Steps to Building A Rental Marketplace Platform

The rise of the online rental industry has benefited equally to the product owners and the consumers. Renting out things has boosted the model of sharing economy as it saves huge time, money and efforts. This has resulted in expansion of opportunities for entrepreneurs willing to start their own rental business. With proper planning of business models and identification of revenue streams it becomes easy to run an online rental marketplace. 

To begin with, you need to narrow down your niche and the products your marketplace would be dealing with. Below are some industry stats that explain the opportunities that explain growth in rental economy in multiple sectors:

Steps To Create A Rental Marketplace

Here are some key points that you should prioritize before entering the eCommerce rental market.

Market Research

It is important to know about your key competitors and the features that customers find helpful while renting a product. A comprehensive market study will help in defining the business objectives and creating a unique selling point for your marketplace. 

Additionally, here are a few aspects that should be analyzed:-

• Identifying target customers
• The current state of the industry
• Competitor analysis
• Revenue projections

Revenue Channels

Some eCommerce rental marketplaces offer premium listing services to their renters and rentees, some display advertisements while some follow hybrid and complex revenue channels to yield the profits. Some common and effective revenue practices for eCommerce rental marketplace are:- 

• Advertisements

Being a rental marketplace owner you can reserve space for third-party advertisements from relevant businesses to earn money. 

• Subscriptions

In this revenue model, marketplace owners charge membership fees from both the stakeholders to access the platform. The subscription fee depends upon the traffic and time span availed for the services. 

• Sponsored Listings

Rental eCommerce marketplaces charge fees for the product owners to promote their products on top with matching search results. This helps product owners in enhancing their visibility on the platform in exchange for pre decided fees.  

• Commissions

A one-time commission fee from the product owners can be charged after every successful lead is generated. This is the most common revenue model for rental marketplaces as the fee is justified on the basis of leads generated. 

Essential Rental Marketplace Features

• Real-Time Messaging

• Listings

• User Profiles

Choose the Right Development Approach

Selecting a development approach for your rental platform can be confusing. To decide whether you need a readymade solution or a custom-built platform, you should check your requirements to validate the development methodology.

• Readymade Software

If your requirement is a readymade solution, then you can go with readymade eCommerce marketplace solutions available on the web. Availing a readymade solution for building a rental marketplace saves you a lot of time and technical effort. 

Software like YoRent is the best suitable option to create a single vendor and multivendor rental marketplace platform where you can start your own online rental business. It comes with a variety of modules such as document verification, Tiered pricing, product inspection, and many more.

• Custom Development

Building a custom solution for rental eCommerce marketplace can provide you with personalized features and source code for the web application. This development approach makes your platform unique but the development costs are very high as you need to hire skilled developers to develop and maintain the product.

Conclusion

Ready-made software will be a more effective solution to materialize your business idea without any technical expertise. Additionally, with ready-made rental software you can do customization as per your business needs. As a marketplace owner, it is important to keep the platform secure & prevent users from online fraud. So it’s better to choose a fully secure rental software instead of any cheap solution.