How to launch a marketplace on WordPress

Hey guys! Seems if you are here you are in the need of a wordpress marketplace theme. We are going to debate here on how to launch a marketplace on wordpress. And explain how you can launch a marketplace website using WordPress CMS. And you might want to read the article because the marketplace website business is very rich these days. Almost everyone wants to have a multi vendor marketplace website. Some of the customers want to launch b2b marketplace websites, which is probably kinda the same thing.

In a marketplace you can find almost anything like: toys, car parts, household appliances, office supplies, agricultural equipment, live stock, even live animals.. And amazon is probably the most famous marketplace website in the world. These days you can create easily with no coding skills any marketplace using wordpress cms system.

There are so many marketplace type of sites that defining all of them is quite hard. But we are going to present you a few ideas and what could be the main ones:

• car marketplace
• digital marketplace
• b2b marketplace
• rental marketplace
• NFT marketplace or crypto
• social marketplace
• affiliate marketplace

What is a marketplace website anyway ?

A marketplace website is like any regular website, only it offers the customers a way to list their products (cars, crypto, items). And the sellers will search the website and find what they need. At the end they can buy the item they are interested in, and the sellers get paid. And the website or the platform will charge a commission for providing this way for the sellers and buyers to connect. Buyers and sellers will have a place to connect and sell and buy products or services.

Through the most famous marketplace websites we can remind you: ebay, etsy, alibaba, rakuten, facebook marketplace and even walmart. Amazon in particular offers their own products but also allows other sellers to sell items on their marketplace. As opposed to ebay or etsy where the site is just hosting the platform for sellers to sell, and do not sell their own products.

Marketplace types

We can distinguish a few types of marketplaces based on the way they operate:

• The B2B marketplace, often called business to business , only for professional buyers and sellers, similar to alibaba.com
• The b2c marketplace type, intended for individual people. Here amazon is most famous
• The last one C2C marketplace, thats customer to customer, for individuals only, like Skillshare or facebook marketplace.

Further more the products sold on a marketplace can be:

• Digital products, where people sell ebooks, stock photos, software, or even services (see the case of upwork or fiverr or other marketplaces like that)
• Physical products like clothing, electronics, computer parts, vehicles

How can we launch a marketplace on WordPress ?

Most likely you will need a wordpress marketplace theme to be able to launch such a website. And there are plenty of themes out there. That is because wordpress is a very popular type of cms. And it powers over 35% of the websites in the entire world. The theme we recommend for launch a multi seller marketplace of any kind is the walleto theme for wordpress.

Why not use plugins instead of a wordpress marketplace theme ?

We will not use plugins just because using plugins, in most cases you end up combining plugins from multiple vendors. And that is bad because not everybody thinks the same. And most important not all plugins can interconnect without any flaw. In most cases you find yourself in a situation you need to hire a developer to make plugins compatible with one another. And only after that hire another developer to start working on your site itself. So you are leaving right from the start with a disadvantage.

We really recommend you go with a theme and not with a bunch of plugins from different vendors. Thats why our walleto theme is the best theme to start with. It allows you to create a multi vendor marketplace website and has all the features for the buyers and seller:

• themed dashboards
• sellers and buyers dashboards
• shopping cart
• checkout screen
• multiple payment gateways
• admin analytics and control orders
• shipping options

Checkout the walleto marketplace theme because this is a wordpress theme like etsy and if you ever need WordPress development services do not hesitate to get in touch with us and schedule a call.