Our High-Performance Marketplace Technology Stack

Your choice of technology will have a huge impact on the success of your online marketplace. Options range from off-the-shelf templates to custom development. CobbleWeb specialises in custom marketplace solutions built with carefully selected tech stacks. In our experience this offers the best opportunity for success.

We have an agnostic view on marketplace technology. That means we only use software applications that are best suited to your project. Our approach is to first understand the client’s business case and its individual customer journeys, which are then further broken down into comprehensive user stories, before we select an appropriate tech stack.

That said, there are some common criteria that all software solutions have to adhere to. Marketplace technology must be scalable to accommodate increased user loads as your platform grows. It should also yield high performance in terms of latency, throughput and reliability. We perform rigorous performance testing to ensure that your platform architecture can always handle the workload.

That’s not all. Your tech stack should be flexible enough to support business and user flows that drive revenue and provide a superlative user experience. Extensibility is important too; it should be easy to add new functionality such as APIs. Nothing kills a platform like the inability to add the features that your users demand.

Security is of cardinal importance, since your marketplace will invariably deal with confidential user information. CobbleWeb is well acquainted with the latest platform security requirements and follows best practices when implementing any software application. 

Speed of implementation is another factor we consider. As the startup saying goes, ‘release fast, release often’. Rapid feedback loops between development and user testing get our clients to product-market fit faster.

As custom marketplace developers, we’re big fans of open-source software. The ability to modify and enhance freely accessible software, performance-tested by some of the world’s most iconic platforms, provides a cost-effective, but powerful, innovation vector for marketplace startups. However, we are not rigid about our affinity for open-source solutions. If there’s a better or more suitable paid application we will recommend it. 

Our agnostic approach also means we are constantly evolving our marketplace technology skills and insights. For instance, we started using Express (a backend framework for Node.js) more often, due to its ability to handle asynchronous events and other advantages for marketplace development. 

We mitigate the risk of new technology by first testing its impact on small projects and evaluating its performance for third-party platforms. Express, for example, had to prove its worth for IBM, PayPal and Uber before we considered it.

This guide will introduce you to the software applications we use most often to build high-performance online marketplaces. Each section explains what the technology does, which platforms use it and why it is ideal for marketplace development.