How do I start a successful online business in 2018?

In 2018 for creating the successful business you just need have an idea and passion to realize it. If you are seriously thinking about running the business, you should know that choosing the right business model is a major factor affecting your profit in the future. So, let’s talk about such an easy-to-implement but very cost-effective model as a collaborative marketplace.

There are two issues have to be solved before opening the collaborative marketplace. First one is choosing a nice for your future marketplace.

And the second issue is to decide: who should you try to convince first the supplier, or the customer?

1. Tips for choosing the right niche for the marketplace you can find here: Julia Kush’s answer to How do I create an online marketplace?
2. And about the second issue, I would like to tell more here:

This is a classic chicken-and-egg conundrum: drawing the attention of customers means offering a varied range of service providers but those are hard to come by when you don’t yet have an established customer base to offer them.

There’s no single, universal answer to this question. But looking at different types of cases, and understanding the user groups involved, there are some pieces of advice to deal with this problem.

Consider the example of a home-service barber marketplace The Haircut, a solution created with Cocolabs and uses the Cocorico platform to let people find independent hairdressers who can visit them at home.

Obviously enough, nobody will agree to become any platform’s ‘user zero’ by definition, a platform with almost no sellers will attract almost no buyers. Customers want something now, not the vague possibility of something in the future. So, launching a marketplace without users is a bad idea.

The same is true of providers. Anyone from them won’t commit to a new marketplace unless they can be convinced it offers tangible benefits.

In the case of The Haircut, customers looking for a home hair master are spontaneous, only registering at the very moment they wish to use the service. Good hair experts are usually not short of work. And they have had bad past experiences with worthless online platforms. All this means they take a lot of convincing to get involved in the new online service platforms.

What is important: Identify target customers, then look for their needs.

This is definitely the most complicated solution for implementing when you have simultaneous growth of your clients and provider databases.

In the beginning, the first two weeks, The Haircut did 75% of its business away from its online platform. This recognized that home hairdressers weren’t interested in the platform in and of itself, they simply wanted to get new customers. But as a community of motivated and experienced professionals grew together with its new-found client base, the platform offered by The Haircut seamlessly became the natural way for them to continue doing business. Source

Online Marketplaces: What You Need to Know

Online marketplaces are extremely useful modern web tools for retailers and customers. These eCommerce solutions make it possible to choose and buy different goods from different sellers in just a few clicks without the necessity to leave one’s home or workplace. The most prominent online marketplaces out there right now are Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, etc. Besides these, there are lots of online platforms dedicated not only to sales purposes. Airbnb and similar services, for instance.

Types And Features Of Online Marketplaces

All in all, an online marketplace is a website full of different products from various entrepreneurs. All of these products can be bought within seconds without wasting much time on shipping, delivery or other issues. As for the sellers, these platforms provide them with assistance in solving the following questions:

• How to create a product page or catalog?
• How to organize the communication with potential customers?
• How to perform financial operations and what tools to use for that?
• How to contact a support team in case of emergency?

And this is not a full list of questions you can easily resolve with the help of online marketplaces. At the same time, these sales channels are not about answering significant business questions only. They are about fulfilling eCommerce tasks and getting a real profit.

Coordinated efforts of web service providers, sellers, logistic and delivery specialists are aimed at catering to the customer’s needs perfectly. What is crucial, all of the web marketplaces are integrated with payment gateways.
As it was mentioned above, eCommerce marketplaces are not limited to trading only. These platforms have strong capabilities to satisfy various needs. According to this, main types of online marketplaces are defined as follows:

• Product Marketplaces which are the most popular ones, like Amazon.
• Job Marketplaces which provide the access to plenty of job openings and resumes, like UpWork.
• Service Marketplaces providing other services, like Airbnb.

Nowadays, the global market is full of complex eCommerce platforms that provide several various services at once. For example, OLX platform offers a wide range of services. Besides that, the market gains more specified services like platforms for price comparison or grouping the announcements.
One of the integral things users are interested in is what profit the marketplaces get. Well, it is all quite transparent. The marketplace’s income consists of three main parts:

Service Fee
Each purchase, each payment requires an additional service fee. This is the basic component of platform’s profit.

Advertisement benefits
The advertisement is the engine of progress. Also, this is a source of income marketplace can get by posting third-party information on its web pages.

Commissions
Cooperation with other service providers requires commissions for every financial operation.

Considerable Advantages Of Online Marketplaces: Two Points Of View

Did you know that 96% of the USA citizens have already made online purchases at least once in their life? Did you know that most of them would prefer to start looking for a product via an online marketplace initially? This kind of service is really convenient and such an accessibility is the main cause of high level of online marketplaces’ popularity. However, this question is deeper than that, so let’s define more constructive reasons why shoppers prefer surfing online marketplaces:

Possibility to save time
Traditional shopping requires visiting the mall. Alternatively, web marketplaces provide the customers with the convenient opportunities to buy things from any location where there’s an access to the Internet.

Choice of a better product
One of the most useful online marketplace features is its filters. With the help of a Filter option, one can easily choose the most suitable type of product out of dozens that are offered.

Access to the bottomless ocean of goods
Unlike web stores, marketplaces provide online users with a unique opportunity to view and compare products of different types, quality, and vendors. One click opens the doors to the digital mall where one would certainly find the desired product.

Living in a never-ending rush mode, consumers find peace and satisfaction in online marketplace shopping.

But this kind of business relations may be risky. First of all, it includes the third party, which may be not reliable. Second of all, buying things online excludes the possibility to try it on physically or check its quality in real life.

Short tip for a consumer: pay enormous attention to feedback and ratings.

But what does it all mean to sellers? Is it really as profitable as it is believed to be?

Let’s just highlight one significant point in this question.

The aim all the entrepreneurs chase after is a bigger profit. And it is only reachable by attracting more customers. Briefly, the more people visit your website, the more would make a purchase. By opening a web store on an eCommerce platform, one gets the opportunity to access a wider audience. Additionally, online marketplaces eliminate boundaries. International trading enables cooperation with customers worldwide.

But along with all of the advantages, there’s always a fly in the ointment. Lots and lots of competitors all around the web fight for customers by offering better terms, lower prices, and higher quality. It’s a challenge to keep up with them and to keep your head above the water.

Short tip for the sellers: always provide your potential customers with accurate information and high-quality attractive photos in order to win their attention. 

Development Of Online Marketplaces: What Is Crucial

Online marketplaces demonstrate huge potential and amazing capabilities to impact the eCommerce industry and gain marvelous popularity. The decision to develop a marketplace platform can be extremely profitable for your business. Before commencing to the implementation of your idea, however, take a look at the following valuable expert tips:

Technical aspects
Depending on what kind of service you’ve decided to build, choose the development technologies that are really capable of bringing your idea to life. If it’s a simple software product, use one of the ready-made solutions and enhance its functionality with unique features. Otherwise, if you would like to get a large-scale project, hire a skilled development team.

Security matters
Online marketplace requires dealing with lots of financial operations daily. Your payment system needs to handle the process and deal with every issue possible. It has to be able to provide seamless interaction between customer and retailer and be a cornerstone of all the processes. So make sure it meets all of the expectations. Use modern approaches and cutting-edge technologies to take care of your customers’ future confidence and convenience.

Quality rules the show
Deliver the solution of the highest quality possible at every stage of the process. Marketplace development, cooperation with brands, and interaction with customers must meet the vital quality requirements.

Final Thoughts On The Web Marketplace Topic

Online marketplaces play a significant role in the modern eCommerce world. They provide amazing opportunities for entrepreneurs and create an amazing shopping experience for consumers. What is crucial, they are responsible not only for a service itself but also for every single vendor that runs a web store on the defined platform. In the long run, a winning approach is pretty simple (yet still pretty difficult to achieve) – by providing the highest level of quality, one can reach ultimate online marketplace success.
Source

How to choose a payment tool for your Chicago marketplace focused on people working on-demand

I want to start by saying that work on-demand is really a great solution for many people. Research conducted in the United States for over the past year has shown incredible figures of people for whom work on-demand acted as a sort of “airbag” and became a necessary measure for a comfortable existence. Here are some statistics by software provider Intuit for February 2017:

Forty-one percent of respondents said they had experienced a financial hardship during the prior year, compared to 18% of all Americans in a recent study by the U.S. Federal Reserve. Half of the 41% said their financial hardship was the reason they work in the on-demand economy. The survey was conducted from Sept. 20 and Nov. 18, 2016.
The hardships included an unexpected major expense (36%), job loss (31%), health emergency (29%) or reduction in their hours at work (26%). Almost one-third of those with full-time jobs said they see their on-demand work as a backup, in case something goes wrong with their main job.

More information about this study can be found in this Forbes article.

And such popularity of this working type brings with it a number of issues in which pay for work is probably the most important. So how to choose the right payment tool for your online marketplace for on-demand work?

To choose a payment system, you need to start by answering the following question: What is a type of your marketplace? In the case of on-demand workers, it’s a service marketplace. The choice of the payment system is also directly related to the marketplace platform used. Service marketplaces can be successfully created on such platforms as Sharetribe, Cocorico, Market WordPress Theme, etc. For finding a good platform for your marketplace, use this free marketplace comparison tool. It provides important information about pricing models, localization, demo, supported languages and others parameters of platforms including supported payment methods.

For example, if you select Sharetribe for your marketplace aimed at on-demand work, you will have access to 2 payment tools: PayPal and Stripe Connect. And in this case, you need to compare these two systems. At this time, Cocorico offers the possibility of connecting MangoPay payment tool.

In brief, each of these three payment methods the following can be underlined:

Stripe provides high fraud-prevention. It is very convenient, giving customers the opportunity to pay without signing in and without being diverted to a separate site.

Stripe accepts currencies from more than 139 countries and converts them automatically for international transactions. Each transaction with a European Blue Card is charged at 1.4% or €0.25 (whichever is greater).

Many people heard about PayPal. But if we talk about service marketplaces, PayPal is not always preferred, if only because it’s more expensive than Stripe. PayPal fees are far more complex and nuanced. For example, they only charge extra for American Express when you’re on one of the paid plans, which seems a bit counterintuitive.

MangoPay is flexible and simple to integrate, this tool naturally allows sites to accept online payments, as well as to take payments on behalf of third parties, and manage cash flow. Mangopay was designed especially for marketplaces and crowdfunding, so it allows multi-currency processing.

A big plus is the transparency and competitiveness of its pricing: 1.8% or €0.18 (whichever is greater) of commission per transaction, with no hidden fees for installation, subscription, or transfers to your bank account.

More information on payment tools for marketplaces can be found here.

And as mentioned above, choosing a payment system for of your marketplace requires considering many factors, such as marketplace type, platform, support of countries. But if you take this process seriously, the probability of finding the right online payment tool for your marketplace of any type is possible by 100%

How to use influencer marketing and video in promoting marketplaces

Creating a good online marketplace with professional help can be faster than you can imagine, but to involve sellers and buyers there is not an easy challenge.

Many e-commerce marketplace owners concentrate on the standard methods of promoting (SMM, SEO, Adwords) their business while skipping the not so traditional, but very effective methods. I’m not in any way not saying that the widely used promotion channels do not work, but why not try to look a little more abstract about it. Let’s imagine that you get 200 new users to your trading platform every month from SEO, 400 users — from social media and over 1,000 new (buyers + sellers) reach your marketplace with Adwords. This can be enough to get the profit, and you stably adhere to the strategy used. I have only one question: “Do not you want more?”

If you tell me — No, I don’t, I will not believe it. I believe everyone who decides to start a business, and especially if this is e-commerce business, always wants to develop and grow.

So below I added some methods which are not so often used, but quite effective for promoting your online marketplace.

1 Influencer marketing

It is super effective in generating sales! And if you don’t start experimenting with it, you’re losing quite a big money.

So the first thing you should do is to find the right influencer.

The challenge is that finding an influencer to work with your brand isn’t as straightforward as it seems. But it is possible.

First, determine who your target audience. If you’ve already used any advertising in your promotion campaigns, it won’t be difficult.

In another case, I would recommend starting with Facebook Ads. It is really easy to customize and allows selecting the audience automatically.

You must select the influencer according to your target audience.

Try also the following services to find the influencers: influence.co, Openslate, Grapevine and Famebit.

• Do not hesitate to ask the potential leader for the full statistics on his/her profile, depending on where you want to promote your marketplace (Instagram, Facebook, Youtube etc.). It is also will be useful to do some research on your influencer using such services like Social Blade, to be sure on the true of this influencer popularity.
• Do not hesitate to bargain! Of course, before you write to your potential leader, you need to review forums and other resources where the information about approximate prices for bloggers services of this category. Try to lower the price, presenting your store in the best light. It is possible that the blogger will become your buyer or seller in the future.

Offer the blogger some benefits on your trading platform. This proposal can also reduce the price.

It also should be noted that when addressing the influencers for the promotion of your online marketplace, you must be assured of marketplace quality (convenience for buyers and sellers, security, relevance, etc.). That’s why it is best to use expert help to create your online trading platform.

Using the power of influencer marketing for your marketplace, you can run a strong grapevine among your potential sellers and buyers. So think carefully before you skip this idea and go back to your old strategy.

2 Video Marketing

Create Your Own Promotional Videos!

With adding a qualitative video about your marketplace on your promotion channels you can increase the number of new users by 80%. And it has been already proven that video works well regardless of the category in which you deploy it.

But when you use video marketing to promote anything and even truer for business, the video content provided must be perfect! I don’t advise you to create a video for promotion your marketplace by yourself (of course, not when you’re experienced video maker). Video creation like any other content creation it is a work for professionals. In this case, you can suggest with an idea for the future video clip if you have something interesting.

Vision is our most dominant sense. Think about something really exciting for your potential clients, your video must hit on its visitors.

Moreover, coming back to the marketing, Google loves videos! Videos allow you to increase the time spent by visitors on your marketplace website. And this, of course, will affect them progress in the search results for your marketplace.

What Will Blockchain Do To e-Marketplaces?

Ask yourself: “What is the most popular topic today, if we are talking about new technologies?” Of course, it is Blockchain. Blockchain technology has burst into our reality and led to irreversible changes in many business directions including online commerce.

So far this century, the efficiency savings online marketplaces have produced, and the value they’ve been able to extract from them, have made those businesses an unbeatable proposition within the retail space. No other system could sell so much with so relatively slim an infrastructure. But what is expected from the future life of online marketplaces under the influence of Blockchain?

In February 2017, Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani in their “The Truth About Blockchain” introduce Blockchain Technology as “an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way.” This leads one to conclude that through Blockchain and smart contracts two sides (the seller and the buyer) will be able to rid themselves of any risks associated with the payment processes and get the fully transparent data of money transactions.

Get more info about future transformations in the online commerce business due to the effects of Blockchain technology here.

Marketplaces In 2018: Riding The Wave Of Hype

Today, there are more than 40 marketplaces in the world with a stocks comprising of more than $1 billion. But startups must not draw the inspiration only from the numbers some existing companies score.

If you do not already know what a “marketplace” is, just look at the screen of your smartphone. The Uber Taxi Service, the Airbnb apartment search platform, the Booking are just a few examples of products that have become the basis for companies with a similar marketplace business model.

Nowadays, a great number of marketplaces with a huge range of customization capabilities exist. Among the high-profile names are the Lyft taxi service (capital $5.5 billion), a German delivery service Delivery Hero ($2.9 billion), French search service Blablacar (capital – $1.6 billion).

Marketplaces have been a “tidbit” for venture investors for several years now. Instead of selling the Traveltriangle project hotels has decided to aggregate ready-made ideas for travel collecting offers from more than 10,000 agencies for users from 65 countries. In February 2016, Traveltriangle attracted $10 million from the Singapore venture fund RB Partners and other investors.

What spurs the “appetite” of investors for all the new marketplaces?

First, let’s define the terms. Unlike online stores that sell goods from a warehouse, marketplace services aggregate the offers of suppliers of goods or services on one site. Then, they provide convenient tools for searching, assist in conducting transactions, and regulate the interaction between the client and the supplier. The presence of third parties – suppliers – makes the model of the market more complex than the usual business models in e-commerce, but they are more flexible and easier to scale.

Focusing on one type of product or service allows startups in the field of marketplaces to work better in their niche and be more mobile than the competitors. The marketplace model is stable from the point of view of monetization prospects, and the “mathematics” of profit/loss per customer is very clear. Startups, due to their flexibility and unconventional look, manage to take their place even in highly competitive niches. The example of Traveltriangle in a highly competitive hotel reservation market proves that point really well.

Another example is the startup from Los Angeles – Goat.

Read the full article here: https://roobykon.com/blog/posts/79-marketplaces-in-2018-riding-the-wave-of-hype

What is the status of e-commerce in the business world?

In the age of globalization, no retailer anywhere, whether large or small, can afford to limit its ambitions to just one country. Naturally, some sellers are further than others down the road of developing an international strategy – but what none can afford to ignore is the importance of online marketplaces in developing their ability to sell across borders.

Anyone in any doubt only has to look at the figures – in markets as diverse (and fast-growing) as Poland and Australia, nearly half of e-commerce trade is now taking place via marketplaces. Shift your sights to China, and you can make that figure 90%.

Because they are platforms for huge numbers of businesses, marketplaces have a strong proposition for building brand recognition, and the largest of them are among the most-visited sites on the Internet, ranking up there with Google and Facebook.

When retailers sell their products via marketplaces, they get the power of all that traffic and brand recognition at their heels – without having to splash out for extravagant marketing.

How marketplaces drive international expansion

Because they’re all set up and ready to go, and have already gained the trust of local consumers in whichever new market you may be looking to move into, marketplaces allow you to enter that market smoothly and speedily.

Meanwhile retailers, with an eye to their ease of use and low cost, increasingly find marketplaces an ideal arena in which to soft-launch in new territories where they still need to fine-tune their understanding of local market conditions. After all, the products that sell best in France might…Continue reading: https://roobykon.com/blog/posts/77-to-meet-global-ambitions-look-to-local-marketplaces

Home Farmers: Easy Access To Healthy Food!

Across the globe, it’s probably fair to say that small-scale farming is not as widespread an activity as it once was. The situation varies widely from country to country, but as a rule, the more economically developed and urbanized a place becomes, the more food production gets to be a matter for big companies, not individuals.

But as supermarkets become ever more ubiquitous, people living in some of the world’s most advanced economies are becoming increasingly concerned about how little they know of where their food comes from and how it’s produced.

In some countries, supermarkets have begun to print on the labels of fruit and vegetables the names of the farms at which they were grown, or even of the farmers who grew them. But given supermarkets’ mastery of branding, it’s debatable how much such moves increase consumers’ level of trust.

From Edinburgh to Ohio, the rich world has, in the past two decades or so, seen a boom in the number of farmers’ markets, offering health-, environment-, and provenance-conscious consumers the chance to deal directly with the producers of their fresh produce. These markets have become the beating heart of the global ‘slow food’ revival, letting consumers stay in touch with the sources of their produce, and producers make a better return by selling directly, at retail prices.

But there are downsides to farmers’ markets. For a start, not everyone lives near one. Then, there’s the fact that they’re often only open for a few hours each week. Occasionally, they’re even exploited by unscrupulous vendors whose produce is not everything it claims to be.

It’s with all the above in mind that Home Farmers was set up. Based in Australia but operating globally, it’s an online marketplace that aims to combine the convenience and security of e-commerce with all the joys and benefits of buying fresh produce direct from the grower. Continue reading to find out how it works: https://roobykon.com/blog/posts/70-home-farmers-easy-access-to-healthy-food

Introducing The Marketplace Comparison Tool!

At Roobykon, we love online marketplaces. We think that they represent a huge part of the future of commerce.

Back in the summer, we launched a tool called Marketplace Platform Advisor, designed to help you make the very best choice of platform for your marketplace business.

Now, Roobykon is proud to introduce you to a brand new tool designed to compliment Marketplace Platform Advisor: it’s called the Marketplace Comparison Tool.

‘So,’ we hear you ask: ‘how does this new tool differ from the one we already have?’

Well, it’s actually rather simple.

Marketplace Platform Advisor guides you through a series of questions, leading to a recommendation. It’s a great way to start, particularly if you don’t have much technical knowledge, but it doesn’t let you make a side-by-side comparison between different platforms.

And that is exactly what Marketplace Comparison Tool enables you to do.

 

How does it work?

The interface you will see when you enter the platform is really straightforward:

First, we have one dropdown menu from which you are asked to choose which types of platform you would like to compare (e-commerce, service, project, or all three).

Below this, you’ll find two further dropdown menus, from which to select the two particular marketplace platforms you’d like to see next to each other.

Once you’ve made your selection, you’ll see all the key variables related to each of your choices, arranged side-by-side for easy comparison:

Continue reading: https://roobykon.com/blog/posts/69-introducing-the-marketplace-comparison-tool