Rise Market is an e-commerce platform that focuses on providing a diverse selection of sustainable and eco-conscious products, simplifying the process of making environmentally friendly shopping decisions for everyday necessities.
If you’d like to start your own marketplace like Rise Market, 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 Rise Market marketplace case study
Rise Market quickly became a strong player in the growing world of online shopping, which has been changing a lot lately. The global online shopping market is expected to grow by 9.4% in 2024, and Rise Market has been smart in taking advantage of this by being flexible and clever in using online markets.
Online markets are digital platforms where many different sellers can list and sell products, and they are an important part of today’s shopping world.
Rise Market’s way of doing things matches what makes online markets successful. They have lots of products from different sellers, a variety of things to buy, and customer reviews, which make shopping better and create trust. Big companies like Amazon get about 4.8 billion visits each month as of April 2023, showing how big and important these platforms are.
It’s a good choice because it’s not very risky and it’s easy for new businesses to join, especially with so many people using these platforms. But there are challenges too. Rise Market, like other similar companies, has to find a way to stand out in a very competitive market.
There are a lot of sellers on these platforms, so it’s hard to be different. Also, when you work in this way, you can’t control everything about how customers feel, and your brand might not be as important as the platform’s brand.
Still, Rise Market has done well. They use technology and good logistics to make sure everything works smoothly, and customers are happy. They also use promotions and make sure sellers are active in the marketplace, which has helped them get more sellers and become a trustworthy and lively marketplace.
How to emulate Rise Market marketplace success?
Emulating Rise Market’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?
