HellaBlack marketplace case study: book a demo to start yours
HellaBlack Marketplace is an online platform dedicated to empowering Black-owned businesses by offering them a space to showcase and sell their products and services.
If you’d like to start your own marketplace like HellaBlack, 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 the feature-rich Enterprise Edition cutting your time-to-market to a few weeks.
Build vs Buy a marketplace?
The use of open-source brings several advantages, such as total ownership and the ability to adapt as needed, but these benefits have their own costs. Developing a comprehensive marketplace solution is a lengthy, expensive endeavor, usually taking several months to years, as learned from various marketplace projects.
If you haven’t raised a significant amount of money, you’re much better off choosing a complete, off-the-shelf marketplace solution like Vendo, as advised by someone who has extensive experience in billing clients for marketplace development.
Back to the HellaBlack marketplace case study
The HellBlack marketplace is unique in the digital world, blending regular marketplace features with the hidden aspects of the dark web. While we don’t have exact numbers for HellBlack, we can gain insights from the broader dark web marketplaces.
A study in Scientific Reports revealed the massive scale of these dark web marketplaces, with 133,308,118 transactions involving 38,886,758 users. 8,377,478 distinct users interacted directly with a dark marketplace, showing how far-reaching these platforms are.
The transactions involving dark marketplaces totaled 4.21 billion US dollars, and dark marketplaces themselves received 1.99 billion US dollars. Despite occasional closures, the number of dark marketplaces has stayed relatively stable since 2014.
Additionally, the total weekly volume in these marketplaces grew steadily until the end of 2019, and they quickly bounced back from unexpected closures, usually within 9 days.
Another study looked at various items found on dark web markets. Payment card data was the most common item, highlighting how easily such information can be compromised. Crypto wallets and account login details often had higher prices than traditional bank accounts.
Prominent cryptocurrency platform accounts were particularly sought-after, averaging several hundred dollars, while passports, crucial for identity verification, fetched around 600 USD on average, with variations based on the country of origin. This data shows that dark web markets offer a wide range of illicit goods and services.
In the realm of marketplace development, K&C Consulting conducted a case study, creating a B2B marketplace for virtual gaming goods in just 3 months. They achieved this through a flexible, agile approach, using Python, Django, and Celery for backend operations, Vue.js for the frontend, and various DevOps tools for seamless deployment. This success underscores the need for adaptability in the fast-paced digital marketplace environment.
How to emulate HellaBlack marketplace success?
For a success similar to HellBlack’s, you might want to start your marketplace within weeks, not months. It’s important to see if your product catalog is what your audience is looking for and to modify your ways of attracting customers based on real results.
Test the market before you decide to fully build it yourself.
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?
