I am starting a marketplace site, and I need a way to gain sellers to kickstart the site.
I am starting a marketplace site, and I need a way to gain sellers to kickstart the site. Whats the best way to go about this?
I am starting a marketplace site, and I need a way to gain sellers to kickstart the site. Whats the best way to go about this?
If you have to bootstrap both sides of the marketplace simultaneously, I recommend trying to make it useful even if there's only a small number of people on either side. Otherwise you'll be pouring water into a bucket that's leaking water just as fast (people won't stick around to use a marketplace that's not useful), and it'll be difficult to hit critical mass. Find a way to make critical mass easier to hit, so you can actually get there. Then take baby steps to grow.
Alternatively, find a way to "prop up" one side of the marketplace for long enough for you to do the work of growing the other side. For example, instead of getting sellers, put affiliate products on your site and work on finding buyers. Once buyers are in, reverse and leverage their attention to attract sellers and improve the offerings on your site. Another example would be to use some external audience/community as one half of your marketplace temporarily. Find sellers, and do the work for them of compiling their offers into something attractive and promoting it to a sub-Reddit or email list or podcast audience or whatever. Once you've got an attractive set of offerings, use that to build your own audience comprised of buyers. Etc.
I don't know the specific details of your business, so these specific examples might not work for you, but you get the idea.
Thanks for the great advise. Very useful for my business as well.
How are you planning to get revenue from this?
If they have to pay a monthly membership, you can offer them few months for free.
If it's commission based, you can offer them better commission then the competition.
I was thinking of giving initial vendors free advertising or several months of premium membership
Do the work for them.
Tell them you have users looking to buy from them.
What if you don’t have users looking to buy from them yet?
Not my best comment ever, was in a rush.
Obviously don't lie (about having customers when you don't, or ever).
I guess my (not very helpful) answer would be that I've never seen a successful marketplace where there hasn't been obvious demand on at least one side of the marketplace prior to starting the project.
Also - if you don't have demand yet (on the consumer side) - get some!
If you don't know there's demand on either the consumer or the supplier side though, I do have to ask whether you want to start that marketplace at all...
EDIT: This comment isn't very useful either. I think I'm struggling because I've started two marketplace businesses myself and therefore find it difficult to give good advice in the space of more than a tweet but less than a novel.
Its not really like a traditional marketplace. It has a large social aspect to it much like fancy.com so if there aren't any people to buy from no one will visit
fancy.com started off by building the consumer side of the marketplace first and added the supply side (ecommerce) later once the demand is there.
If you'd like to share a bit more context about what you're building (and why) then I'm happy to give some feedback. Can't really be useful as it is though, I'm afraid.
How did it build a consumer side first if there was no one to buy from?
There's always a way.
Fancy started off by just allowing people to tag images of things/products they liked on other sites, and include a link to the original page it was found on.