What the words actually mean.

A marketplace is a platform where two groups who do not know each other transact, and the platform takes a cut. It is three pieces of software, not one: an app for the side that buys, an app for the side that sells or works, and a console where the operator sets prices, resolves disputes and sees the money. Most founders underestimate the third.

Marketplace app development · Marketplace operations answers

A two-sided market is one where each side is worth more to the platform when the other side grows. Riders are worth little without restaurants; restaurants leave without riders. This is why a marketplace cannot be launched half-built on both sides at once, and why most launches start by serving one side properly first.

Launching one side first

The chicken-and-egg problem is a marketplace with nobody on either side, because neither side will join before the other. It is the most common reason a technically finished marketplace fails. It is answered by operations rather than software: seed one side by hand, or serve one side as a plain service until the other side is worth joining.

Launching one side first

A network effect is when a platform gets more useful to each user as more users join. It is what makes a mature marketplace hard to displace and an empty one hard to start. It is also why marketplace software has to survive growth it does not have yet: the design that works for fifty providers is not the one that works for five thousand.

Multi-vendor means many independent sellers on one storefront, each with their own listings, stock, orders and payouts. It differs from a single-vendor shop in the parts nobody sees: a seller's own dashboard, split payments, per-seller commission, and returns that route to the right seller rather than to you.

Multi-vendor ecommerce development

Single vendor means you own everything sold on the platform. There is one seller, so there are no payouts, no seller onboarding, no commission and no disputes between two parties you both serve. It is a materially smaller build than a marketplace, which is why it is the first of the five questions we ask.

How we work

The gig economy is work bought and sold in single jobs rather than by employment. For a platform this is a legal question before it is a technical one: whether the people doing the work are your workers or independent providers changes what the app must record, how payouts work, and what the platform answers for. It varies by country.

Home services

Escrow means the platform holds the customer's payment until the work is done, then releases it to the provider. It protects customers from paying for a job that never happens, and providers from working unpaid. It also changes what the platform is: once you hold other people's money, the rules that apply to you are financial rules, not software rules.

Who holds the money · Payments and payouts answers

A payment gateway is the service that takes the card or account payment. One that handles a simple checkout well may be unable to pay a provider afterwards, which is a different job with different rules. Which gateway suits a platform depends on the country it operates in and on whether money has to move back out to providers.

Payments and payouts answers · Regions and payment rails

A payout is money leaving the platform to a provider, seller or rider. It is the half of payments founders forget to budget for, and it is harder than taking money: it needs verified identity, a bank or wallet the provider actually has, a schedule, a record for tax, and a plan for when it fails. Availability differs sharply by country.

Who holds the money

Commission is the platform's cut of a transaction — a percentage, a fixed amount, or a different rate per category. It belongs in the console, not in the code, so that it can change when the market changes without a developer and a new app release. Where the platform holds the money, commission comes off before the provider is paid.

Marketplace operations answers

KYC is checking that a person or business is who they claim to be before money moves. Payment providers require it of anyone receiving payouts, so it is not optional on a marketplace that pays providers. It adds a step to provider sign-up that will lose you some providers, which is a reason to design that step carefully rather than to skip it.

Payments and payouts answers

A chargeback is a customer asking their bank to reverse a payment. On a marketplace the awkward question is who loses the money when it happens after the provider has been paid — the platform, the provider, or neither. Deciding that before launch, and writing it into the terms and the console, is cheaper than deciding it during an argument.

Payments and payouts answers

Strong customer authentication is a legal requirement in the UK and EU for the payer to prove who they are on many online payments, usually through a prompt in their bank app. It affects the checkout design, saved cards and repeat charges, so it belongs in the plan rather than in a fix after the first failed payment.

Regions and payment rails

Payment rails are the routes money actually travels in a given country — cards, bank transfer, mobile money, cash on delivery. A marketplace that works in London and one that works in Abidjan differ mostly here. Choosing the rails is one of the five questions, because it decides the gateway, the payout design and sometimes the business model.

Regions and payment rails

A phase is a block of work that ends in software you can open. Each one is priced before it starts and paid for on its own. Phase 01 is scope and price at a fixed fee; phase 02 is the first working version. A phase is a decision, not an obligation — you can stop after any of them and keep everything built so far.

How we work · Timelines and phases

Scope is the written record of what is being built, and — the part that does the work — a named list of what is not. It is produced in a fixed-fee phase of about a week, before any price for the build exists. Without it every estimate is a guess, and every disagreement later is about whose memory is right.

How we work

Scope creep is a build quietly growing after it was priced. It is the usual cause of a project that is permanently three weeks from finished. Pricing per phase contains it: new work is not refused, it is scoped and priced as the next phase, so the cost of a change is visible at the moment the change is asked for.

Timelines and phases

An MVP is the smallest version of a platform a real user can complete a real transaction on. It is not a demo and not a prototype: if money cannot change hands, it has not tested the thing that matters. We call it the first working version, because “minimum” is the word that tempts people to cut the part that proves the business.

How long it takes

The console is the web application the operator runs the business from: commission, categories, disputes, refunds, provider approval, payouts and the numbers. It is the piece founders leave out of their own descriptions and the piece they use every day. A marketplace without one is a marketplace where every change needs a developer.

Internal business tools

White label means an existing platform resold under your name and colours. It is faster and cheaper to start, and it is somebody else's product: what it does is what it does, the roadmap is theirs, and the parts that make your business different are usually the parts you cannot change.

Custom marketplace vs Sharetribe

Source code ownership is who may keep, change and re-sell the software after it is built. On our builds it transfers to the client on full payment, with the repository, the accounts and the documents needed to hand it to another team. Ask any supplier this question in writing before the first payment, not after the last one.

Ownership and handover

Cross-platform means one codebase producing both the iOS and the Android app. For almost every marketplace it is the right choice: the same screens, built and changed once instead of twice. Native — a separate app for each — earns its extra cost only where hardware or performance demands it.

Flutter vs native · Technology choices

Flutter is Google's toolkit for building iOS and Android apps from one codebase, and it is what we build marketplace apps in. It draws its own interface rather than borrowing the system's, which is why a Flutter app looks identical on both platforms — an advantage for a branded marketplace, and a trade-off worth knowing about.

Flutter vs native

A native app is written specifically for one platform, in that platform's own language. Two native apps mean two codebases, two teams' worth of work and two of every change. It buys the closest possible fit to the operating system, which matters for a small number of apps and for very few marketplaces.

Flutter vs native

An API is the agreed way one piece of software asks another for something. It is how your platform talks to a payment gateway, a map, an SMS service or an accounting system. When a founder asks whether the platform can connect to a tool, the answer depends entirely on whether that tool has an API and on what it permits.

Technology choices

A push notification is a message the platform sends to a phone while the app is closed. On a marketplace it is not a marketing feature, it is the mechanism: a job offered to a provider, an order accepted, a rider arriving. Reliability matters more than volume, and both app stores treat promotional pushes differently from transactional ones.

Geolocation is the platform knowing where a person or vehicle is. It drives matching by distance, live tracking on a map, and proof that a job happened where it was meant to. It is also among the most expensive things a phone can do to a battery, so how often a location is taken is a design decision with a real cost.

Logistics and fleet software

A point of sale system is the software a shop takes payment on. Connected to a marketplace it stops the two halves of a business disagreeing: stock sold at the counter disappears from the app, and an order taken in the app is one the counter can see.

POS and retail systems

Technical debt is work postponed to ship sooner, and the interest is paid in every later change. Some of it is a sound decision taken knowingly. The dangerous kind is the sort nobody wrote down, which is why each phase ends with the documents as well as the software.

App store review is Apple's and Google's check before an app is published or updated, and it can reject a build for reasons that have nothing to do with whether it works. Marketplaces meet this more than most apps: payments, user-generated content, account deletion and privacy policies are all common grounds for rejection.

After launch answers

Maintenance is the work a live platform needs that is not new features: operating system updates that break things, payment providers changing their rules, app store policy changes, and the bugs only real use finds. It is not optional on a platform handling money, and the agreed period and price are set in the scope.

After launch answers

GDPR is the UK and EU law governing personal data: what you may collect, why, how long you keep it, and what a person can require you to do with it. A marketplace holds unusually sensitive combinations — identity, location, payment and message history — so the obligations are real, and they apply from the first user rather than the thousandth.

Privacy

Handover is the moment a platform stops depending on the people who built it: the repository, the accounts, the environment variables, the deployment process and the documents, transferred and then checked by somebody else opening them. A handover nobody outside the build has tested is a claim rather than a handover.

Ownership and handover