Building A Marketplace Like Amazon or eBay (without coding)

Akanksha Chandan
5 min readApr 14, 2020

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Updated on 19.10.2021

When you heard the word ‘Amazon’ as a child, you might have imagined the largest tropical rainforest in the world. But now you think of the most successful online marketplace in the world.

This is the power of eCommerce!

Building eCommerce Website like Amazon without Coding

With the passing of time, we all got addicted to online shopping. Right?

For more than a decade, numerous innovative digital practices have revolutionized eCommerce. The eCommerce industry has so much potential that it is growing irrespective of pandemic situations like COVID-19.

Here are the projections about the eCommerce revenue in the year 2023:

Source: Statista

Due to the huge success of the eCommerce industry, the competition in this field has also been growing. Let’s take a look at the major competitors of Amazon in the US for the year 2020.

10 Largest E-Commerce Retailers in the US
Source: marketingcharts.com

Did you notice something? Look at the difference between the share of Amazon and Walmart. Amazon is leading the eCommerce market by an incredible margin. That means — people are looking for multi-vendor websites like Amazon because through such websites they can find almost every product in one place.

Moving forward, let’s take a quick dive into Amazon’s journey and understand how they made it BIG!

Evolution of Amazon

Amazon has evolved drastically and so did our shopping habits. The milestones achieved by this eCommerce giant are astonishing as they show the popularity and success of the company. But Amazon didn’t achieve all of this in a day. Let’s remember how it all started,

Source: rubygarage.org

Now we have a clear understanding of why Amazon is the most successful multi-vendor eCommerce website. There are several brands that started as a single vendor store but became an online marketplace.

Want to know why a multi-vendor marketplace is preferred over eCommerce stores? Keep reading!

What is a Multi-vendor eCommerce Marketplace?

Multi-vendor eCommerce marketplaces are large-scale eCommerce websites where multiple vendors can sell their products and services to a large number of buyers. This kind of business model can be used for B2B as well as B2C trading.

Take a look at the following image to understand how an eCommerce website like Amazon or eBay works.

Multi-vendor eCommerce Marketplace Framework
Multi-vendor eCommerce Marketplace Framework

Suggested Read: Top Online Multi-Vendor Marketplace Business Ideas

Here are a few reasons why merchants favor multi-vendor eCommerce websites:

  1. Readymade traffic provides more sales opportunities to the vendors.
  2. Suitable for sales-minded merchants if they are not focused on creating their own brand.
  3. Small setup costs as the vendors don’t need to create a website.
  4. Vendors have the flexibility to manage product details, prices, and areas of delivery, make additions, and updates as per their convenience.

If you are planning to build a multi-vendor eCommerce marketplace similar to Amazon or eBay, then make sure you do justice to their business model. You would need to create a high-quality multi-vendor marketplace to survive in this competitive arena.

To ensure the success of your eCommerce marketplace, make sure that your multi-vendor eCommerce website has all the necessary features. Let’s explore a few of them.

Must-Have Features for an eCommerce Website like Amazon or eBay

The features of a multi-vendor eCommerce website like Amazon are categorized based on the users of the marketplace. Yo!Kart is among the most popular multivendor eCommerce platforms and it has categorized the essential eCommerce features as follows:

  1. eCommerce Features
  2. Design Features (UI/UX)
  3. Product Management Features
  4. Marketing Features
  5. Conversion Features
  6. Payment Features
  7. Reporting & Analysis Features
  8. Mobile App Features

If you want to explore each and every feature falling under the above-mentioned categories, then you can visit their website. Below I am sharing the top features of a multi-vendor eCommerce platform:

Multilingual Functionality

For the global reach of your eCommerce business, multilingual functionality is essential. People are always comfortable in consuming and sharing information in their regional language.

Yo!Kart is integrated with MSN Language API that translates 60+ languages automatically.

Multi-Currency Functionality

This feature is integrated with a real-time currency converter API to display and manage the currency conversion automatically. This feature is important if you want to take your business to the global level.

With this feature in place, marketplace owners can easily accept payment in any currency that is selected in the payment gateway.

Abandoned Cart Management

When the relevant users add products to the cart and abandon it due to some reasons, it creates a leakage in the purchase funnel, thus reducing the profit margin significantly. Your eCommerce marketplace must have the functionality to track and recover cart abandonments.

With Yo!Kart’s abandoned cart feature, you can create personalized offers and send discount coupons to recover abandoned carts.

Progressive Web Apps (PWA)

PWA allows websites to have more of a mobile web audience as it combines the best features of the web and apps. Yo!Kart is PWA compliant the help improve user experience and reduce loading time.

How to Create an eCommerce Marketplace like Amazon or eBay without Coding

It requires a lot of effort and time to build a marketplace like Amazon or eBay especially when you are coding it yourself from scratch. Other than coding a website yourself, there are two more ways to build a marketplace:

i) launching your eCommerce marketplace through a ready-made platform like Yo!Kart,

ii) or hiring a team of developers and availing custom eCommerce development services

What will be the best method for you will depend on the following questions:

  1. What kind of marketplace are you building?

2. What is your budget?

3. What are your own technical capabilities and resources?

In my opinion, using a ready-made eCommerce marketplace solution is always a better option because it is less time-consuming, easy to implement, affordable, you get free trials & demos, it’s highly customizable, and can be scaled to any extent.

However, hiring a team of developers is again all about coding the website from scratch. The only difference is that in this case, the coding is done by professionals.

Is Yo!Kart the ultimate solution that you are looking for?

Watch this amazing video to find the answer!

Launch your eCommerce marketplace without coding

Next: Yo!Kart Latest Version Released V9.3.0 — New API Integrations, Features, and Enhancements

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Akanksha Chandan

MBA — Marketing & International Management | Marketing Team Lead @ Grazitti Interactive | Sprouting Interest in Psychology