Sourcerie marketplace case study: book a demo to start yours

Leveraging a community-powered approach and sophisticated algorithm, Sourcerie provides tailored beauty product recommendations by analyzing user reviews and specific consumer profiles in its unique beauty marketplace.

If you’d like to start your own marketplace like Sourcerie, 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 Sourcerie marketplace case study

Sourcerie, a personalized beauty marketplace, shows how technology can change traditional industries. Founded by Kristin Cardwell and Alex Beyer, who have backgrounds in technology and beauty, Sourcerie came from their own experiences with skin issues, like eczema, which was important in making their platform.

Sourcerie’s success is because of its community-driven approach, using over 300,000 user reviews. This helps their personalized recommendation engine match brands and products to more than three billion different user profiles effectively.

Their recommendation engine is special because it suggests products based on your specific needs, skin type, age, goals, sensitivity, and worries, with a high accuracy rate of over 90%.

Sourcerie is also inclusive, bringing together many online stores, brands, and retailers to meet various user needs, including different skin types, tones, and conditions. The beauty club gives members exclusive discounts and free product releases, making the user experience better.

The founders’ vision and strategy were crucial for Sourcerie’s success. They focused on solving problems instead of having a fixed solution, along with getting £1.8 million in pre-startup funding to build a strong team and launch the platform.

Sourcerie has a big impact on the beauty industry, making shopping easier and helping consumers make informed choices with data-driven personalization. This addresses a real need in the beauty market, where consumers often have too many choices and not enough guidance.

For entrepreneurs looking to follow Sourcerie’s success, there are key lessons. Identify a real problem and be passionate about solving it. Use community data to create a personalized experience, be inclusive, and have a problem-solving mindset. Lastly, get funding to build the technology and team you need.

How to emulate Sourcerie marketplace success?

To get success like Sourcerie, it’s advisable to initiate your marketplace in a matter of weeks, not months. Look into how your product catalog aligns with your target audience’s needs and adjust your customer acquisition approach based on real-life feedback.

It’s crucial to test the market before you fully invest in developing it.

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?