Credo is a beauty and skincare vendor recognized for its dedication to clean, eco-friendly, and ethically produced goods, providing a diverse selection of cosmetics, skincare products, and wellness items that prioritize environmental and ethical integrity.
If you’d like to start your own marketplace like Credo, you’re facing a buy vs build decision. So before you decide to build it in-house on top of Spree open-source, consider using Vendo which is a marketplace SaaS. Go live, start selling, iterate.
Build vs Buy a marketplace?
Open-source has its share of advantages, like total ownership and the freedom to customize. Yet, these perks often involve considerable costs. Developing a complete marketplace solution is a time-consuming and expensive task, usually taking months or years, as we have learned from multiple marketplace projects.
If your funding isn’t huge, it’s more practical to use a pre-built, all-in-one marketplace solution like Vendo, advice from a person who has extensive experience in billing for marketplace development work.
Back to the Credo marketplace case study
Credo, which started in 2013, is a place where companies, especially those in online selling, software services, and business-to-business industries, can find trustworthy digital marketing experts. This platform has grown a lot, getting tens of thousands of visitors every month. This quick growth caused problems with their old hosting service, so they switched to a managed WordPress host called Kinsta.
Creating a marketplace like Credo means making two connected businesses: one for getting customers and one for getting experts. This makes growing the business a bit tricky. At first, Credo focused on both sides equally to see if there was a market for it.
As Credo grew, they started to focus more on getting good experts, especially those who offer top-notch services and charge more than $1000 per month or at least $100 per hour. This makes Credo different from cheaper marketplaces.
In the third phase of Credo’s growth, they concentrated on getting more customers. This phase is important because it’s not just about keeping the experts busy but also finding new ones as the market changes.
A big challenge in this phase is making sure that the leads they get match the experts’ skills and that they are good leads. This is important for making sure the business keeps making money and growing. Since it started, Credo has helped thousands of businesses find the right marketing partners.
Their success is because they have a strict process for checking digital marketing experts. They go through a 3-step and 28-point check before they can join Credo. This way, businesses can trust that they will work with good SEO and digital marketing experts, increasing the chances of a successful partnership.
How to emulate Credo marketplace success?
In pursuit of success like Credo’s, contemplate setting up your marketplace promptly, in a few weeks rather than waiting months. It’s vital to test how well your product catalog meets your audience’s needs and revise your customer acquisition tactics according to real results.
Initially, test the market before investing heavily in building it.
Here’s what you’d be getting with a Vendo free trial:
- Book a marketplace demo call: We’ll set up your demo marketplace and populate it with products, so you could give it a try and start selling in 14 days
- Customize your Storefront: Use the drag & drop page builder or custom CSS
- Onboard Brands: Invite your brands or choose brands from our catalog
- Select Products: Curate products and collections manually or automate it
- Embed products: Make your content, newsletters, social media shoppable
- Get Paid: Get paid as soon as products are shipped by the brands
- End-to-end automation: Brands sync, fulfillment, payouts, invoicing, taxes
When you’ve tried all that and it works, start thinking about building your own, custom-made marketplace project based on Spree Commerce. First, by decoupling the storefront and going headless with Vendo marketplace API, and later with your own backend, if you decide you really need it. Just lift and shift the storefront.
Nobody has to know what’s under the hood, right?
