From shopping carts to marketplace scripting - A new generation in e-commerce

The arrival and advent of mega-marketplaces like Amazon and eBay ushered in an era of immeasurable prosperity for both the owners of the most successful e-commerce websites and the vendors who became "power-sellers" under their umbrella. These sites created thousands of jobs for stay-at-home retailers and all of that prosperity trickled down into other industries like shipping, web design, accounting, manufacturing, product distribution, and content creation.

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The dawn of online marketplaces

Of course, other entrepreneurs saw the opportunity to enter into the burgeoning industry and soon sites like NewEgg, Overstock, Etsy and others began springing up across the web, each with their own fair share of traffic and sales. Even the least popular of the major e-commerce marketplaces are doing well, and the model as a whole works so well that even "copycat" sites that are just modified clones of these major marketplaces are still generating enough traffic to facilitate millions in annual sales.

Nowadays, the field of e-commerce as a whole is shaped by the skills and talents of programmers, app developers, site designers, and innovative thinkers. All of these components come together to form the creative process that drives the development of each e-store or online marketplace. Perhaps one of the most important facets of a successful e-commerce endeavour is the user experience the site creates for both consumers and vendors.

A new approach to marketplace building and e-store administration

While the front end of a site (the side that site visitors see) is equally as important as the backend (the side that vendors see), there's a lot more going on the administrative side, which makes the development process for the backend a bit more complicated. To handle this complexity and the ongoing need for flexibility, a marketplace of coders, programmers, developers, and designers has emerged on sites like Rent-a-Coder.

However, today's e-commerce landscape is also filled with a broad range of solutions and services highlighted by easily customisable template-based content management systems, which give the average, non-computer savvy retailer much more control over online marketplace construction and e-store administration.

Finding the perfect solution or service in a saturated marketplace

Unfortunately, based on research conducted by Monetary Library, with so many programmers, app developers and service providers trying to make a name for themselves, the market has become saturated enough to make decision-making a challenging process. The best way to find what works is to follow the success of other online marketplaces.

The right marketplace script gives site developers access to templates and tools that let them create a site that looks similar to popular sites like Etsy. This allows you to create modified clones of major marketplaces, giving you a fair head start in the site design department, so you can immediately start competing using design components that have already proven their ability to convert.