Building a Market Place on WordPress or a Hosted Platform

You want to create a market place.

This idea popped into my head this morning after chatting with you yesterday. That chat lead to this idea that was stewing in the back of my head. After saying “sure, let’s build a market place site” I then started Googling “marketplace plugin for WordPress” and I found this post by Chris Lema.

I read the post and then I read the comments and that led down another alley of “market place platforms” and I found Share Tribe in the comments.

So what platform should you build your Market Place on?

I don’t know the answer to that question but here are 3 solutions for WordPress and 1 hosted solution that I found so far.

Hosted Market Place Platforms

The only one I looked at was the one I found in the comments. Sharetribe is a purpose built platform specifically for making a Market Place site that you can use to connect buyers and sellers. An example site built on their platform is StudioTime.io

Pricing of Sharetribe. They have a “hobby” site for 100 users at $79.00 per month but it retains their branding. I would go with the $119 a month plan (6 month commitment) because it removes the branding on your site.

Side note:

What is a Market Place? An easy answer is to think eBay, Etsy, Custom Made, AirBNB,  hell even Amazon is a Market Place.

WordPress Market Place Plugins

1 EDD Market Place Bundle (not in order of importance)

Chris Lema posted about this package from Easy Digital Downloads Bundle (this is Chris Lema’s Affiliate Link, i want a cut). The package is $499. That’s a cheap price to get started technically compared to having someone build this. I’ve used some of Pippins Plugins and they are cool. But I haven’t used them in a while and I’m not motivated to buy this for $500 bucks and have no idea how it will even work. Chris also mention a theme called Marketify to go with the bundle. I didn’t bother looking at it. If I did this for you I would probably go the beaver builder route.

2 Dokan

This one looks pretty cool. I haven’t done really any testing or even played with their demo. But there is a free version to try and that is really enticing. Then the Pro version for more features is $199. It does appear I would need to buy extra add-ons to get features I want like Stripe integration

This one piqued my interest over the others here.

3 WC Marketplace

This plugin allows vendors to create individual stores, manage their inventories and shipping while you can earn commission on their sales. YES, WC Marketplace makes your e-commerce a hassle-free experience. It looks like an interesting product. It’s based on WooCommerce and I don’t know if that makes a difference

4 WC Vendors

Free version and a Pro version. I can’t say anything bad about it because I haven’t used it. But there was nothing on their site that gave me any interest to even look at it more

WordPress all inclusive themes?

I wasn’t even thinking about this but when I was looking for the links above I found WP Jobster. Their site says that WPJobster theme has been developed from the ground up and maintained by the people who run a successful marketplace of their own.

I am going to have to Research WP Jobster more. The price is right to experiment at $98 but it looks like the $350 dollar plan would be the point where you want extra features (payment gateways)

This could also go under Hosted Market Place Platforms because they do have an option to host it for you if you contact them.

I found this review at WP Dean it has some dashboard screen shots.

What should you build your Market Place on?

I cant answer the question for you at this time because this is just a brain dump of ideas.

Right now the top choice for me is not a WordPress solution but the hosted platform Share Tribe. I’m trying it now because it has a 30 day no questions asked no credit card needed trial period.

Disclaimer
Some of the links in all posts may be affiliate links, which means I may get a commission if you end up purchasing their product or service. You will never pay more by using my link compared to what you would pay if you went directly to their website; in fact you may receive an exclusive discount. And it helps me keep the site running!

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Loren Nason

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