The development of the marketplace was included in most of the reports on e-commerce trends in the coming years. Customers more and more often choose marketplaces that focus on a specific area, e.g. a furniture marketplace, a bio-products marketplace, a premium clothing marketplace, etc. We call it multi-vendor. How does it work in short? The business owner focuses on the development of the marketplace and promotion platform, the merchant on how to add the products for sale and customer services. The marketplace earns a commission on sales, and the merchant earns a margin on the product. Sounds great, but how do you do it from the technological side?
It is worth starting with the fact that on the market there are more and more technological solutions for marketplace platforms. There are dedicated platforms, open source and SaaS solutions. The prices of the solutions start from €10,000 to €500,000. Anyway, when deciding on a marketplace solution, it is worth thinking about the future, in which direction the technology will go and how the solution that we implement will be scalable.
That is why at Brand Active we have developed a solution that combines the best in e-commerce: Shopify Plus, Storefront PWA, Marketplace App. On the question Can I have a marketplace on Shopify platform? We answer YES!
Why Shopify Plus?
Shopify Plus as a dynamically developing technology based on Liquid, React, Node and Ruby is one of the most modern e-commerce solutions in the world. Its advantage over the regular Shopify is the ability to edit the most majority of the components platform, which is rare in the case of SaaS. Shopify Plus is still a cloud solution, so it gives us peace of mind (server and system performance). Shopify Plus is a global solution, ready for marketplace owners looking to sell in multiple currencies and languages.
Why Vue Storefront PWA?
On Vue Storefront we will build a PWA (Progressive Web App) marketplace that will allow customers to view the store’s offer offline (like a native app) and increase the website’s performance, which is important for SEO. Vue Storefront is based on the JavaScript library Vue.js, which is used to build web applications based on the MVVM (Model View View Model) architecture. It is worth adding that Vue Storefront is one of the fastest growing open source projects in the world, therefore access to knowledge and resources is certain, which is important in the event of a change of the technological partner.
What is the Marketplace App?
The Marketplace App is our solution, which is made available to merchants options (profile management, product listing, order processing), and the marketplace owner defines the settings (global settings, merchants management, defining the amount of commission). The solution is connected via Shopify API, and its biggest advantage is full customization according to business needs.
Shopify Plus + Vue Storefront + Marketplace App = Marketplace Platform of Future
Why this way? Headless commerce!
We adhere to the principle of headless commerce, so we separate the customer’s experience (front-end) from the merchants experience (back-end) and in this case from merchants (marketplace). Independent microservices are the key, which as a whole create a coherent ecosystem and allow for the development of each area without affecting the functionality and performance of the others.
Who do we dedicate our solution to?
First of all, small and medium-sized businesses that aspire to become leaders in their product segments in the future. Our solution enables fast time to market without spending hundreds of thousands of euros.
If you think that our approach is consistent with yours, let us know, we will exchange insights and present our solution in detail info@brandactive.co