Creativity and commerce with CMS, come with endless possibilities, which seriously doesn’t cease to amaze anybody who is making use of the same. With a certain degree of imagination, mashed and combined with WordPress’s huge variety of plugins and themes, you have to power to do almost anything, starting from minimal blogs, eCommerce stores and ending up with web applications.
Apart from the creation process being simple, another point that acts as an advantage is the fact, that WordPress does not require you to spend a lot of money. Websites, that generally will take thousands of dollars to build, along with a team full of developers, can just be built and managed by just one individual, using this platform.
You wanting to build an online marketplace is very much similar to the one mentioned above. Traditional custom solutions are extremely difficult for any average user to execute, especially the process of e-commerce development. This is where this platform comes to play, with which anybody can spend a few hundred dollars and create their next big online market place.
This blog will focus on how anybody can very easily create an e-commerce website. However, before getting to know about the steps involved in creating a website, you need to be informed about what is meant by a WP marketplace. Getting to know all this will also help you to be sure if you even need to hire WP developers, to get the wordpress development services
What Is Meant By an Online Marketplace?
An online marketplace is basically another name for an eCommerce website. To define it simply, it allows all the users to become a seller. They have the freedom to sell any kind of product. One important thing to note is, being a marketplace owner, you are not the owner of any kind of inventory. Your job is to allow different users to list and sell their products on your marketplace.
Almost all developers are familiar with the fact that this platform can be used to build an e-commerce store on any website. However, there exists a huge possibility that even though most people understand the basic concept of a marketplace, they might not be able enough to know how a marketplace is different from a store.
The fundamental difference between the two is the fact that in a store, a single vendor attempts to sell certain goods, whereas, a marketplace includes a number of stores, which is comprised of various vendors and sellers.
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After getting informed about what a marketplace refers to, it is time that you get to know in short about how much it costs to create an online marketplace.
How Much Does It Cost?
An actual physical marketplace takes years to get set up properly and also needs you to spend, millions of dollars. On the other hand, an online marketplace can cost as low as 6.95 dollars a month and can get created in one hour.
There are certain tools that you need to set up a marketplace, and each of it comes for a price:
● Domain name – This is the address to your website on the internet. It costs around 14.95 dollars per year.
● Web Hosting – It refers to the online location, where a user stores the content and files of their website. It costs around 13.99 dollars per month.
● SSL Certification – This is the feature that adds a green padlock icon, to your address bar. This lets your customers know that your website is safe to visit. It costs 6.67 dollars per month.
Benefits of Setting Up an eCommerce Marketplace
The biggest advantage of creating and running such a marketplace has already been talked about briefly in the previous section. The benefit that is most important for most people is the fact that as a marketplace like this grows in scale, your potential to generate revenue increases accordingly.
There however certain factors that are important for you to consider if you want to gain advantage from this feature. You need to have the ability to understand whether the current market you are targeting is good enough for your purpose. You need to be sure that the marketplace you are planning to build will be able to attract multiple customers and vendors at the same time.
Proving a good experience to the vendors and the customers, along with finalising the correct niche, wins half the battle for you. The vendors, who do make money from your marketplace will focus greatly on driving the traffic for you. In addition, the customers who will receive a good experience after visiting your marketplace will ideally inform their friends about it.
Finally, it is time for you to know in detail about the steps you need to take to create a WordPress marketplace. The following section comprises of the same.
Steps to Successfully Create A WordPress Marketplace
● Creating and Setting up of Your eCommerce Platform
The very first step involves purchasing a domain name and an account for web hosting. Just web hosting will not be enough, as you will need access to software that specialises specifically in creating e-commerce websites.
● Switching your Platform Into a Marketplace Using a Plugin
The moment your e-commerce platform is ready, you can install a vendor’s plugin and make use of it. This plugin is going to transform your single vendor store into a marketplace, which will attract multiple vendors. Once this setup is complete, a number of vendors can choose to sign up to your website and sell all their products online.
● Allowing Account Creation
This is an important step. You need to allow all your customers to create an account. For instance, while making use of a WooCommerce plugin, a customer needs to visit its ‘settings’ page, and then go to the ‘Accounts and Privacy’ tab and make use of ‘Account Creation’ feature.
● Adding an Accounts Page
The next step is to make sure that you have added a ‘registration’ option to your navigation menu. The purpose of this tab will be to ease up the registration process, and in turn, will allow all the users to sign up quickly and seamlessly.
● Run and Maintain Your Online Marketplace
This is undoubtedly the final step of the creation of an online marketplace. Once you develop the idea that your online marketplace is ready, then the best thing you can do to check is to create an account, to confirm that every feature is working as expected.
Maintenance is an equally important function, so you must check whether there exist any pending vendor requests and if so, you need to address it immediately.
Wrapping Up
If you are certain about the fact that you want to create a WordPress marketplace, there is the presence of a huge variety of tools and resources online, which allows you to try the entire process by yourself.
There is however that fact you need to consider, that just building a marketplace does not assure that you will be successful. Just building a marketplace, will not make the sellers want to visit it, let alone wanting to sell their products on it.
The solution is consistency. After you build your marketplace you need to focus on consistently promoting it and maintain it and give it the time it needs to grow.
Author’s Bio
Ani Ray is working as a senior WordPress developer. He is passionate and proficient in his job and writing on new technologies like WordPress, DevOps, and E-commerce. One who wants to hire WordPress developer can check out Capital Numbers Infotech, which is a leading software development company.
