Open Your Service Marketplace Like HomeAdvisor and Coursera
Why a Service Marketplace is a Great Business
So, you’re about to launch a service-focused online marketplace. You’re just in time—a service marketplace business model has a great forecast for the upcoming years and many niches are still not occupied.
Uber’s bookings have increased by a whopping 51% since 2017, which has led to an increase of over 60% in quarterly sales. Airbnb accommodation marketplace is expected to earn $3.5 billion each year by 2020—it would be a 3,400% increase from what the company earned in 2016. HomeAdvisor, the biggest household jobs marketplace, gets a $300,000,000+ annual revenue and 5,000,000+ unique users monthly.
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Home Services Marketplace
Every day, millions of people need assistance in various jobs: assembling furniture, plumbing, and fixing electricity issues in their houses. And they want qualified professionals for this job. Home jobs marketplaces connect consumers with such professionals who can do the job well.
Home job marketplaces are becoming a usual way to get help about the house. With these marketplaces, a consumer doesn’t have to search for a professional electrician, call the guy, extract quotes, send specifications for the job. Assistance is one click away. And a consumer can be sure that he or she will get a qualified pro for the job.
Meantime, the household assistance industry shows stable growth and service marketplace pop up here and there. For example, the floor covering segment is expected to grow 5% by 2024. HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) will grow 14% and plumbing—12% by 2024. Other segments show similar growth. So, it’s high time to jump in and build your own home jobs marketplace.
Online Courses Marketplace
Studying online has attractive benefits: a student has a flexible schedule, can access a wider range of courses in a service marketplace, and pays less. Online courses are a perfect form of studying for busy men and women and for those who are on a budget. Plus, selling online courses on a marketplace can make a good passive income for coaches.
The industry is very promising as it shows intensive growth. For example, during 2018 the number of students on Udemy increased up to 30%. The number of course enrollments increased from 125 million to 190 million. Since 2017, Coursera’s marketplace revenue has grown from $100 million up to $140 million and the number of learners—from 30 million to 37 million.
Freelance Job Service Marketplace
An independent research firm Edelman Intelligence in association with Upwork conducted several researches, that show that by 2027 the majority of the U.S. workforce will be freelancers. Another their research shows that 56.7 million Americans freelanced in 2018, which is 3.7 million more than in 2014. So, a job marketplace can become a profitable long-term project if you start it now.
Why CS-Cart Multi-Vendor is a Good Fit for a Service Marketplace
The CS-Cart Multi-Vendor marketplace software has all the functionality you’ll need to start selling services. But not only functionality matter. Here are 4 reasons why you should open your service marketplace on CS-Cart Multi-Vendor.
1. Necessary Functions for Selling Services in a Marketplace
CS-Cart Multi-Vendor service marketplace platform has over 500 eCommerce functions on board: SEO tools, promotions, reward points, and other marketing tools, functions for vendors, reports and analytics, and more. We’d like to focus here only on the specific marketplace functions for selling services. The CS-Cart Multi-Vendor marketplace platform has them all:
| ✅ Powerful catalog management Fill the catalog manually or use a flexible mass listing import, configure listings by tweaking over 45 properties, create an unlimited number of listing features, filters, options, and categories. You can attach downloadable files to the listing: instructions, agreements, sketches—clients can download them right from the listing page. Your vendors can do all this as well. | ✅ Call requests To simplify the ordering process for clients, your sellers can get incoming requests. When a client clicks the call request button on a listing page, a new order with the “Awaiting call” status is created for the service provider. |
| ✅ Customer-to-vendor communication Connect your marketplace customers with providers so that the latter could answer the customer’s questions about the service and arrange it. With the Customer-to-Vendor Communication function, customers can send a message to providers right from the listing page. | ✅ Vendor locations Allow service providers to set their locations on your service marketplace, so that they could receive more orders from local clients. The Vendor Locations function allows you to display a map in your marketplace with all the providers in the chosen location, enable filtering by distance from the customer’s location, show nearby providers on the marketplace homepage, and more. The Vendor Locations function allows clients to easily find nearest providers. |
| ✅ Comments and reviews Reviews are crucial for any business that cares about its reputation. Buyer reviews help providers on a service marketplace get fair credit and earn a good image in customers’ opinion. Reviews influence providers’ and thus your income directly. Multi-Vendor offers the feedback and review system with an interactive star rating. Customers can comment and rate providers, services, categories, and more. Only a marketplace admin can moderate provider reviews |
2. Minimum Viable Product
Launching an online service marketplace can cost you thousands of dollars. If you’re not sure that you will 100% succeed with your marketplace project, you won’t be ready to spend that amount of money for sure. We wouldn’t
As our clients say, CS-Cart Multi-Vendor has a perfect price/functionality ratio, which means you can quickly launch a fully functioning eCommerce marketplace without spending a lot of money. Our Multi-Vendor software is a perfect solution to test MVP.
3. Scalability
So, you’ve tested MVP and looks like your marketplace has great potential (of course it does!). Eventually, it will grow and you will probably need to adapt it to your changing business strategy.
Thanks to open source code and tons of ready-made add-ons, you can scale your Multi-Vendor marketplace vertically, horizontally, or how you need it. CS-Cart Multi-Vendor is very flexible and extremely scalable, which is confirmed by our clients.
4. Support
You won’t be left behind after you buy CS-Cart Multi-Vendor. Our support team of professionals will always be at your disposal at the launch and after it. You will get 90 days of free technical support and you’ll be able to get assistance any time after these initial 90 days. Our support team will help you set up your marketplace, maintain, and upgrade it.
Of course, this is just a small part of all the default functionality that Multi-Vendor can offer for your service marketplace. Request the demo to explore all the functions.
Some Successful Service Marketplaces Built on CS-Cart Multi-Vendor
Service-focused marketplaces are the second popular business model after retail and there are hundreds of awesome marketplaces out there. We picked these three to show you.
Marry.vn
Marry.vn is a service marketplace in Vietnam. They offer wedding services: ideas, organization, planning, and everything. This is the largest website in Vietnam for wedding planning. Here, you can order wedding promotion, plan, find some cool wedding ideas, choose a restaurant, manage your guests, hire a professional for wedding preparations and related jobs, and whatnot. Over 8,000 wedding services providers are at your disposal here.
Rento
This is a service marketplace from Ukraine, on which clients can rent musical instruments, equipment for shows, building implements, and order other services. There are currently about 1,000 items for rent and services for ordering.
ComfortCar.pl
Comfort Car is a car booking service marketplace in Poland. They have worked in this industry for 10 years and rent out over 150,000 cars. In 2009 they started with 5 cars and now their car fleet counts more than 500 vehicles. They have departments in all the big cities of Poland: Warsaw, Krakov, Katowice, Poznan, Gdansk, and others.
Yan Anderson is the Head of Content Marketing at CS-Cart with over 10 years of experience in the eCommerce industry. He's passionate about explaining complicated things in simple terms. Yan has expertise in building, running and growing eCommerce marketplaces. He loves to educate people about best practices, new technologies, and trends in the global eCommerce industry.