling losses for a vendor in the fashion space.
• Perhaps most importantly: the ability to turn traffic into revenue

Top 5 Key Features That a Marketplace in Online Fashion Needs to Have to Win

Surprisingly, many online fashion marketplace websites fail to identify crucial elements of success in the industry. And it stems from a failure to marry some traditional concepts of fashion with their counterparts in the multi-vendor eCommerce store space.

Here are five features you cannot do without if you want to succeed:

1. Extremely high degree of customisation. More so than in other industries, merchants in fashion need to constantly update their product offering and marketing approach. And it is worth considering the scaling issue from the start. Note however, that the more complex you make your personalisation for your buyers, the more effort is required from your sellers to create configurable or customisable products on your marketplace. It is better to support this than not – and you need to ensure that you provide sufficient help guides to your sellers to guide them on how to setup highly customisable product listings.

2. Accessible product catalogue. In the world of fashion, product catalogues change by the hour in some cases. Merchants will want the freedom to modify their product offering easily. Consider integrations with the retailer’s own stores – ensure that your marketplace platform can support API integrations with top eCommerce platforms to allow your vendors to integrate and sell their entire catalogue on your marketplace.

3. Analytics from day one – Integration with Analytics Platforms such as Google Analytics with the ability to also track with GTM for advanced analytics. GTM and advanced eCommerce Analytics from Google in crucial to provide step-by-step conversion tracking for your marketplace. Ensure that these are configured from day one, so you do not miss tracking data that tells you how your marketplace is performing.

4. Integrated shipping and logistics: One of the biggest elements of marketplaces that we see missed when determining the features and functionality is integrated shipping. In many cases your marketplace vendors will have their own carriers, however, to provide vendors a complete solution, providing integrated carriers is critical. This allows Vendors to onboard more easily and utilise either the marketplace owner’s shipping solution or sign up for their own and use the marketplace to perform all their shipping for marketplace orders. For integrated vendors, the orders will be passed back to their eCommerce store, from which they can fulfil using their existing 3PL or freight providers.

5.  A platform that supports customisation and extensions – Fashion marketplaces, if not customised to meet the needs of the specific segment that it is targeting, will inevitably become just another site on the internet from where you can purchase products. Software-as-a-service marketplace platforms are simply not sufficient for long-term, scalable marketplace growth.

Keeping in mind that according to Forbes, Amazon accounts for over 80% of all sales in the U.S. that leaves an already minor share of the fashion pie within which thousands of online retailers and brands compete.

To stand out and be different your marketplace must have a secret sauce. Here are examples:

• Allowing your customers to showcase their fashion ideas or create Look Books (like Fashmates – https://www.fashmates.com/)
• Integrate with Instagram to show off their new fashion
• Target unique selling methods such as flash-sales
• Provide buying opportunities from unique sellers or provide integrations with a whole host of other platforms

the ability to customise and extend the marketplace platform is crucial and should be a key determining factor when selecting which platform you want to build your marketplace solution.

Best Online Fashion Marketplace Examples and What They are Doing Right

The best marketplaces in the fashion industry have a few things in common. They are crystal clear about who their target audience is, and what those customers need to be successful. Here is a list of some of the top performers in the industry.

1. Zalando

One of the biggest online retailers in Germany, Zalando accounts for around 1.6% of the fashion spend of the entire European Union. Although their partner marketplace is only a small part (10%) of their business, it is a small slice of a €6.6 billion ($10.8 billion) pie. Seeing the opportunity in the marketplace, Zalando aims to grow its partner revenue by 40%.

2. Farfetch

A prime destination for vendors who specialise in luxury brands. Over 3,000 merchants use Farfetch to sell their products and it has just about every type of fashion product imaginable. The business model for Farfetch was ambitious from the start, aiming to provide a platform for all luxury fashion brands across the world. Its success speaks for itself and it offers more features than most competitors.

3. ASOS Marketplace

A global leader in the B2C multi-vendor marketplace sector, ASOS focuses on peerless customer experience as a differentiating factor. The platform insists on free delivery and returns and risk-free checkout options. And its efforts have certainly paid off since it fields almost 100 million visits a month. Originally founded in London in the year 2000, the British fashion retailer now ships to every country in the world in addition to marketplace sales.

4. Myntra

Myntra is a retailer from India that focuses on lifestyle and fashion that ended up expanding into a partner-based marketplace. With a strong focus on merchant satisfaction, Myntra invests in a painless onboarding process and many other vendor amenities to attract customers. It has peaked at over 40 million visits per month.

5. StockX

StockX is one of the most successful fashion marketplaces for high-end sneakers. Still relatively young, the sneaker resale website was founded in 2015 but it is already valued at over a billion dollars. A large part of its success was identifying pain points for both the average marketplace vendor and buyer. One of the main sources of consternation among sneaker shoppers is the shoes’ authenticity. So, the company guarantees every shoe to be authentic with a solid refund policy.

6. Nineteenth Amendment

Although they do not boast the kind of numbers some global competitors do, Nineteenth Amendment carved out a space in a clever way. It allows shoppers to purchase items from independent designers at a pre-purchase price. Then, designers manufacture them on-demand with the help of manufacturing partners across the United States.

7. Lyst

A thoroughly global brand, Lyst focuses on attracting as many vendors as possible and providing a massive catalogue of items. From their apps to their merchant onboarding, everything is designed to make the selling process frictionless. They represent over 2,000 merchants and carry over five million products all told.

8. Amazon

Despite its success, Amazon is a good example of how a marketplace can get away with bad practices if it is great at generating revenue. Amazon’s product management is atrocious, Amazon competes with their own merchants on the marketplace, and the onboard is minimal. Yet, millions of merchants choose it to place their products because it reliably creates revenue streams for them.

Are you looking to start up and create a fashion marketplace?

Picking the marketplace software platform that is right for you, is about matching your requirements to the capabilities of the solution and the ability to support your long term growth plans.

Omnyfy’s Multi-Vendor PaaS Marketplace Platform is the ideal solution on which to build and launch your marketplace. We have developed Omnyfy to tick all the boxes required to start and launch a winning fashion marketplace. Check out our features and modules and case studies on fashion and retail marketplaces below, and if you are ready to proceed, book a meeting with us for a free initial consultation.

Check out our Marketplace features here and explore how Omnyfy can help create a customized marketplace solution for your fashion marketplace idea.