Verishop is an online shopping platform that provides a convenient and curated selection of products spanning fashion, beauty, home decor, and electronics. If you’d like to start your own marketplace like Verishop 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 Verishop marketplace case study
Verishop, a creative social shopping platform, started a big change by launching two new brands, Billie and Lett. They had a tight six-week deadline to make two different online stores using Shopify Plus for New York Fashion Week.
Their aim was to make a stylish design that works well on mobile phones. They wanted to show off their curated collections with high-quality pictures that people could buy right from the homepage. They also wanted to make it easy to filter products.
To do this, they made the homepage into a special shopping experience. Most websites use the homepage to lead you to other parts of the site, but Billie and Lett let you see and buy all their products right from the homepage. They also added features like changing colors and sizes when you hover over products and a direct button to add items to your cart.
They chose Shopify Plus because it’s quick to set up and easy to manage after it’s launched. This way, Verishop could focus on fashion and not get stuck in technical problems.
They connected the websites to many other systems. They used StitchLabs for managing products and orders, Segment Analytics to track data, Klaviyo for email marketing, and Zendesk to help customers. Verishop is all about influencers and cool people, so they used Instagram and Pinterest a lot for ads and selling.
They liked Instagram so much that they put a special section on the homepage to show popular posts from there. This helped them become fashion influencers quickly.
The project was a big success. In less than six weeks, Guidance made two unique online stores for Billie and Lett using Shopify Plus. These stores looked modern and were inspired by social media. The homepage was made to be easy to shop on, and you could quickly find the products you liked in different colors and sizes.
How to emulate Verishop marketplace success?
If you’re aspiring for success similar to Verishop, plan to open your marketplace swiftly, preferably in weeks instead of months. Examine the compatibility of your product offerings with your audience’s demands, and adapt your customer acquisition techniques based on tangible outcomes.
It’s wise to gauge the market’s potential before fully investing in its development.
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?
