When it comes to selling services, providers often turn to big and well-known marketplaces.
However, the digital market is often overly saturated, complex, and confusing, meaning it may be hard for newbie entrepreneurs to shine.
While larger marketplaces truly offer service providers greater exposure, it often makes it extremely difficult for them to find and retain the right clients.
In the following paragraphs, we’ll cover why it is important to go for a niche marketplace and how to proceed after that.
What are niche marketplaces?
Niche marketplaces are defined as sections of a larger market that target a very specific group of people and focus on providing solutions to a particular problem or interest.
For instance, within the field of online tutoring, there are many niches – middle school tutoring, high school tutoring, and college or university tutoring. Also, you can dive deeper and focus on the subjects – programming, mathematics, languages, arts, sports, etcetera.
In contrast, larger service marketplaces cover multiple categories and target different audiences. This increases the number of their competitors and makes it harder to track the quality of services.
Niche marketing also means that your advertising will be cheaper and probably more efficient since you’ll be solving a specific problem for a narrow audience.
And if you offer high-quality services your clients will trust you and will keep coming back to you. Moreover, they’ll be more likely to recommend you to their group of friends and colleagues.
However, before you start developing your business idea, you have to find the best niche for your business and you have to validate your ideas.
Otherwise, you may start your business merely to find out that it’s not as profitable as you imagined and that you’ve chosen the wrong path. You have to carefully do your research to avoid disappointments like that.
💡 Pro tip
3veta can help you quickly prototype and test your marketplace idea. See how others made it work.
How to discover your niche for an online marketplace?
Several methods could help you find an answer to the question of How to pick the right marketplace niche for your business?
If you’re starting from scratch and you have no ideas whatsoever, our suggestion is to head to Wikipedia and brainstorm.
Let’s say that you’re interested in providing math lessons. You’ll have to decide whether the lessons will take place virtually or in person, or maybe both. Then, you’ll have to decide what type of mathematics – geometry, algebra, calculus, statistics, computational maths, or something else?
It might sound trivial, but Wikipedia can inform you about all aspects of a certain field of work that you could possibly cover.
After you have a few ideas in your list, go to Google Trends and check if people are actually interested in the topic.
Make sure to pick a country and a 5-year time frame so that you can filter the results by location and see whether people’s interest remains steady over the years.
If the chart looks stable or growing, this means that people are actively searching for that on Google, therefore there’s a demand for this type of service.
How to build a niche-focused marketplace?
Marketplaces focused on specific niches can be created in many ways, depending on your expertise in web programming and budget.
Niche-focused P2P marketplaces are also called vertical marketplaces and in order to build one you can choose from the list of options below:
DIY coding edition
This option is for those who feel very confident in their programming skills and are able to write and run complex codes.
Bear in mind that service marketplaces require basic marketplace features like a solid booking system, geo-location-based listing, payment processing, multi-currency support, an e-mail reminding system, and so on.
Therefore, even if you’re an expert in the programming world, consider one of the other three options below.
Hire a team of experts
If your budget is not tight and you want full control over what is being done and how this is a possibility.
We don’t recommend it, though. It takes a huge amount of money and time to achieve the final version of your fully functional niche marketplace.
DIY with the help of a no-code marketplace solution
Essentially, you can pay a company to provide you with the most basic functionalities of a marketplace like managing communication among participants, listings, bookings, and transactions.
But as we just mentioned, that’s costly. However, you can get the same result if you use a no-code marketplace builder instead.
3veta is a great example of a fully white-label marketplace solution you can use to build, test, run and scale your business idea.
Modus Operandi of a niche marketplace
If you’re still unsure about the functions of marketplaces focused on specific niches, especially if these niches are services-oriented, here is a short scenario.
The client goes to your website, enters in the search bar what they are looking for, and adds filters (e.g. date and time slot for the service to take place, whether they prefer it to be online or in-person, etc.)
The service marketplace displays the profiles of available service providers in accordance with the client’s specifications.
The client may choose one or more of the options.
The client and the service provider can easily meet online or in a physical location.
The client may be asked to pay before or after the completion of the task but the money should be transferred to the service provider’s account only after the job is done.
With 3veta’s secure payment integration with Stripe, you can easily arrange payments between service providers and customers.
In case of any complaints, the person will be redirected to the Dispute manager.
Finally, the client may leave a positive/negative review on the website if they’d like to do so.
The why and how – answered
Creating a service niche marketplace requires a prior investigation into the business field of interest.
Factors like existing competition, customer demands, gaps in supplies, and possible niches should be taken into consideration before diving into the actual process of creating a marketplace.
However, once you figure out what your marketplace business strategy is, we can take care of the rest.
3veta offers a range of no-code white-label modules for service marketplaces. See how we can help!