Bonanza is an internet-based marketplace recognized for its varied selection of products, such as antiques, collectibles, handmade items, and others, providing a platform for sellers to showcase their Bonanza. If you’d like to start your own marketplace like Bonanza, 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?
Leveraging open-source can be advantageous, offering complete control and the freedom to customize. However, these advantages often entail significant expenses. The creation of a full-scale marketplace solution is a prolonged and costly process, typically lasting several months to years. This insight is drawn from various marketplace project experiences.
Unless you have access to substantial funding, it’s usually more prudent to go with a ready-made, all-encompassing marketplace solution like Vendo, as recommended by someone with a long history of billing for marketplace development.
Back to the Bonanza marketplace case study
Bonanza Marketplace is an online store that sells a wide variety of products from sellers around the world. It’s a big deal in the online shopping world and is known for having lots of different things for sale like clothes, stuff for your home, electronics, and things people collect. You can buy stuff directly from the sellers on the website.
What makes Bonanza special is that it’s easy to use, things are not too expensive, and it really cares about the sellers. In October 2023, they made $9,451,629, which shows how important they are in the online shopping world.
A guy named Bill Harding started Bonanza, and now it’s run by Quincy Faison, who used to work at IBM and knows a lot about making the website better. Under his leadership, Bonanza is focused on making customers happy by adding cool things to the website and using social media to make shopping more fun.
People like Bonanza because it’s easy to use, especially for sellers. They have a special tool called Background Burner that makes pictures of things look really nice without spending a lot of money. Plus, they make it simple for sellers to put their stuff on different websites, so more people can see what they’re selling.
Bonanza is good at advertising and talking to sellers. They use Instagram and TikTok to show off their stuff, and they use something called demand-side platforms to put ads where they will work best. This helps all kinds of sellers get their products to the right people.
How to emulate Bonanza marketplace success?
Aiming for Bonanza-like success, consider starting your marketplace soon, ideally within weeks, not months. Explore how your product range fits with what your customers need and keep tweaking your customer acquisition techniques based on real findings.
It’s smart to test the market before fully investing in its creation.
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?
