Bring buyers and sellers together

A marketplace is software that lets many sellers trade with many buyers, and takes a fee for making it easy and safe. The sellers might be shops, farmers, cleaners, tutors or wholesalers; the buyers might be households, traders or businesses. The platform owns neither the stock nor the work. It owns the trust and the transaction.

That makes a marketplace different from an online store. A store has one seller and one price list. A marketplace needs a way for many sellers to join and be checked, a way for buyers to compare them, a way to agree a deal, and a way to split every payment between the platform and the seller.

A marketplace works when a buyer who arrives finds what they need quickly, and a seller who joins gets enough work to stay. Everything we build serves those two moments.

Every new marketplace faces the same problem: buyers won’t come without sellers, and sellers won’t come without buyers. The answer is to win one side first, usually the side that is harder to find, and to win it by hand.

In Austin, cleaners, plumbers and electricians were signed up and checked before the launch, so every area had pros ready on the day customers could book. In Nashik, the farmer producer company’s field staff registered farmers, verified their bank accounts and helped with the first listing.

So the first version of your marketplace often includes tools for that side alone: an easy sign-up, a seller app that works on a basic phone, and an admin your team uses to onboard sellers in person. Buyers come once there is something worth finding.

How buyers and sellers agree a deal is the heart of your marketplace, and it differs by market. Fixed prices suit products and simple services. Upfront prices worked out from a few answers suit jobs such as cleaning, priced by bedrooms, bathrooms and extras. Quotes suit work that needs a look first. Open bids suit produce, scrap or anything sold by lot, where the price is found on the day.

Automatic matching suits requests that need someone now. A job is offered to available sellers who cover that area and service, highest-rated first, and the first to accept takes it. If nobody accepts in time, it lands on your team’s board to place by hand.

Many marketplaces use more than one: fixed prices for standard items, quotes for the rest. We design the rules with you and test them on real deals before launch.

Payments are where marketplaces most often go wrong, so we use products built for them. Abroad that usually means Stripe Connect; in India, Razorpay Route or a similar split-payment product from a payment provider.

The buyer pays once, by card, UPI or whatever your market uses. The provider splits the payment: your commission stays with the platform, and the seller’s share is paid to their bank account, at once, on a schedule, or only when the job is marked complete. Refunds, cancellations and partial payments follow rules you set.

Sellers see what they earned, what was deducted and when they will be paid. Your team sees every payment, fee and payout, matched to the order, and finance gets reports that agree with the bank.

Trust is what buyers pay a marketplace for. It starts before the first sale: identity and bank checks for every seller, plus whatever your market needs, such as a GST number, a trade licence, insurance or a background check through a specialist provider, with the seller’s consent.

During the deal, buyers and sellers talk through masked numbers or in-app chat, and the seller records what was done, with a checklist or before-and-after photos where it helps. Afterwards, both sides rate each other, and only real orders can leave a review.

When something goes wrong, your team opens the order and sees its messages, photos, prices and every status change in one place. Rules for refunds, cancellations and no-shows are written down and applied the same way for everyone.

Buyers, sellers and your team each need software built for them. Buyers want to search, compare and pay in a few taps, usually on a phone, sometimes on a website they found through search. Sellers want to see new requests or orders, accept them, find the address, record the work and see what they will be paid. Your team wants to approve sellers, settle disputes and see the whole market at once.

So a marketplace is usually three products: a buyer app or website, a seller app and a web admin. Sellers often work on low-cost Android phones with patchy signal, so their app has to be light, quick and forgiving offline; in Nashik, listings and photos wait on the phone until a signal returns.

The admin is where the market is run: categories, service areas, fees, payout rules, refunds and reports. New cities and categories are switched on there, not in a new release.

A marketplace takes on duties that a single store does not. In India, platforms collect TCS under GST and deduct TDS under income tax on sellers’ sales, and the e-commerce rules expect the seller’s details and a grievance officer to be shown to buyers.

Elsewhere the duties differ. In the United States, platforms send year-end tax forms to the people they pay, as the Austin marketplace does for its pros. In the European Union, platforms report sellers’ income to the tax authorities.

We build the records and reports these rules need into the platform from the start: seller tax details, deductions on every payout, and statements sellers can download. Your accountant and lawyer confirm exactly what applies to your model, and the system follows their answer.

We need to understand your market better than anyone else does. Who are the sellers, how do they work today, and what would make them switch? Who are the buyers, and what do they find hard? We usually spend time with both before designing anything.

We also need your rules: your commission, when sellers are paid, what checks a seller must pass, how disputes are decided, and what happens when someone cancels. And the accounts that stay in your name: the payment provider, which checks your business before it pays out, any check or messaging providers, the app store accounts and the domain.

Most of all, we need someone on your side who runs the market day to day and can bring the first sellers on board.

A marketplace is healthy when requests turn into deals quickly, and people on both sides come back. Before launch we agree a few measures: how many buyer requests or searches end in a deal, how long a match takes, how many sellers stay active each month, how many buyers return, and how much the platform earns per deal after payment fees.

We read them by city and category, because a marketplace grows one area at a time. They show where to act: a category with buyers but too few sellers, a city where matches take too long, or a step in sign-up where sellers give up.

A marketplace grows by adding sellers, categories and places where it already works. We run it with you: new categories and cities switched on from the admin, search and matching tuned on real data, new pricing or payout rules as your model develops, and new apps or features when one side needs them.

Each month we look at the measures together and pick the next change. Often the most useful work is the least visible: a shorter sign-up for sellers, a better first search result for buyers, or a payout that arrives a day sooner.