Building Online Marketplace
I've been reading a lot in this forum and learned a lot from you guys. I have always wanted to start my own startup/project but due to lack of ideas and lack of coding experience i have not done so... until now!
I have finally decided what i want to start and it might seem to advanced for somebody who is just a newbie but i really believe in this idea and willing to put a lot of working into it. Anyway the reason behind this post is that i want to ask for some advice from you guys regarding the implementation.
I want to create an online marketplace where people can sell their stuff, much like amazon or eBay BUT obviously for a very specific group of people and not in any way near as complicated as those sites but just wanted to give you an idea of what i have in mind. So the question is: What technologies should i use to create this type of site/app? And also could anyone who have built this kind of site/app share their experiences and share some advice.
Have a great day/evening everyone!
I built and manage a very busy online marketplace that let's creators sell Blender add-ons. We've paid out $1.5 million dollars to its creators. https://blendermarket.com
I would not advise using WordPress to build this. We actually started on WordPress ourselves, and within 2 years we outgrew the plugins (EDD, RCP) that we were using. WordPress was holding us back. It's a great blogging platform, but a terrible website application.
I wrote the migration scripts and migrated millions of records from MySQL to PostgreSQL and rebuilt the entire thing with Ruby on Rails.
Learn Ruby, and learn rails. Use basic HTML, and keep things simple.
Good luck!
I agree with you, better to keep things simple and use right technologies than to complicate things and not get much out of it! I appreciate you advice, and good luck to you as well!
So many people go down a rabbit hole of deployment infrastructure, numerous external dependencies and complex front-end frameworks. All of that stuff has its place, but that place is not a fledgling product with zero traction!
Dokan is pretty cool. https://wedevs.com/dokan/
Yeah, Dokan with WooCommerce. Good enough for small to mid-level multi-vendor marketplace :)
If your community is small you may start with WordPress. For digital products you can use EasyDigitalDownloads and for physical products WooCommerce FTW (both of them have reliable multi-vendor extensions with all essential marketplace features)
My two centz: Try Doorstep e-commerce, its open source project on github https://github.com/mysteryjeans/doorstep
However its very basic in terms of features.
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of this project
To start one quickly I would suggest you can go with https://www.cs-cart.com/. We have analysed several softwares and ended with cs-cart and our application is here www.narporul.com
Thanks for the suggestion will check it out. By the way if i can ask how do you handle money transcations etc? meaning if someone buys a product on your site, how do you go about getting the money from the buyer to the seller?
Check Sharetribe! They have both open-source and hosted versions. Their Marketplace Academy also has a lot of useful content about online marketplaces in particular.
The marketplace academy has useful content indeed! Thanks for sharing.
Some answers on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Is-there-an-open-source-marketplace-platform
If I were to do it, I'd use Drupal. (Or maybe WordPress for a small community.) But if you're not familiar with it, it's not a great place to start.
Will look into it, thanks for sharing!