With the fashion field thriving with online selling processes, many fashion and design businesses are already embracing and adopting the concept of selling online. Customers, too, prefer the online shopping experience since it is a more convenient, reliable, and streamlined process of acquiring their best fashion designs. The benefits are many. However, the main concern lies in building a reliable, robust, and secure fashion marketplace to meet the needs of business people and buyers, too.
The process of building such a marketplace can be complex, especially with the advanced features required to make the whole marketplace a viable solution for those seeking a suitable platform to showcase and buy the best fashion trends.
This guide will give you all you need to know when building the best fashion marketplace, including the features, benefits, and processes, among more valuable insights. Keep reading.
What is a fashion marketplace?
A fashion marketplace is an online platform connecting the marketplace owners, vendors, and buyers. Through the platform, vendors get to showcase their fashion requirements, be it footwear, accessories, or clothing.
Such a marketplace has a wide range of products all under the same store. This allows buyers to analyze the available products and choose the exact product they are searching for. The products, in this case, have detailed descriptions of each including customer reviews and incredible product images to guide the buyer into making the right decision. Most importantly, these marketplaces have reliable and secure payment gateway for streamlined and easy payment processes.
Examples of fashion marketplaces that are thriving include the following:
ASOS Marketplace – this is a British-based fashion retailer whose focus is the use of social media platforms to reach the global audience, with generation Z standing out as their target user base.
Risk-free checkout options, returns, and free delivery are among the top reasons making ASOS stand out.
Zalando – based in Germany, Zalando is another thriving online retailer in the fashion industry.
StockX – StockX thrives as the best marketplace offering top-quality sneakers. While the marketplace is still young, it is growing at a rapid speed, with the refund policy being among the features of this marketplace.
Other marketplaces in the fashion industry that are doing well include Lyst, Farfetch, Amazon, Nineteenth Amendment, and Myntra, among many others.
Why you need a fashion marketplace: Top benefits of a fashion marketplace
A fashion marketplace has many benefits for marketplace owners, vendors, and buyers. Below are some of the reasons why building or using a fashion marketplace is a viable idea:
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Lower risk
As a new business owner looking forward to exploring the fashion industry, settling on a marketplace option has low risks associated with all the processes. First of all, the platform offers all the logistics and technical support, thus simplifying your work. What’s more, the initial costs are reduced, thanks to the platform features. This means you don’t need to worry about experiencing financial risks throughout the process.
Above all, the platform already has a strategy to attract more customers while retaining the already existing ones. However, vendors can also introduce their preferred marketing approaches to make more sales.
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Cost-effectiveness
A fashion marketplace offers a cost-effective solution to business owners. All the sellers or vendors under the same marketplace share the marketing costs, which can be costly when working independently. Such shared costs include digital security, hosting fees, and development costs.
What’s more, a fashion marketplace gives room for vendors to negotiate costs with delivery services and payment gateways, especially when the sales are higher. This generates more profits in the long run, thus offering a cost-effective solution in the fashion industry.
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Customer trust
Selling your fashion products on a famous marketplace gives your business a positive and professional overview. This creates a positive customer experience, thus making customers maintain loyalty, which in turn facilitates rapid business growth.
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Increased profits due to huge sales
A fashion marketplace attracts a huge userbase due to the convenience and flexibility of shopping through such platforms. The high traffic enhances the visibility of your business which can lead to more sales, thus making more profits without investing in marketing strategies.
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Increased reach and visibility
Who wouldn’t want a large userbase to access their business dealings? Well, a fashion marketplace attracts many visitors every other day, thus giving perfect visibility to businesses operating through such platforms.
What’s more, a fashion marketplace attracts users from different regions. This means you can expand your business reach by serving customers from across the globe.
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Seamless customer experience
A fashion marketplace has streamlined processes customers follow when placing orders, tracing their orders, and collecting their products after delivery. Besides, such platforms have features that offer 24/7 customer support. This means a customer can get served at their convenient timeframe. This creates a seamless user experience, which creates a solid customer base.
Must-have features of a fashion marketplace
When building a fashion marketplace, you must highlight the core features for marketplace owners, vendors, and buyers. These are the features that make the marketplace fully functional and operational in a streamlined manner. The features include the following:
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Features of marketplace owners
These are the required admin features for marketplace owners. They facilitate a streamlined operation when serving vendors and other customers.
- Payment gateway system – As a marketplace owner for the fashion industry, you will need a streamlined system to complete all the payments from the platform users, including vendors and customers.
- Review & rating feature – in a fashion marketplace, customer feedback is essential. It helps you know where to improve and enhance efficiency. In this regard, customers can rate and leave reviews on the specific vendors and products delivered.
- The control panel – this makes up a detailed dashboard or display system that enables marketplace owners to manage orders, sellers, content, and all other users of the platform in a streamlined manner.
- Onboarding & approving vendors – this is a feature that facilitates the process of vetting vendor applications, approving them, and establishing the operation procedures and protocols with the marketplace vendors.
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Features for sellers – vendors
These are features that enable vendors or sellers to complete their selling processes in a streamlined manner. They include the following:
- Product listing feature – as a fashion marketplace vendor, you’ll need to post about your product offerings including their detailed description on product outlook, prices, and available stock, hence the need to include a product listing feature.
- Vendor panel – this is a detailed dashboard where vendors track their sales, manage their product listings, and track orders within the platform for a streamlined operation.
- Analytics & reporting – this is a vital feature in a fashion marketplace as it provides sellers with valuable insights, including tracking stock levels, customer reviews, and overall sales made for making informed decisions.
- Order management – this feature helps sellers to complete the ordering processes including receiving orders and processing shipment and logistics processes.
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Features for buyers- end customers
These are features that help end users, or buyers complete their actions within the fashion marketplace without facing difficulties. The features include the following:
- Different payment methods – not all buyers have the same method of payment, depending on where they are operating from. Therefore, include diverse payment methods such as digital wallets, PayPal, and credit/debit cards. This enables the buyers to select the most convenient payment method they have.
- User accounts & customization – this feature enables buyers, especially those on a long-term basis, to create personalized accounts showcasing their buying history and product preferences.
- Product search &filters – the search and filter feature helps buyers choose the products they want easily. They can sort or filter out with material type, color, price range, band, and size, among other dynamics.
- Product pages – this is a page that specifically describes the product in detail to help buyers make informed decisions.
- Order tracking –this feature creates transparency and openness between the buyer and the seller, thus enhancing customer satisfaction.
Step-by-step process of building a fashion marketplace
The process of building a good fashion marketplace complex, especially with the technical aspects required. However, with the following steps, you can complete your fashion marketplace in a streamlined manner
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Define your business model
Start the process by understanding the nature of your business model. This includes the services you intend to offer to users and the streams you will use to generate revenue. These details will help you structure your fashion marketplace.
Some key guidelines here include:
- Revenue streams you need to integrate into your fashion marketplace
- Inventory management option – do you want to operate your platform as a marketplace only, or do you want to keep a section of your inventory?
- Global outreach – do you want to focus on an international, national, or regional audience?
- Vendor management – Do you want to manage your own stock while other vendors list their products on your marketplace?
The insights or answers you get from these questions will guide you on the appropriate measures to take to build a solid basis for your fashion marketplace.
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Prioritize the features
Now, start prioritizing the features of your fashion marketplace based on what you need to achieve in the end. Make sure you consider features for admin (marketplace owners), vendors, and buyers. These are the features that will streamline the marketplace operations.
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Build the platform
At this point, you have all that is needed to set up your fashion marketplace except the platform and the development team.
Depending on your set budget, you can choose to assemble your development team or partner with a custom marketplace development company to carry out the processes in a professional manner. The only considerations you need to make here include:
- Faster-time-to market
- Ease of customization and scalability
- Cost-effectiveness
- Access to ecommerce tools and resources
- Ease of integration
- Security and performance
- Multi-vendor capabilities
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UI design
Now, you can build a good and attractive user interface, ensuring the user interface aligns with the target audience’s preferences. It should be an easy-to-navigate through interface with the following attributes:
- Highly responsive
- Customizable
- Simple and clean
- Attractive product images
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Payment gateway and order management integration
A complete fashion marketplace must have a streamlined payment gateway system and a smooth order management process to complete the transaction processes.
Simply factor in the multi-currency support and secure payment procedures when integrating a payment gateway system.
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Marketing & SEO
Well, there are many fashion marketplaces already thriving, with many more coming up. This can make it hard for your marketplace to standout due to extreme competition. That is why you shouldn’t skip the marketing and SEO section to make your marketplace known to the target audience. You can achieve all these through the following strategies:
- Social media marketing
- SEO optimization
- Referrals
- Email marketing, among many other options
The goal of this step is to attract vendors and buyers to start using your fashion marketplace. Once you have established your platform’s user base, you can now move to the next step.
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Deploy and maintain the fashion marketplace
At this point, you have your fashion marketplace complete with the right user base. You can now launch it can make regular updates and improvements to ensure the marketplace accommodates the growing userbase.
Monitor the emerging trends and technologies as you adjust your marketplace to accommodate all these needs. Most importantly, strive to keep a good relationship with the platform users for steady growth.
What are the challenges of building a fashion marketplace?
While building a fashion marketplace comes with many benefits, there are challenges you might encounter during the development timelines and even after launching the marketplace. It is essential to understand these challenges so as to create a practical plan and find viable solutions to overcome these limitations early enough. The challenges include the following:
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Platform dependency
As a seller, you may experience operational-associated risks when dealing with a fashion marketplace. Sellers depend on the platform to complete all the actions. In this regard, if the platform faces technical glitches, gets closed, or operational policy changes, it affects the sellers negatively. This can destroy your customer base plus cause declining sales, which will harm your business in so many ways.
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Commissions & service fees
A fashion marketplace makes money through product listing fees or a fixed monthly fee. While this is okay based on the services such a platform offers, the overall costs can reduce the profit margins for sellers using the platform.
The solution to this is to do in-depth research on diverse platforms, compare the terms and conditions, and choose one that favors your business operations.
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Economic uncertainty
A financial crisis can happen when you least expect it, and this can harm the business in many ways. Recession and market volatility, for instance, are examples of situations that can emerge, unforeseen and impact the business negatively.
In such a scenario, your key focus would be how you will keep and retain the existing customer base through high-quality service delivery. Go a step ahead and source for other suppliers if the past ones are too expensive. The goal is to stabilize the business during economic crisis times and ensure your customers are fully satisfied.
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Limited control
As a seller running your business through a fashion marketplace, you don’t have control over many processes on the platform. You simply work with what the platform has to offer, including following the guidelines and the layout. This means it is hard to create your unique brand identity.
What’s more, businesses that thrive on differentiation will be limited due to restricted personalization on the platform. This gives sellers limited control over what they can do to build their brand in a unique manner.
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Data Security
Security is of crucial concern in any business, especially one that involves online transactions. Of course, the fashion industry isn’t exceptional when it comes to matters of security threats and related cyberthreats.
Therefore, you need to keep your platform updated as you follow the emerging tech trends and ecommerce platform security best practices. Use the right software, implement solid security measures such as the use of strong passwords and encryption techniques, and comply with the set rules and guidelines. This will make the platform users feel secure with their confidential data.
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Customer loyalty
In a fashion marketplace, there are many sellers who have the same business dealings as you. In this case, you can have loyal customers who get unsatisfied with another seller’s service delivery from the same platform. The customer is likely to have a bad review on the same, thus not using the marketplace ever again. In short, how other sellers carry out their activities can impact your sales in so many ways.
However, you can overcome this challenge by allowing your customers to process their transactions through your channels or agents to ensure your customers get the right experience and retain them for long.
How much does it cost to build a fashion marketplace?
Building a fashion marketplace can be a complex process or a simple one, depending on the nature and dynamics used in building such a platform. The costs of building a marketplace, in these regards, can range anywhere from $15,000 to $100,000 or even more. This is based on several factors, as highlighted below:
- The platform features – The type and number of features you need to integrate into your fashion marketplace will impact the overall costs of building such a platform. The more the features, the more the costs associated with the development processes.
- Platform complexity – the platform you choose for your fashion marketplace plays a key role in determining the overall costs of building such a platform. A platform with advanced integrations such as augmented reality, personalized styling, and size recommendation engines will be costly in the long run.
- Location of the development team – hiring a fashion marketplace development team from advanced countries like the UK and USA will be costly compared to hiring experts from Aalpha Information Systems, located in India, for the same services.
- Type of development team – Another factor impacting the costs of building a fashion marketplace is the type of development team. In this case, you can outsource the development team, use a pre-built solution, or hire a freelancer. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages, thus impacting the costs of building a fashion marketplace.
- The technology stack used – the tech stack used in building a fashion marketplace also impacts the overall costs. In this case, cross-platform tech stacks such as MERN, MEAN or any other stack for cross-platform development will be cheaper compared to other native technologies.
- Marketing and promotion – once you complete your fashion marketplace, you will need to attract sellers and buyers, hence more marketing and promotion costs. This impacts the overall costs of developing such a online platform.
How to reduce the costs of developing a fashion marketplace
While developing a fashion marketplace can be costly, taking the following measures and approaches will help you reduce the related costs:
Outsource the development team – If you don’t have the required tech skills, outsourcing a team to complete the process of building your fashion marketplace is the cheapest option. In this case, you don’t need to hire separate experts to handle different aspects of building the marketplace. You will get designers, developers, testers, and any other skilled personnel you need under one roof once you outsource from Aalpha Information Systems, India.
Use pre-built marketplace solutions– instead of starting the process from scratch, you can opt for pre-built solutions to minimize initial costs and speed up the fashion marketplace development process.
Build a scalable fashion marketplace – while this approach will attract more initial costs, it will help you adjust the features in the future as your marketplace starts to grow and expand. Besides, it gives you better flexibility in transforming the platform in response to emerging trends and technologies, thus more return on investments.
Prioritize the core features – when you start building your fashion marketplace, identify and prioritize the core features that are crucial. Don’t overspend and waste time building features that are of less significance in your marketplace.
Do market research – most importantly, invest your time in doing proper market research to evaluate your competitors and establish your target audience. This will help you make the right decisions that will help you save more in the long run.
Conclusion
Building a fashion marketplace is a promising business, especially in this era where both sellers and buyers are searching for the most convenient way to complete their selling and selling experiences. Besides, there are many more ways you can monetize your fashion marketplace and generate more revenue. The challenges will be there, but with proper research, an action plan, and a set budget, you can have your fashion marketplace in place and start generating revenue in a streamlined manner.
FAQs on building a fashion marketplace
How can I monetize my fashion marketplace?
There are many ways you can monetize your fashion marketplace and generate more revenue. Below are some concrete ideas that you can apply when monetizing your fashion marketplace:
- Listing fees – include fees where sellers pay to list their products either through subscription plans or one-time fees. This will depend on the number of listings and the listing timelines. Apart from generating extra income, the listing fee will attract serious vendors to your platform.
- Advertising revenue – you can also allow advertisements on your platform as you promote selected brands or products. Product owners pay for advertisement fees, thus generating more revenue through the marketplace.
- Affiliate Marketing – here, you connect with ecommerce brands or platforms and then earn commissions made through your marketplace via a referral link set within the app,
- Transaction fees – impose a small percentage on transactions on a completed purchase process. This helps sellers use the platform and deliver excellent services.
- Subscription plans – let sellers choose their preferred subscription plans with different levels for diverse benefits. For instance, include extra features, marketing support, better visibility, and ad analytical tools for different tier subscription plans.
- Promoted listings – here, the sellers pay an extra fee for a promoted listing, which enhances their product visibility on the platform.
What is the best tech stack for developing a fashion marketplace?
Building a fashion marketplace requires different technologies to complete different parts of the platform. In this case, the development team selects the ideal eCommerce tech stack based on the nature and dynamics of the fashion marketplace. For instance, you can use the following technologies in the respective sections of such a marketplace:
- js or Python for backend development
- js, Next.js, Angular, and ReactJS for web-frontend development
- Neo4j GraphDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB for database management
- Swift, Kotlin, Flutter, and React Native for mobile frontend development
- Cloudinary for image hosting
- PayPal, Braintree, Stripe, MangoPay, and RazorPay for payment options
- Apple Push Notification, PubNub, and Firebase for push notifications
- AWS or Googe Cloud for cloud hosting
- SendBird, Twilio, and Firebase messaging for in-app messaging and calling.
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