The W Marketplace is a digital platform dedicated to the sale of products and services from businesses owned and led by women, with a mission to empower and support female entrepreneurship.
If you’d like to start your own marketplace like The W Marketplace, 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 has its benefits, such as full ownership and the freedom to adapt, but these come with their own costs. Developing a complete marketplace solution is an extensive and costly endeavor, often taking many months or years, as learned from multiple marketplace projects.
If you haven’t secured a significant amount of funding, it’s generally more sensible to adopt a pre-built, all-encompassing marketplace solution like Vendo, as recommended by an expert with years of experience in billing for marketplace development.
Back to The W Marketplace case study
The W Marketplace plays a significant role in managing and storing data differently and is growing strategically with innovation. It’s worth noting that the global modular data center market, where The W Marketplace operates, is on an impressive growth path, going from $25.8 billion in 2023 to an estimated $81.2 billion by 2030, driven by a strong 17.8% yearly growth rate.
This growth is due to factors like the rising demand for easily expandable and energy-efficient data centers and the increasing availability of data center colocation facilities worldwide. These factors show how the market is adapting to new technology and environmental needs.
The modular data center market, where The W Marketplace operates, is highly flexible, offering various solutions for different industries. For example, all-in-one modules combine cooling, power, and IT systems into one efficient containerized facility, saving time and costs and being useful for disaster relief and business data management.
Additionally, specific sectors like Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) are quickly embracing modular data center solutions for reliable, cost-effective, and energy-efficient data management. As BFSI handles large amounts of customer data and requires continuous financial services, the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of modular data centers like those offered by The W Marketplace are invaluable to them.
How to emulate The W Marketplace success?
If you’re looking to replicate The W Marketplace’s success, you might want to get your marketplace going sooner, in weeks rather than months. Check how your product lineup matches your audience’s interests and continually refine how you draw in customers based on real-world evidence.
Initially, test the market before investing heavily in building 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?
