How to grow a marketplace: 7 tactics & tips

How do you grow a marketplace? Slowly at first, then mostly on its own. At Code23 we’ve watched some marketplaces we’ve built find momentum within months, and others take a lot longer. What works is always the same underlying pattern: more vendors give buyers more choice, and more buyers give vendors more reason to list with you. Your job is to get that loop turning, then keep feeding it until it starts turning on its own.

That means picking a handful of growth channels, testing them properly, and doubling down on whatever actually moves signups and transactions, not just traffic. Don’t chase every tactic at once, and don’t panic if growth feels slow in the first few months. It usually is. What matters is that something improves every month: more listings, more enquiries, more repeat buyers.

Here are the channels worth testing first.

Make sure you’re clear about what sort of growth levels you’re looking for. Growing online marketplaces can take longer than traditional online businesses, so don’t be concerned if it’s taking time. Building successful marketplaces takes patience, so plan your runway for a slow start rather than betting on a quick one.

In fact, if you grow too quickly, you may not do your marketplace business justice and fail for all the wrong reasons. If you get too big before you’ve ironed out any problems or listened to feedback, you won’t be showing yourself in the best light. But equally, don’t use it as an excuse to remain stagnant. Things should be improving in terms of signups and transactions a little every month.

Let’s look at some marketplace growth tactics

Different tactics work for different marketplaces, you may need to test a few before deciding which is best for you. Start by coming up with ideas as to how to grow a marketplace and then pick the ones you think will work the best. Focus on the ones that worked best and use it to increase growth and get you closer to your target growth rate. If one stops working, test a new channel. It’s a pretty simple strategy! 

Some of the common channels you’ll initially be looking at include:

1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

If your SEO strategy is correct, customers will find you organically rather than you having to actively look for them. This is achieved by making your marketplace easy to find when potential customers are searching for services or goods that you offer in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). 

A good SEO strategy needs a strong technical build, a site structure and internal linking that matches how buyers actually search, and a content plan that targets what they're typing into Google. Our marketplace SEO guide goes into the detail, and our SEO service covers what we do for clients.

TIP: Vendors and their product or service pages will play a key role here too, so you’ll want to make sure you educate them about the importance of SEO. 

2. Content marketing

The content on your marketplace can be used to help grow marketplace traffic through search engine rankings. And this isn’t just relevant to your blog, content is a key ranking factor across all of your landing pages and product pages. Our marketplace content marketing guide covers how to build that out without duplicating what your vendors already write. 

TIP: Duplicate content is one of the biggest challenges on a marketplace. Ensure your vendors aren’t copy and pasting product descriptions from other places online.

"After wanting to up my game with my marketplace website I found Code23. They made switching web agencies really easy and have consistently provided great support, thoughtful suggestions and advice to improve the website... The team are super responsive which is very reassuring for a non-techie!"

3. Pay Per Click (PPC)

If you want to boost your visibility quickly, you can pay for ads on search engines such as Google. These ads are shown depending on the keywords you specify you want to rank for, along with a lot of other factors.

Likewise, you can pay for ads on Social Media sites such as Instagram and Facebook. Depending on your target audience, this can be a great way to improve brand awareness and attract new customers to your products or services.

With paid advertising be sure that your return (ROAS) is more than you are spending (ROI). PayPerClick can be expensive (particularly for popular search terms) with costs sometimes being reduced if on-page content and ads are of the highest quality. Even then though, they are usually not suitable for low value product or service marketplaces purely due to cost, but they are worth testing if you can.

4. Referrals and viral marketing

This is perfect for growth as it doesn’t cost you anything and builds you a good reputation! Ideally, your initial group of users will rave about you and encourage others to become customers. What’s more, it’s scalable as the new people will bring in their own new people etc. It’s a good idea to give customers an incentive to tell other people about you, the nature of which will depend on your marketplace but could be a financial incentive for referrals upon completion of a transaction. 

Likewise, if you have a good relationship with your early vendors and they have bought into your idea, you can educate them in ways they can go about marketing for you too. 

5. Email campaigns

This is probably the most efficient way to encourage new and existing customers to complete transactions. Before you go to the expense of looking for new potential customers, make sure you’ve activated the ones you already have. Send them information about new products or services as you get new vendors, give them offers, create an interest with successful reviews.. However you do it, get people active on your site and then continue to engage with them. 

6. Create your own community

If you can get your users to communicate with each other and enjoy spending time on your site, before you know it you’ll have your own marketplace community. And once people begin to feel ‘a part of something’ they are less likely to go elsewhere. Our guide to marketplace community building covers how to turn early users into advocates who bring in the next ones.

7. Marketplace technology

Investigate whether you can add growth through technology, integrating other existing services into your offering. Integrations could include, accounting, calendar bookings or google shopping feeds.

In the early stages we advise that keeping your focus narrow is important, but there will come a time when you want to learn how to scale a marketplace. At that stage keeping things ‘niche’ may no longer be appropriate. 

The time to do this may become clear naturally, for example, if you begin to have a lot of marketplace sellers whose offerings don’t fall into existing categories. Or it might be that you remain in the same niche but suddenly find there is a new interest (or resurgence of an old one) and many more potential clients you can tap into. 

At the risk of repeating ourselves, it all comes back to trust. If people trust you, no matter how much your marketplace grows and expands, they’ll continue to use your service.

[ the growth loop ] Test channels until the marketplace starts pulling in its own growth

01 SEO 02 CONTENT 03 REFERRALS 04 EMAIL 05 COMMUNITY 06 TECH

TRY. MEASURE. REPEAT.

BUILD BOT_ GROWTH LOOP

TESTING CHANNELS ONE AT A TIME Drop what doesn't work. Double down on what does

Frequently asked questions

How long does it take to grow a marketplace?

It varies, but growth is rarely instant. Some marketplaces we’ve built find real momentum within months once vendors and buyers start pulling each other in; others take longer, especially in a niche with less existing demand. Test a few growth channels early, track signups and transactions monthly, and expect the pace to pick up once both sides start feeding each other.

What’s the best way to market a marketplace?

There’s no single best channel. SEO and content compound over time and cost nothing per click, referrals are cheap once you’ve got happy users, and PPC gets you visibility fast if you can afford it. Test two or three, measure signups and transactions rather than traffic alone, and put your budget behind whichever one is actually working for your marketplace.

How do you get both vendors and buyers onto a new marketplace at the same time?

This is the classic chicken-and-egg problem, and there’s no shortcut round it. Most marketplaces we’ve built start by manually recruiting a small group of vendors first, giving early buyers a reason to visit even before volume builds. Once a few transactions happen and vendors see it working, referrals and word of mouth start doing more of the job for you.

Does marketplace SEO need a different approach to a normal website?

Yes. A marketplace has category pages, listings, seller profiles and filters that a normal brochure site doesn’t, and each one needs its own SEO treatment rather than one blanket strategy. Duplicate or thin vendor listings can drag the whole site down in search, so cleaning up how vendors write and structure their pages matters as much as any technical fix.

Next step

Growth tactics only work once the marketplace underneath them can carry the weight: fast pages Google wants to rank, a search and category structure buyers can actually use, and enough vendor tools that your team isn’t stuck in spreadsheets while you’re trying to grow. Fix that first, then spend on traffic.

There are two ways to start. The Marketplace Growth Review is a free 30-minute call that tells you which growth channel is worth testing first. The Marketplace Growth Plan is the written version: a full look at your SEO, vendor experience and growth options, at a fixed price that comes off your build if you go ahead. We’ve built 50+ marketplaces over 15+ years, so we’ve seen what actually moves the needle and what doesn’t.