How To Create A Profitable Marketplace Website

Aggregators are increasingly pushing company websites out of search results and will continue to do so in the future – the reason is higher behavioral indicators and successful closing of user intent. The marketplace software development company allows you not only to find but to compare and choose.

Often this is not just a site catalog of organizations or products, but a whole thematic portal that contains a large amount of various information on a specific niche. We maintain that in the future, thematic aggregators will be much more successful due to greater elaboration and level of expertise. That is, a specialized dental portal is likely to provide the user with more necessary information than a general medical one, and an aggregator of educational organizations for children, for example, will be much more meaningful than just a city directory of organizations.

There are still many niches in the Russian segment of the Internet in which aggregators can take root well. But to start the aggregator and not burn out, you need to do a lot of preparatory work and consider many subtleties. We will talk about our approach to work and list all the important points that should be considered when planning and creating an aggregator.

How will it be monetized?

We advise you to answer this question first – even before planning the development and promotion. To create a successful project, you need to immediately think about how it will bring you profit. From the point of view of the owner of the aggregator, there are two groups of people for whom you make a resource: users (site visitors) and partners (those who post their offers).

There are several ways to monetize an aggregator:

• payment for accommodation
• payment for priority accommodation
• payment for applications/calls
• sales commission
• advertising placements
• banner advertising
• native advertising

To determine how to monetize, answer the following questions:

• What do you offer a partner?
• Why should you host it?
• What benefits will he get?

It is best to place an offer with benefits immediately on the site, so be sure to include a cooperation page in the terms of reference – at first, you will most likely need to run ads on it to attract partners.

How do attract traffic?

It is also better to think over the marketing plan before the start of development by Peiko in order to plan the budget and predict when the project will be able to start making the first profit and reach self-sufficiency. It is best to draw up a project roadmap so that you have an understanding of when you can launch the project, at least in the minimum viable version.

The main source of traffic for aggregators is usually search engines, but at the first stages, it is unlikely that you will be able to do without paid traffic. Many sites that have already become popular continue to actively use paid traffic.

How to think about structure?

To write a full-fledged technical task, you need to answer the question: “Why does the user need this site?”.

To get started, just write down everything that an abstract user can find and do on your site – the more, the better. This will be the starting point for your project. After that, you have to leave only what is in demand on the Internet. To achieve this, we collect the semantics of the future project.

Now that we can make a list of pages, we need to work out their structure and content.

• Who is your user?
• What is he looking for?
• By what criteria does he chooses?
• What are his problems, objections, and concerns?
• What might motivate him to choose/purchase?

If you do not immediately decide how your new product will be better than those already on the market, then in the future it will be extremely difficult for you to step over them. Without a USP, your news aggregator will be doomed to become one of a bunch of sites in the SERP, even if you enter a niche without competitors – don’t you think that only you have a bright head with brilliant ideas?

At the output, you should get a list of pages that will be on the site, and a list of blocks and elements for each page.

After that, you can write terms of reference – a document that will reflect the structure of the future project. Having a clear TOR on hand, you will save time searching for a contractor and agreeing on the cost of development. Many do not want to bother, but simply throw off an example or ask “How much will it cost to make a site like AliExpress?”. As they say, what a question, such an answer.

How to optimize your site for search engines?

If you plan to get traffic from search engines, you must immediately make a website that search engines will like. Before starting work on the aggregator, we collect search queries by which it will be promoted. This allows you to immediately create pages that will be indexed and immediately provide for the closure of indexing pages with zero queries (this is done to save search engine crawling budget). Thanks to special services, we analyze competitors and find out what pages are on their sites and how useful they are for the user. As a result of such deep analytics, we get a list of important blocks and elements that must be on our new project. Usually, there are thousands and even millions of pages on aggregators, and to make search engines index them all, it is necessary to make each page of the highest quality and meet user needs.