Made Trade is an online marketplace committed to ethical shopping, featuring a handpicked assortment of sustainable and handcrafted products such as apparel, home furnishings, and accessories, all while advocating for fair trade and supporting eco-friendly brands and artisans.
If you’d like to start your own marketplace like Made Trade, 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?
Employing open-source technology has its perks, including outright ownership and developmental flexibility, but these come at a substantial price. The journey to build a complete marketplace solution is lengthy and financially demanding, often stretching over months or years. This knowledge comes from our involvement in numerous marketplace projects.
Unless you’ve acquired a considerable sum in funding, it’s advised to opt for an established, comprehensive marketplace solution like Vendo, a suggestion from an individual experienced in charging clients for marketplace development services.
Back to the Made Trade marketplace case study
Made Trade is a unique online store known for its commitment to ethical and eco-friendly practices. They focus on products that are not only beautiful but also meet high ethical standards.
Also they offer a wide range of items, from clothing to home goods and children’s products. What makes Made Trade special is their careful selection process, where each product must align with at least two of their core values, such as Fair Trade, Handcrafted, or Sustainable Materials. This approach reflects their dedication to fairness, sustainability, and openness.
From a business standpoint, Made Trade made significant improvements to enhance the customer experience. They added various payment options, switched to Shopify for their website, and improved the user interface to make shopping more accessible and engaging.
Made Trade’s success can be attributed to a few key factors. Their unwavering commitment to ethical selection ensures that all products sold align with their values. They also actively promote products from BIPOC and Women Owned brands, showcasing their dedication to diversity and inclusion. Furthermore, their emphasis on sustainability, using eco-friendly materials and minimizing environmental impact, is a vital part of their business model.
Made Trade isn’t just about selling products; it’s about building a community and promoting conscious consumption. They empower artisans and ensure fair labor practices, making them more than just a marketplace; they are a platform for positive change.
How to emulate Made Trade marketplace success?
Emulating Made Trade’s success requires considering a quick launch of your marketplace, ideally in weeks, not months. It’s essential to match your product selection with your audience’s preferences and continually adapt your customer attracting strategies based on actual outcomes.
Make sure to test the market before you invest in building it from scratch.
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?
