Real-World Examples for Building a Successful Two-Sided E-commerce Marketplace

Two-sided marketplaces are becoming increasingly popular in the e-commerce startup world. eBay and Etsy are some of the most obvious examples of two-sided marketplaces, but now we are seeing a lot of niche and esoteric marketplaces as well all over the world. 

So what does it take to be successful in this kind of business? 

This Udemy course provides real-world examples of successful two-sided marketplaces, as well as a step-by-step breakdown on how they were built.

1. Building a Two-Sided E-commerce Marketplace w/ Sramana Mitra

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Accelerate Your E-commerce Business with Fundamental Courses

Are you new to e-commerce or already scaling your business? Do you want to accelerate? This is a collection of courses that can help you save time and resources by teaching you how to avoid common mistakes through case studies.

The courses are built on real-time examples of successful entrepreneurs, so if you study them carefully, you’ll be several steps ahead of the competition.

You can choose from a variety of different courses depending on your skill level, or experience in entrepreneurship. There are lessons for beginners as well as more advanced users who want to take their business to the next level faster.

Depending on what you’re creating, pick between these courses.

• How to Build E-commerce Startups with Sramana Mitra
• How to Build 2-Sided E-commerce Marketplaces with Sramana Mitra

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Bootstrapping Using Services and Piggybacking from Australia: StoreConnect CEO Mikel Lindsaar (Part 1)

Mikel has built a services company in Australia and spawned six SaaS products out of it. One of them, StoreConnect, is a terrific Bootstrapping by Piggybacking story on top of Salesforce.com. He has exited four of the apps and expects to grow StoreConnect to $100M+ in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: HugePOD CEO Joe Zhou (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What about fabric?

Joe Zhou: We purchase from big fabric factories and we handle its stocking.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s say a designer wants to design something, they have to work within a catalog of fabric?

Joe Zhou: We have 40 kinds of fabric. They don’t need to select from the fabric. The fabric is connected to certain styles. We already have these prepared.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: HugePOD CEO Joe Zhou (Part 1)

Joe talks about a gap in designing, manufacturing, and drop-shipping small run fashion merchandise.
Excellent offering from a Chinese company to fill a big gap in SMB e-commerce.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: AfterShip CEO Andrew Chan (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When you look at the app stores of Shopify and BigCommerce, do you see opportunities for new apps or new services that new entrepreneurs could build?

Andrew Chan: Definitely. We’ve extended into after and before shipping. E-commerce merchants these days are using so many different solutions. Many SaaS solutions for e-commerce are not designed for e-commerce. I’ll give you an example. MailChimp is a great solution but is not really designed for e-commerce brands. Many solutions start to go back to email marketing solutions for brands. That’s an opportunity.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: AfterShip CEO Andrew Chan (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Which platform was the first one that you started getting traction on?

Andrew Chan: Shopify and eBay as well.

Sramana Mitra: Just to get a feel for this strategy, what you’re describing is a strategy that we have picked up on from various case studies that we have covered. We call it Bootstrapping by Piggybacking on Platforms. It’s a strategy of going to market that is working very well for a lot of small startups. As you pointed out, you’re going to market without a sales team. You are able to go to market by riding on somebody else’s marketing channel.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: AfterShip CEO Andrew Chan (Part 1)

Andrew has built AfterShip by heavily leveraging the e-commerce Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Marketplaces. Read on for more.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as AfterShip.