Did you know that there are almost over 4 Billion active internet users? As of 2020, three countries make up the majority of the internet population and collectively, these three countries – US, India & China, account for more than half of the global digital population. In fact, the number of internet-connected devices is also projected to increase at exponential rate worldwide by the year 2025. From this, it is obvious that the internet has paved the way for businesses to thrive online and if you are an entrepreneur who wishes to start a new business, the benefits reaped from running your enterprise online far outweigh the ones when carried out on the offline mode.
That is why bringing your marketplace on the internet will be the best choice to gain success. Though the mode of launching an application is of utmost importance, the type of technologies used to develop your online marketplace will also play a crucial role. Let’s delve into more details to understand this.
All about tech stack and beyond
In simple words, a technology stack is the list of the most suitable software, programming languages, and other tools that will be used to develop and enable a web application or website to function appropriately. For any application, the technology stack consists of the server-side/back-end technology and client-side/front-end technology.
While the client-side technology stack covers the visual aspect of the website focusing on the interaction with the users, server-side tech stack includes all technologies that power the entire website but is not visible to users.
From HTML to CSS, front-end languages tell the browsers how to display the content of the web page. Other technologies like JavaScript(JS), allow interaction within the website. On the other hand, the back-end includes the basic logic of the website or the database, where the site will be able to store the necessary data for handling the requests from the users’ devices.
Things to Keep in Mind When Choosing the Technology to Create a Marketplace
Simply put, you should have an idea about the type of technology you will choose to build an online marketplace solution. Though the technologies can be used in various combinations, frameworks can only be finalized upon after deciding the programming language. If you are a novel businessperson, there are certain points you should keep in mind while choosing the technology stack to create an online marketplace. This is because the success of your online marketplace solely relies on the following factors:
Review the size of your project
Your choice of technology stack will largely depend on the size and complexity of your online marketplace application. As the project size grows, the complexity of your project also increases. One can classify their project as small, medium-sized, or large depending on scalability, serviceability, and speed of functioning.
If you are planning on developing a basic application in the least possible time, simple technologies such as WordPress or other CMS will do the job but if you want to build a complex and huge online marketplace, you might need a mix of several programming languages.
A good way to analyze the size of your project would be to identify the features that need to be integrated into your online marketplace solution and then discuss with the development team to check if the technology and solutions fully support the idea.
Ensure security is factored in
Incidents of cybercrime have been increasing day by day and as per Statista, it has been forecasted that spending in the cybersecurity industry will reach almost 42 billion by the year 2020.
So, if you want to develop applications for the financial market or applications that involve financial transactions online, make sure that your potential users have a safe and secure experience. To minimize threat and unwanted vulnerabilities, choose a tech stack that will help you configure security policy for your application. However, one should keep in mind that security does not depend on technology only, your developers must also be skilled enough to use the right encryption modules and suitable technologies.
Understand the costs involved
Even after developing your online marketplace platform, maintaining it will definitely require many resources, including heavy financial resources. The more complex your technology stack, the more the final price of building your application. While it is your choice to build your applications on open-source technologies for enabling cost-efficiency, maintaining your application and to keep it running will require additional costs.
Similarly, the more skilled developers one hires to work for a project, the higher their salaries will be. The cost of developing your application is also directly proportional to the time taken to complete it and the complexity of its features.
What technology stack should you go for?
Tech stack is not everything. There is more to developing a functional online marketplace solution. For starters, if we focus on the front-end, it is recommended that front-end frameworks like the latest version of Angular be used for your application. Not only does this framework make the development process seamless for the developers with its highly reusable components, but it also facilitates simplified unit-testing.
Angular also enables efficient maintenance of code allowing hassle-free updating. Frontend frameworks offer developers with a foundation of tested functional code. There is no need to code from scratch and Angular helps in saving precious time.
As far as the back-end is concerned, the PHP Laravel framework will be an ideal choice. Being a secured framework combined with its capabilities to provide high-class security, your application will be free from any type of SQL injections. Another advantage is its ability to provide excellent performance along with powerful authentication options for users.
Being open-source, Laravel is continuously updated to make it more flexible and scalable. This means that complex functionalities can be added to your application whenever desired. With object-oriented libraries and ease of migrating databases, Laravel makes development an easy-peasy task for developers. In short, if you wish to develop a multilingual online marketplace platform that has to be promoted at the earliest, Laravel is the right framework for you.
For database management and boosting scalability, MySQL is a great choice for an extensive range of applications. If your app is largely dependent on multi-row transactions, MySQL will be able to provide a high performance. Last but not the least, if you are developing your application on iOS, Swift will be a preferred language while JAVA will work for the Android operating system.
Final thoughts
If you are someone who is not familiar with the nitty-gritty of app development, choosing the right technology stack can be a daunting task. Instead of going back and forth on deciding the tech stack for your online marketplace software, you can do some research and understand how to go about it. However, it is always better to seek advice from technology experts and experienced developers before making a final decision. Drop a line if you wish to get in touch with our experts who can guide you in building a successful online marketplace from scratch.
