More than 2 billion people in the world buy goods or services online. This resulted in global e-retail sales of over 4.2 trillion dollars! And it doesn't look like it will change anytime soon.
In the US, for example, Amazon's first-quarter sales for 2022 reached more than 110 billion dollars, the majority of which were service sales.
- Walmart jumped in on the trend rather late but managed to bring together more than 100,000 sellers after a couple of years, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic.
- In the far east, Taobao and Tmall generated the world's largest gross merchandise volume (GMV) in 2020 at around 600 billion dollars each.
- And in Latin America, Mercado Libre is expected to cash in on a compound annual growth rate of about 66 percent.
Today, there are more than 150 mainstream marketplace websites worldwide, excluding even the massive ones like Amazon, eBay, and Etsy.
So how do you compete with them? Here are three tips.
#1: Identify Your Marketplace Niche for Your Online Marketplace
The first step in standing out from the competition is to know where you fit in. About 20% of small businesses fail in their first year, and a decade in, 70% will have failed.
One reason for failure is the lack of an identified niche. With the proliferation of marketplace websites nowadays, you can't fall into the trap of generalizing your approach.
Your online marketplace should have the following:
- A clear purpose.
- A defined set of offered solutions; and
- Unique selling points.
Need help with those? Start with what you excel in and what you like. Now, what you're good at may not exactly be what you're interested in, but identify areas where they overlap. For example, if you have excellent organization and coordination skills and like cars, you may want to start a marketplace website for curated travel experiences or tourist car rentals.
For example, if you have excellent organization and coordination skills and like cars, you may want to start a marketplace website for curated travel experiences or tourist car rentals.
List as many as you can and trim your list later. Next, identify the problems that you can solve.
Using your listed passions, write down the problems related to your specific interests and strengths. And then, think about how you can help provide a solution to those issues.
Next, assess which remaining items on your list will be profitable to hone in further. Research your competition and start by testing your idea with a sample landing page aimed at your target market
#2: Streamline The Benefits That You Offer in Your Marketplace
The biggest challenge in launching a marketplace website is attracting not only sellers or buyers. It’s that you need to attract both.
If you have a lot of sellers and no buyers, your sellers will pull out; and if you have many people ready to buy but not enough vendors, they’ll jump ship. To generate interest from both groups, strengthen your value proposition with a list of benefits for both sides.
This is what Creative Market, a graphic design marketplace, did successfully. They first targeted buyers by offering perks to those who would sign up, such as free-spending money on their website ($5) and a tiered referral program.
Then they approached content creators and invited them to showcase some of their works on their website for free; many agreed in exchange for exposure and a chance to show buyers what they could do.
Add in reasonable terms; the Create Market now has over 4 million resources from artists in almost 200 countries. To streamline your offered benefits and make a strong case for why your platform should be chosen among all the other marketplace websites, create a strong value proposition.
Add in reasonable terms; the Create Market now has over 4 million resources from artists in almost 200 countries.
First, understand your target market. The four main target market components that make up your target market are demographics (who they are), location (where they are), behaviors (what they do), and psychographics (what they think).
Similarly, it would be best to put together a value map that encapsulates your offering’s unique selling points, how it can make your target market happy, and what problems you can solve for them.
Research conducted by CXL found that users spend more time reading a company’s value proposition than any other information.
#3: Choose a Suitable Online Marketplace Revenue Model
Your chosen revenue model is how you can make money off of your marketplace website. You must clearly understand the specific revenue stream you want to monetize.
There are five popular ways to earn money through an online marketplace: commissions, listing charges, subscriptions, advertising or sponsored listings, and freemium. This is how popular websites like Amazon, Etsy, Zillow, and even OkCupid generate revenue.
There are five popular ways to earn money through an online marketplace: commissions, listing charges, subscriptions, advertising or sponsored listings, and freemium. This is how popular websites like Amazon, Etsy, Zillow, and even OkCupid generate revenue.
Etsy, for example, reported consolidated revenues of over $717 million in 2021, while Amazon recorded over $460 billion in profit in the same year. Creating cash depends on having a solid business model. Your revenue model should be founded on a generally good business model.
Digital entrepreneur Alok Keyrival says, “A successful combination of a great Business Model and Revenue Model results in a Google of today or a Facebook of tomorrow. But if you place your Revenue Model on the throne and crown it as king, with your Business Model as its slave, you will land up with a Myspace of yesterday.”
What the big marketplaces charge sellers in 2026
Before you set your own commission or listing fee, look at what sellers already pay on the biggest platforms. These fees anchor what your sellers will think is fair, and they show how much room a niche marketplace has to undercut them.
| Marketplace | Main fees (US) | Model | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon | $0.99 per item sold (Individual plan) or $39.99/month (Professional plan), plus a referral fee by category that mostly falls between 8% and 15%, with a $0.30 minimum per item. Clothing over $20, for example, pays 17%. | Subscription + commission | Amazon Sell pricing (October 2026) |
| eBay | First 250 listings free each month, then $0.35 each. A final value fee of 13.6% of the sale up to $7,500 for most categories, plus $0.30 per order (orders of $10 or less) or $0.40 (larger orders). | Listing fee + commission | eBay seller fees (October 2026) |
| Etsy | $0.20 per listing, a 6.5% transaction fee (shipping included) and 3% + $0.25 for payment processing. Sales from Offsite Ads cost a further 15%, or 12% for shops with more than $10,000 a year in sales, for whom the ads are mandatory. | Listing fee + commission + advertising | Craftybase Etsy fee guide (updated April 2, 2026) |
Craftybase works out that on a typical $50 Etsy sale the seller loses about 10% to fees, and about 25% when the sale comes through Offsite Ads. On the big platforms, sellers are used to giving up 10–15% of a sale or more. That has three consequences for a new site:
- Undercut on commission while you are small. A lower commission, or none at all, plus paid extras (featured listings, bumping an ad to the top) gives sellers a reason to list with you while you have little traffic.
- Charge per listing where items are rarely bought online. Vehicles, property, jobs and services usually close offline, so a commission is hard to collect. Charge to post or offer a membership plan instead.
- Add a commission once buyers arrive. When sales happen on your site, a commission scales with your marketplace's growth. eBay and Etsy both mix a commission with listing or advertising income rather than relying on one source.
If you build on Yclas, you pay a flat monthly subscription and payments go straight to your own Stripe or PayPal account with no cut taken. To earn a commission on sales between buyers and sellers, use Stripe Connect, where you set the percentage you keep.
Bonus: Invest in the Right Marketplace Software!
Your marketplace website must be designed and developed with the right software to ensure a successful launch.
You can build your own from scratch, but that can cost up to $68,400. Or even 1300 hours.
Investing in marketplace software will radically cut the time and costs of launching your online marketplace. When choosing the right software, first look for its offered functionality.
Investing in marketplace software will radically cut the time and costs of launching your online marketplace.
The right software should be able to address your technical requirements, like integrating it with several payment gateways or even designing a mobile app. Additionally, it should allow for easy launching, even if you don’t have coding experience or don’t have the money to hire a development and design team.
And support should be available, especially after launching your marketplace website.
Yclas offers a user-friendly solution to get you started.
