The Next Service Marketplace Wave

1. The Next Service Marketplace Wave Service marketplaces allow service buyers to connect with endless professionals from all types of fields and industries. Besides providing the service, the marketplace provides value on the demand side in three ways which are discovery, trust, and convenience. The marketplace platform helps the buyers identify the right provider (discovery), provide the assurance that the provider is legitimate (trust), and make it easier to connect directly with a provider (convenience). With the success of goods-based marketplace platforms like Amazon and ebay, entrepreneurs have ventured into service-based marketplaces like Fiverr and TaskRabbit. These are what we call “Horizontal” Service Marketplaces. They are about providing access to providers of different services. We have seen four major stages of the evolution in the online service marketplace industry. Digitalization of Yellow Pages: The websites like Craigslist aggregated the listings and messages from the Yellow Pages were the first service marketplaces. The customers would see these listings, read the supporting information, discover the contact details of the service providers (merely phone numbers and address), and process the rest of the chores offline. Organized Versions of the Digital Yellow Pages: These websites focused on offering personalized services and user experience. For example, entrepreneurs started dedicated marketplaces for Childcare, home rentals, freelancing, and others separately. The information on such platforms was structured and presented personalized filters to discover relevant listings conveniently.

2. On-Demand “Horizontal” Marketplaces: The marketplaces like Fiverr, Uber and TaskRabbit created a full-stack experience in a digital experience for not just the customers but also the providers. Now, the customers can now book a service, track the progress, make transactions, and share their experience on social media, right within the platform. The marketplaces managed a broader scope of the entire life cycle of a service, right from listing to the transactions and review of the provider. It was the era of Uber for X, where X meant any service that one can accommodate in the digital ecosystem. Yet! Not good enough. These platforms provide limited-value, one-off transactions and fail to enable long-term business collaborations. The Horizontal marketplaces lack the standardization of the services delivery across every segment. The complex and diverse nature of services spread across every segment, makes it challenging to acquire, process, and trust the information we see on an online horizontal marketplace. The next wave is On-Demand “Vertical” Marketplace: These marketplaces narrow down to a specific segment of services like Accounting, HR, Marketing & Tech Support. These vertical marketplaces are focussed on specific service enabling long-term collaborations between the customer and providers. And the best part is - these marketplaces are able to standardize the quality and the delivery of these services. Our Vision is to build the best online service marketplace software, to help anyone, anywhere build, scale and manage a two sided marketplace business. We help individuals, entrepreneurs, small to medium-sized businesses, and large enterprises to launch a fully functional niche multi- vendor marketplace platform in a few days, and at the fraction of the cost ready to generate revenue. We are here to support you succeed! Let’s start the journey. Original Reference : https://bit.ly/3my4MDX