Revolve marketplace case study: book a demo to start yours
Revolve is a well-known online fashion store that provides a diverse range of stylish clothing, accessories, and beauty items from a variety of brands. If you’d like to start your own marketplace like Revolve, 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?
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 Revolve marketplace case study
Revolve is a prominent multi-vendor marketplace that has revolutionized the fashion retail industry by blending technology and trendy fashion offerings. Founded in 2003 by Michael Karanikolas and Mike Karanikolas, Revolve’s success story stems from its strategic fusion of digital innovation, influencer marketing, and a comprehensive understanding of consumer preferences.
Unlike traditional retailers, Revolve strategically leveraged social media influencers to showcase its fashion line, utilizing their immense follower base to model and promote selections from the marketplace. This ingenious tactic significantly contributed to the company’s exponential growth and market presence.
The marketplace offers a diverse range of clothing, accessories, and beauty products, curating a stylish and trendy selection that resonates with its predominantly young and fashion-forward audience. With its strategic positioning and commitment to staying on top of the latest trends, Revolve has become a go-to destination for individuals seeking unique and up-to-date fashion choices.
Revolve’s innovative approach isn’t solely reliant on influencers but also capitalizes on technological advancements. The marketplace implements robust tech strategies to enhance the shopping experience, focusing on areas like user-friendly interfaces, personalized recommendations, and efficient logistics.
This tech-savvy approach has translated into impressive results for Revolve, including a 3.2% lift in checkout conversion, 4% higher revenue, and a significant 30% increase in conversion rates, showcasing the efficacy of their strategies compared to the control group.
How to emulate Revolve marketplace success?
For a success similar to Revolve’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?
