Measure Your Marketplace Success

So, you are on a marketplace and selling your items to the world; you have taken a big step towards building your future. One of the most critical factors is to measure your marketplace success. 

This is not easy as there are many factors to take into consideration. One huge mistake that people make is to assume that if their user base is growing and they get sales, that factor alone is enough; it is not!

Life is not that simple, and online marketplaces are much more complex.

Of course, it has a lot to do with how you see success. For example, do you wish to be local, global? One significant goal, to begin with, is to ensure that you can make enough profit to sustain a living. 

Enough to maintain a presence means that by selling on an online marketplace, you can also pay the salaries of your workers, buy your essentials, pay the rents, etc., and still be in the green enough to pay for your living expenses. To do that, you first have to grow. You need to ensure that you get into a cycle of selling and that the customers you have will generate again for you and keep bringing new customers. 

You need to use Key Performance Indicators and follow them with great attention to detail. The very moment that they start to take a dip, you have to act and change your marketing direction.

Analytics And Site Traffic

A great way to see how well your site performs is to use analytics. Google Analytics is excellent as you can log into the account and see live traffic as it happens. 

You can see the locations that your users are from, the amount of time that they spend on the site, and also you can monitor the bounce rate (this means the number of people that vanish when they arrive as they don’t like the setup of the website and haven’t found what they needed. You can see the pages with a better success rate and those that don’t

From this information alone, you will see what pages have success and why. It could be that the keyword usage on certain ages attracts more visitors or that product pictures and layout of pages are more successful on some than others. All factors have to be considered. 

You should check the weekly stats and the monthly stats too for users. 

The important thing is to monitor the unique site visitors and make sure that they go up continually.

Two factors should be considered here, so be careful, be sure that your existing visitors are actually returning and that you measure the percentiles well. Also that the new visitors, are of course climbing up also.

The bounce rate is significant as this determines how many people view your site as applicable or not valuable. If many people leave right away, you need to convert this and make sure they stay and visit different pages!

Your Gross Merchandise Volume

Be sure to be able to understand your gross merchandise volume carefully. If you have an excellent marketplace that is successful, your GMV will be substantial. It means the total sales value of your items or services sold on the market in a specific time frame. 

However, you cannot rely on this information alone as it is not stable. It would help multiply your GMV by your taken rate (the commission you take for each transaction. 

Only then can you tell if you are profitable or not!

Know your customer lifetime. 

By this, we don’t mean how long they will live; we mean how many purchases they make before not returning! If they return time and time, you are a winner. 

If you have returning customers time and time again, then you will be sustainable. However, if you don’t, you will likely sink. It is very tricky to calculate the exact CLV because customers may take a long time to return, and sometimes the case is that just as you think you have lost them, they return! 

This is also triggered and manipulated by how well you market and the promotions that you make.

When creating your marketplace online, ask yourself if you would use it yourself! Be honest and see if you find it easy to navigate, trustworthy, and if the pictures of the products are clear and concise for you to wish to purchase and checkout. 

When you are honest with yourself, also rate the marketplace. Improve and change anything that you see is not good.

So, there you have it great ways to measure your marketplace success. Remember to be unique, though, and do not rely purely on the information listed in this article.