Two-sided platforms need
two-sided onboarding.
B2B platforms, services marketplaces, multi-vendor stores. Supply and demand have different jobs, different doubts, different KPIs — your site has to serve both without one diluting the other.
The hard problem with marketplace sites is that the home page has to do two jobs that pull in opposite directions. The demand-side visitor wants browsing — wide range, easy filters, low friction. The supply-side visitor wants reassurance — that there’s real demand on the platform, that payouts are reliable, that joining isn’t a waste of three weeks. Almost every marketplace site we audit picks one of these as the dominant frame and treats the other as an afterthought, usually buried in a “For Sellers” link in the footer. That works at very early stages — when you’re manually onboarding both sides — and stops working sharply once you need self-serve growth on either side.
What we ship for marketplace builds
A primary home page tuned for the demand side (because that’s where the volume traffic comes from), plus a parallel /sellers or /vendors entry-point that’s nearly a complete site of its own — onboarding flow, payout policy, dispute resolution clarity, success-case profiles of existing sellers, the exact commission rates. Karan, who handles the platform engineering for most marketplace clients, has a rule: if you can’t calculate what you’ll earn on the platform within ninety seconds of landing on /sellers, the page has failed. He’s annoyingly rigid about it. He’s also been right every time so far.
How do we handle the chicken-and-egg problem on a brand new marketplace site?
Pre-launch curation, almost always. The first three to six months you fake the marketplace dynamic — your team is the demand and you’re manually placing orders to keep supply engaged, or you’re the supply and you’re paying for ad-driven demand to land on the platform. The site has to support that fiction without breaking — meaning the seller dashboard needs to show real orders even when they’re seeded, the analytics view needs to look normal even at thin volumes, and the search results page has to look populated even when it’s six items. This is normal early-marketplace behaviour. Pretending otherwise on the site is how you lose your first cohort of sellers.
We built our marketplace site assuming demand would come first. It didn’t. We rebuilt it six months later putting the seller story front-and-centre, and the next quarter we onboarded a hundred and forty sellers organically. Same product, completely different framing.
Building for marketplace?
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