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Your choice of technology will have a huge impact on the success of your online marketplace. Options range from <a href="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/6-ways-turnkey-software-solutions-can-kill-your-marketplace-startup/">off-the-shelf templates</a> to custom development. CobbleWeb specialises in custom marketplace solutions built with carefully selected tech stacks. In our <a href="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/portfolio/">experience</a> 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.

Our High-Performance Marketplace Technology Stack

Mailchimp (formerly Mandrill)

<h2>General usage</h2>
Most applications need to notify their users about important events, such as order confirmations, receipts or password resets, even when the users are not logged onto the platform. The obvious solution is the email address with which users registered their accounts.
Mailchimp&#8217;s transactional email service, formerly known as Mandrill, allows applications to send their users automated emails that are triggered by in-app events, like account registration. Key reasons to use Mailchimp for transactional email include:
It has high deliverability rates, which means emails don&#8217;t land up in spam folders. This is possible due to Mailchimp&#8217;s global server network, membership of industry organisations, ISP feedback loops and whitelists, abuse-detection technology and sender authentication.
It&#8217;s fast. A million emails take on average 45 minutes to send, in part because Mailchimp circumvents ISP throttling by using hundreds of IP addresses.
Its flexible API can link to multiple databases (e.g. to extract user details) and can receive and process inbound emails (e.g. to get feedback requested from users).
Webhooks allow applications to receive real-time notifications of user actions, e.g. whether an email was opened, bounced or there was a spam complaint.
Analytics reports can be customised with tags and metadata for specific metrics, such as customer segments.
Personalised transactional emails offer an opportunity to increase user engagement. A personalised reminder may, for example, be more effective than a utilitarian system message to reduce cart abandonment.
Mailchimp&#8217;s transactional service integrates smoothly with its template ecosystem, which makes it easy for application owners to test email copy, layout and design without the help of developers.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Mandrill is used for transactional mail by 18% of the million most popular sites.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6394" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Transactional-email-market-share.png" alt="" width="504" height="498" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Transactional-email-market-share.png 504w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Transactional-email-market-share-300x296.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 504px) 100vw, 504px" />
Source: <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/mx/transactional-email" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Builtwith</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Since a marketplace’s main goal is to connect buyers and sellers, transactional emails play an important role in the activation, engagement and conversion of users. 
Mailchimp’s transactional email solution offers the flexibility (via webhooks and API), easy implementation (via ready-made templates), analytics (via customisable reports) and scalability (via its global server network and a pay-as-you-go cost structure) that marketplaces need.
Its manageability also makes it a winner. Mailchimp helps our client, Affordable Art Fair, to manage more than forty transactional email types. It allows their administrators to easily manage the parameters (e.g. buyer location), triggers, as well as the content and layout of templates. The system is also able to pull data from multiple external sources such as customer databases.

CubeJS

<h2>General usage</h2>
Companies use Cube.js to create a semantic API layer on top of their databases to act as an analytics backend. This simplifies the translation of business logic (e.g. metrics) into SQL. It also manages the caching and queuing of data as well as database connections. 
With the back-end infrastructure taken care of, developers can focus on integrating data visualisations with user dashboards. Since Cube.js is visualisation agnostic, you can use any frontend library to build custom user interfaces.
Cube.js supports most database types and can be run in any environment. It can also generate a customisable dashboard app that can be integrated with the rest of your frontend architecture.
Cube.js therefore speeds up the development of business intelligence tools, while allowing lots of flexibility for frontend visualisation of data.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Cube.js is backed by heavy-weight VC firms like Bain Capital and Slack Fund.
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
CobbleWeb has used Cube.js to build high-performance business intelligence dashboards for our clients. For instance, we combined it with Snowplow Analytics and other tools to build a data pipeline for Affordable Art Fair, a global art marketplace. 
This gave them a user-friendly way to extract, visualise and manage granular marketing data. Marketing campaigns designed with the improved data contributed to a two to three fold increase in user engagement.

Axible

<h2>General use</h2>
According to <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/private-equity-and-principal-investors/our-insights/growing-opportunities-in-the-internet-of-things">McKinsey</a>, 25 percent of businesses are using IoT technology with an estimated 43 billion connected devices forecast by 2023. Driving much of this growth is the fact that IoT technology has become easier to implement, allowing more SMEs and startups to take advantage of its ability to solve specific challenges. 
Axible is one of this new breed of IoT technology providers. What makes them stand out is their commitment to tailor-made solutions for each business case. 
Their hardware infrastructure comprises sensors, trackers and access control devices that respond to a wide range of signals or inputs. They can be activated by changes in magnets, light, movement, vibration, temperature, humidity, weight, depth, pressure, acceleration, geolocation and more. 
Notifications can be sent to a smartphone via text or email when a threshold is exceeded or an event occurs. Signals from devices are collected on their cloud platform where it is transformed into data visualisations for business intelligence purposes. Some events can also be managed remotely from the platform, e.g. switching a light off or unlocking a magnetic door.
Sensor use cases include alerts when daylight enters a room and a light is left on, overflowing pools or bathtubs, and temperature or humidity warnings for hothouses and cold storage. Some tracker use cases are luggage tracking, sea freight tracking, and crane motion detection when loading/unloading containers.
Access control can be implemented via smart cards, badges, keyboards, RFID tags, intercoms, license plate recognition cameras, or keypad boxes. Use cases include short-term rental property access that dematerialises at the end of the guest&#8217;s stay, traffic control, smart desk occupancy management, and parking spaces integrated with a booking system.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Worldwide spending on IoT solutions is expected to increase almost four-fold from 2021 to 2025:
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6364" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Global-iot-market-size.png" alt="" width="694" height="458" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Global-iot-market-size.png 694w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Global-iot-market-size-300x198.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 694px) 100vw, 694px" />
Source: <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/976313/global-iot-market-size/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Statista</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
CobbleWeb has a track record of solving real-world challenges by deploying internet-connected devices. Axible is especially good at providing access control solutions for our clients.
Drivers using MobyPark’s parking marketplace had to be able to access car parks via their app. We managed this with Axible’s access control solution. Drivers receive access codes which they use to open entry booms.  We solved the problem of bad phone connectivity by attaching hardware to parking entrances that can accept access codes via Bluetooth or manual input.

PerimeterX

<h2>General usage</h2>
PerimeterX offers various products to detect and manage automated attacks and client-side threats to web or mobile applications and APIs.
Bot Defender combines intelligent fingerprinting, behavioural signals and predictive analysis to detect bots on web and mobile applications and API endpoints. It then blocks the bots completely, rate-limiting them, or redirecting them to decoy sites.
Code Defender is a client-side application security solution that continuously protects your website from digital skimming, formjacking and Magecart attacks, stopping data breaches and reducing your risk of non-compliance.
Page Defender preserves the intended online shopper experience by blocking unwanted coupon extensions and ad injections.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Perimeter has won a veritable smorgasbord of <a href="https://www.perimeterx.com/about/">awards</a> for its innovative security solutions. Salesforce Ventures is one of its big name investors.
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
CobbleWeb mostly uses PerimeterX’s Bot defender.  It protects our clients&#8217; marketplaces from: 
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Account takeovers &#8211; an attack in which cybercriminals take unauthorised ownership of online accounts using stolen usernames and passwords. </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Carding &#8211; cybercriminals use bots to test lists of recently stolen credit and debit card details on small purchases before buying high value items on ecommerce sites.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Skewed analytics &#8211; when your web traffic gets polluted by a high volume of non-human traffic.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Web scraping &#8211; bots crawl your site continuously to capture pricing data and product descriptions at scale. Competitors may use it to match or beat your pricing and take business away from you or steal your content.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Denial of Inventory &#8211; malicious hoarder bots add items multiple times to a shopping cart until it is shown out of stock. This is damaging to conversions, user experience and revenue.</li>
</ul>

WordPress

<h2>General usage</h2>
Firstly, it&#8217;s important not to confuse the WordPress CMS with WordPress.com, which is a separate paid blogging service. Secondly, although platforms like marketplaces can be built with WordPress plugins and templates, its scalability and performance limitations make it more suitable as a content management add-on.
With the caveats out of the way, let’s focus on WordPress strengths as a CMS. First up is its REST API, which makes it fairly straightforward to integrate WordPress with other applications, even those built with different programming languages like React. This allows content management to be run separately from the transactional part of your platform. 
It&#8217;s extremely SEO-friendly. Automatically generated title tags and meta descriptions, a, and specialised plugins, such as Yoast SEO, are just some of the ways it helps to increase search engine traffic. In practical terms, search engine-optimised product descriptions make it easier for marketplace sellers to generate leads from search engines like Google.
WordPress is incredibly extensible. Its huge developer community has contributed more than 55,000 plugins and provides advice in numerous online fora. Moving into new markets and want to make your site available in another language? No problem, WordPress has a plugin for that.
User-friendly publishing features, such as a built-in content editor, make it easy for sellers to add descriptions and images of the products or services they are selling. Its robust content management features include user roles, e.g. administrator, editor, and author, version control, and import/export of content.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
More than a third of the top 10,000 sites and 37% of the top million sites use WordPress as a CMS:<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6294" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Wordpress-market-share.png" alt="" width="498" height="496" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Wordpress-market-share.png 498w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Wordpress-market-share-300x300.png 300w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Wordpress-market-share-150x150.png 150w" sizes="(max-width: 498px) 100vw, 498px" />
Source: <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/cms" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Builtwith</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
CobbleWeb often adds WordPress as a headless CMS to custom marketplaces built with technologies like React, ExpressJs or Symfony. It offers marketplace owners and sellers a user- and SEO-friendly way to add content such as product descriptions.
For example, we integrated the WordPress CMS with the FanPass event ticket marketplace to dynamically update content-rich information pages with new events. 
FanPass ticket sellers can add new events via a custom admin portal. Event details, such as title, category, and image, are then used by WordPress to add the new event listing to pre-created search-optimised information pages (e.g. a page about Arsenal Football Club). These landing pages have risen to the top of Google search results, driving tens of thousands of visitors to the FanPass website every month. 
Affordable Art Fair required a productive way to manage different types of content: blog posts, information pages and lead generation pages. We integrated WordPress into their platform so they could leverage its publishing tools and send lead generation data to a Salesforce CRM.

Jumio

<h2>General usage</h2>
Identity verification is an important component of user onboarding in most commercial applications because it supports compliance with laws and regulations (e.g. anti-money laundering laws), fraud prevention (e.g. fake sellers), and trust building between users (e.g. safety and security). 
Use cases for identity verification include hotel bookings, airport check-ins, ride sharing apps, holiday rentals, digital banking apps, e-commerce transactions, and online gaming (age verification).
However, it can also make onboarding new users a time &#8211; and resource intensive affair, especially if the application is available in multiple jurisdictions, each with their own laws and regulations. Manual or slow verification can create friction points that chase users away. It also makes it difficult to scale platforms like online marketplaces.
Fortunately there&#8217;s been a proliferation of identity verification solutions that aim to automate the process. Jumio stands out as one of the most scalable options for the following reasons:
It offers a superior user experience. Verification and authentication can be slotted into custom user flows that support individual business cases. This reduces friction and application abandonment.
It promotes fast, low-friction remote onboarding. An automated process uses face-based biometrics via smartphones, machine learning and AI to verify new user identities and authenticate existing account users.
Comprehensive security features protect user data and prevent fraud, money laundering and other financial crimes. These features include automated transaction monitoring that detects and flags anomalies, and AML screening that checks regularly updated government and other databases, such as sanctions blocklists. 
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Jumio has won several <a href="https://www.jumio.com/about/awards/">awards</a> including Hot Company of the Year in the security services section of the 2021 IT World Awards and gold in the 2021 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards.
It is available in 200+ countries and can process 3,500+ identity document types.
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
A marketplace should be able to vet users at scale otherwise it will struggle to grow. For one, impatient buyers will abandon the platform if the process is too arduous.
CobbleWeb has used Jumio to streamline the verification process to great effect. Our client, Soshop, a neobank that operates in the UK and France, wanted to onboard new cardholders in a simple and secure manner while catering for different banking regulations. Jumio was able to accelerate the sign-up process by automating the extensive checklist that had to be completed. It also provided the SoShop team with an admin dashboard that allows them to pause a user&#8217;s onboarding at any stage.
Rappi is a fast-growing  Latin American on-demand delivery platform valued at $5.25 billion. It needed a low-friction scalable way to onboard customers and couriers across multiple countries. Since they implemented Jumio the company has successfully added 750,000 new users and reduced courier onboarding times by 75%.
Airbnb has used Jumio since 2013 for user identity verification. This has sped up their onboarding process and created better transparency and trust between hosts and guests.

NodeJs (Express)

<h2>General usage</h2>
*A runtime environment provides the infrastructure &#8211; e.g. CPU, operating system or system software &#8211; where programs can be executed. An analogy would be using kitchen equipment to turn a recipe’s ingredients into a cake.
Node improves application performance (e.g. latency &amp; throughput) and scalability due to being:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Event-driven: application flow is only triggered by user actions such as button clicks or file downloads, which means less hogging of server resources.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Asynchronous: applications don&#8217;t wait for tasks to be completed before moving on to the next task, which means multiple server requests can be executed simultaneously. </li>
</ul>
Node’s fast, efficient execution of concurrent user requests is ideal for streaming and on-demand platforms like Netflix or Uber. Other real-time applications that benefit from this include video conferencing, VoiP, online gaming, instant messaging, and online trading (stockbroking sites). Mobile devices with slow connections also load content faster with Node, which is good for user retention.
Node makes a full-stack JavaScript product possible, since it can create and run server-side applications, traditionally done by backend scripting languages like PHP. Building both the front- and backend with JavaScript can contribute to a faster, more cohesive development process.
Server-side JavaScript development can be further expedited with <a href="https://expressjs.com/">Express</a>, the benchmark backend framework for Node.js. It provides prebuilt modules, middleware, and additional features for Node-based web platforms, mobile applications, APIs, and Microservices.
As a server-side application, Node gives you full control over how your frontend is rendered, making it fairly simple to output content that adheres to SEO best practices. So it’s good for organic traffic generation too. 
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Launched in 2009, Node has a very active third-party ecosystem and developer community. The Node package manager provides access to the world&#8217;s largest software library. Developers can choose from over a million free code modules (called &#8216;packages&#8217;) to fast-track or extend their projects.
Node’s growing popularity is reflected in the widespread use of its Express framework by the world’s top sites:
<img class="size-full wp-image-6118 aligncenter" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Express-trends.png" alt="" width="714" height="575" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Express-trends.png 714w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Express-trends-300x242.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 714px) 100vw, 714px" />Source: <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/framework/Express" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Builtwith</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Node is perfectly suited for marketplace features that need to support high-volume concurrent requests. Examples include auctioneering sites, like eBay, that have to handle thousands of simultaneous bids, and real-time messaging systems, such as the group chat feature we built for IHSS Connect, a job marketplace.
We have observed significant performance benefits compared to similar marketplace backends we’ve built with PHP (Symfony). Real-time IoT applications, such as the property access automation we developed for property management platform, Nestify, also experienced performance gains. 
Node also allows us to build a more seamless user experience by establishing closer linkage between front- and backend development, which keeps the focus on the user journey.

KeyNest

<h2>General usage</h2>
KeyNest solves a major headache for organisations and people that have to provide guests, contractors, cleaners and others temporary access to properties. Their platform automates a secure process that can be managed remotely via an app.
How it works:
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">On the KeyNest platform choose from 1000s of local stores or an automatic locker location</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Book your drop off and collection codes</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Drop the keys off when it suits you (no more rushing or staying up late)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Email or text the guest or cleaner the collection details, i.e. the store/locker location and the code</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">They can collect the keys at the store or locker with the code</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">When they are done they simply drop off the keys at the store or locker</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">You receive auto notifications via email when keys are collected or returned</li>
</ol>
The advantages of the KeyNest platform include:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Accessibility &#8211; 24/7 access and online support service.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Trackability &#8211; keys can be logged in and out with your phone by scanning an IoT fob that shares GPS data with the KeyNest app.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Security &#8211; time limits can be added to codes so that guests can&#8217;t check in earlier. or hand the code to someone else after their departure.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Scalability &#8211; unlimited key collections are available.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Recoverable &#8211; staff or contractors are notified automatically as soon as their keys become overdue.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Timesaving &#8211; no more running around after overdue or lost keys or waiting for guests to pitch up.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Better user experience &#8211; guests can collect keys when it suits them</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Automation &#8211; API integrations let you automatically generate and share collection codes with your guests every time a booking is confirmed. </li>
</ul>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
CobbleWeb automated property access for two groups for our client Nestify, a rental property management platform.  
Time-lapse codes are automatically sent to cleaners once they accept a shift with which to open a key lockbox. When the keys are returned to the lockbox the code expires. ​
Guests receive a collection code with which they can collect the keys at a designated store close to the property.  Property managers are automatically notified when keys are collected or returned.

Google Data Studio

<h2>General usage</h2>
Google&#8217;s free Data Studio tool makes it easy to transform raw data into metrics and dimensions that are used to create highly customisable data visualisations for dashboards and automated reports. It offers a cost-effective, user-friendly way to promote information sharing, collaboration and better business decisions across your organisation.
Data Studio offers resource-starved startups a number of benefits:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Visualise all your data on one central platform.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Transform data into insightful visualisations without code or SQL queries.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Blend data sources to reveal valuable relationships between data sets that promote business insights.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Automate the sharing of regularly updated reports with the click of a button.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Quick integration with data sources via pre-built data connectors.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Customise every aspect of reports or dashboards, e.g. logos, images, shapes, icons, colours, fonts, and line styles. </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Easily convert data into a wide range of charts, graphs, pivot tables,and geo maps.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Dynamic controls allow viewers to change report parameters, including date ranges and dimension filters like geography, segment, or channel.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Choose from hundreds of templates to speed up the design of dashboards.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Data Studio has a solid 4.5/5 star rating on Gartner’s <a href="https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/marketing-dashboards/vendor/google/product/data-studio">Peer Insights</a> platform.
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
A number of our clients use Google Data Studio to track standard marketplace metrics such as monthly recurring revenue, monthly active users, gross merchandise volume, average order value, take rate, and buyer-to-seller ratios. It&#8217;s also great for tracking the performance of different marketing campaigns.
Our role is to help our clients connect their databases to Data Studio. They take it from there and build their own custom dashboards. Easy-peasy.

Sift

<h2>General usage</h2>
Sift uses machine learning models to proactively prevent account takeover, payment fraud, scam content, and chargebacks. Its services are divided into:
Account Defense stops account takeover attacks. Appropriate use of two-factor authentication and security notifications protects your users without introducing unnecessary friction.
Payment Protection reduces risk and grows revenue. Includes a user-friendly dashboard to track and manage key metrics, the ability to add criteria that automates the blocking or accepting of transactions, and a monitor for identifying false-positive rates.
Dispute Management reduces chargebacks and automates disputes. Sift automatically selects relevant evidence based on industry, chargeback reason code, and applicable modifiers to generate a comprehensive dispute response.
Content Integrity protects users from spam and scams. Sift uses analysis of thousands of signals (e.g. timing, sequence and velocity of behavior) to flag malicious content.
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
3D Secure Authentication usually allows marketplaces to shift liability from their platform to the issuing bank. Unfortunately, not all banks support 3D Secure authentication. Instead of refusing those transactions we implemented Sift’s Dispute Management service. This allows our clients to greatly decrease the number of disputes and chargebacks.
DoorDash, a food delivery marketplace, was suffering from fraudsters that were using stolen credit cards. They had to refund victims when they disputed the charges, resulting in thousands of dollars in daily  losses.
DoorDash managed to dramatically reduce losses by using Sift’s Payment Protection product. Its real-time machine learning and global data network helped them to proactively block fraudsters, while real-time reports helped them to automate transaction reviews.

Prismic

<h2>General usage</h2>
Prismic offers a compelling basket of features for content-heavy applications. For a start, it&#8217;s quick to deploy since it&#8217;s cloud-based (no server installation needed).
As a headless CMS it provides the backend server and dashboard for your content  and lets you choose your own frontend technology, framework,or programming language. Its RESTful API allows seamless integration with React.js, Next.js etc.
Decoupling backend content creation from frontend display offers a number of advantages. It&#8217;s more secure, more scalable, and flexible frontend technology options offer better support for custom business flows. It also allows content to be pushed to multiple applications simultaneously, e.g. native Android and iOS apps.
The Prismic dashboard makes it easy to create and edit content. Custom content types can be created by drag and dropping required fields, e.g. title, body, image, byline into a template.
Slices are reusable page components (e.g. banners, images galleries, newsletter sign-ups) that can be mixed and matched to create custom page layouts. They act like a page builder for non-technical teams, which makes it easier to create landing pages for marketing campaigns.
Prismic vs WordPresss
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Offers better security</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Better support for integration with platform technologies like React and Next.js</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Easier to create custom layouts</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">More user-friendly editing and publishing functionalities, e.g. bulk scheduling</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Faster and more scalable since it’s built with the latest technologies and frameworks</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Takes care of updates, backups and security fixes</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Built-in CDN and  image optimisation</li>
</ul>
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Prismic is the second most popular cloud CMS on <a href="https://stackshare.io/cloud-content-management-system">Stackshare</a>.
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Prismic allows the Deliveroo marketing team to quickly spin up custom landing pages for targeted campaigns. Doing away with developer assistance has increased their productivity and lowered acquisition costs.

Twilio

<h2>General usage</h2>
Modern consumers want to interact with applications when and how it suits them. That has necessitated an omnichannel approach to user communication. Twilio provides the building blocks to integrate multiple communication channels into applications, supporting a myriad of use cases.
Channels include:
Messaging (SMS, WhatsApp, and Chat), Voice, Video, and Email.
Use cases include:
Notifications (e.g. order confirmations and shipping status), multi-party conversations (e.g. customer service chatbots), real-time video applications (e.g. video conferencing or video chat for health services, recruitment and education apps), marketing campaigns, user verification (e.g. one-time passwords for logins), and cloud-based customer service centers.
Why is Twilio so popular among high-profile applications as well as startups?
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It&#8217;s cost-effective and scalable. You only pay for what you use and volume discounts are available for fast-growing companies.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It supports multi-channel messaging. Users can effortlessly move from SMS to chat to WhatsApp to voice. All messaging includes media support for gifs, static images and audio files, while chatbots can utilise online/offline status, push notifications, message history, and deferred messaging.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It offers worldwide connectivity, with messaging services available in more than 180 countries.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It enables flexible integration of communication tools into any stage of the user journey.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">You can automate messaging functions such as user verification and marketing campaigns. These can then be monitored using its web service APIs.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Twilio is extremely reliable and deliverable. Aside from a 99.99% API uptime, it uses Phone Number Lookup, intelligent route selection, and message status tracking (pending, sent, delivered, failed or undelivered) to achieve close to 100% delivery rates. Details are given when messages fail or are undelivered, which makes it easier to fix issues.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Popularity</h2>
According to <a href="https://stackshare.io/voice-and-sms">Stackshare</a>, Twilio, founded in 2008, is by far the most popular voice and text solution.
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Keeping customers updated about the status of their transactions makes for a more engaging user experience. CobbleWeb has used Twilio to build SMS and WhatsApp messaging systems that do exactly that for our clients. Parking space booking platform, MobyPark, for instance, uses Twilio to send SMSes that remind car owners that their bookings are about to expire. We&#8217;ve also used Twilio-powered SMSes to verify the mobile numbers added to user profiles.
Airbnb used Twilio to drive better response times to booking requests. If a host hasn&#8217;t replied to a request within 32 hours, an automated SMS message with the details is sent to the host&#8217;s phone. The host can then text back to confirm or decline the request. Adding a mobile follow-up has increased the number of successful bookings.

Sterling

<h2>General usage</h2>
Some applications require user background checks that go beyond mere identity verification. This could include criminal history, credit report, education, employment history, previous addresses, and personal or professional reference checks. 
Background checks are most often used to vet job applicants and tenants, with risk mitigation and regulatory compliance also playing a role. They can be used to make dating sites safer and reduce legal liability, for example making sure a moving company&#8217;s truck driver doesn&#8217;t have a substance abuse problem. Screening certifications or professional licences such as for nursing may be required by law.
A sound background solution for digital applications should tick a few boxes before being adopted:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The information provided should be accurate.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Turnaround times should be quick for it to be scalable.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It should offer the right reports for the business case.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It should be cost-effective; a modular offering means only paying for the reports that are required.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Cross-border applications require a solution with an international footprint.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It should be legally compliant, by, for instance, getting consent from applicants, giving them the right to review and dispute inaccuracies, and keeping personal data secure.</li>
</ul>
Sterling checks all the above boxes and more. It offers customisable service options for small, medium and large enterprises, including packages created for specific industries. 
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Both <a href="https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-employment-background-check-services">PCMag</a> and <a href="https://www.techradar.com/best/background-check-services-sites-online">TechRadar</a> have included Sterling in their 2021 list of top background check solutions. According to Sterling it is used by more than half of Fortune 100 companies and 40,000 companies globally.
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Marketplaces can use background checks to build a competitive advantage. This can take the form of offering a safer environment than competitors, especially in sharing economy platforms like ride hailing or accommodation rentals. It can also be used to improve inventory quality in service marketplaces, by vetting service providers on freelance platforms for example.
Sterling&#8217;s marketplace and gig economy package includes criminal background checks, identity verification and ongoing monitoring. It will for example notify a ride hailing platform like <a href="https://uzurv.com/">UZURV</a> if there&#8217;s any changes in a driver&#8217;s criminal record or licence status.

Bootstrap

<h2>General usage</h2>
Bootstrap’s responsive CSS grid system allows you to create web applications that automatically adjust their layout to display perfectly on any device. Its mobile first approach puts the most commonly used devices at the centre of scalable UI design. This removes the need to write separate styling code for different screen sizes, while extensive cross-browser and operating system support ensures universal brand consistency.
Bootstrap also comes with pre-styled JavaScript plugins, such as modals (e.g. image popups), carousels, toggles, dropdowns, tabs, and accordions, that can be quickly added to an interface. An extensive SVG image library makes it easy to add icons to user interfaces.
Developers can increase their productivity further by using a preprocessor scripting language like <a href="https://sass-lang.com/">Sass</a>, which extends Bootstrap code management with nesting, <span data-tooltip="1" data-content="A simple example would be to create a colour variable that is applied to various UI elements, e.g. headings, buttons and borders. Changing the value of the variable to another colour will simultaneously update the colour of all those elements." class="cw-tooltip">variables and mixins. 
Due to its popularity there is lots of support for Bootstrap. Extensive and detailed documentation simplifies its implementation, while regular updates keep the framework in line with user needs and best practices. Paid themes offer additional ready-made, quality-checked components for specific use cases, like e-commerce listings and admin dashboards.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Ten-years old, Bootstrap is used by <a href="https://blog.getbootstrap.com/">22% of all websites</a> and by 2.7 million projects on GitHub, making it the most popular UI framework in the world, based on 2021 market share:
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-6105 size-full" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Screenshot-at-Sep-23-12-46-09.png" alt="" width="540" height="289" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Screenshot-at-Sep-23-12-46-09.png 540w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Screenshot-at-Sep-23-12-46-09-300x161.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 540px) 100vw, 540px" />
Source: <a href="https://www.wappalyzer.com/technologies/ui-frameworks/">Wappalyzer</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Successful marketplace development relies on rapid iteration to reach product-market fit. Bootstrap supports this approach with pre-styled components, responsive layouts, and almost unlimited customisation options that make the compiling and updating of marketplace user interfaces a breeze. 
Projects can be launched quicker with Bootstrap due to its easy integration and compatibility with other marketplace applications, whether it&#8217;s a CMS like WordPress or backend architecture.
Since multiple teams (design, frontend, backend) usually work on a marketplace project, Bootstrap&#8217;s centralised code promotes consistency among developers.
&nbsp;

Wordfence

<h2>General usage</h2>
Its popularity has made WordPress a juicy target for hackers and malware. Wordfence is a widely-used security tool that allows you to monitor and block any malicious attacks.
It includes a Web Application Firewall and malware scanner specially developed for WordPress, which are regularly updated with the latest firewall rules, malware signatures and malicious IP addresses. It also supports end to end encryption.
In addition to stopping hackers from exploiting vulnerabilities and blocking automated bot attacks, it also guides you how to fix an issue when it detects malware. 
Activity reports can be scheduled at regular intervals and provide updates on top IPs blocked, details of successful and failed login attempts, a firewall summary and a rundown of blocked attacks on the entire Wordfence network.
If you need more control over your application’s security measures, Wordfence’s premium version offers features such as spam blacklists, real-time IP blacklists, real-time firewall updates and country blocking. 
&nbsp;
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Wordfence is the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/browse/popular/">10th most popular</a> WordPress plugin &#8211; quite impressive if you take into account that there are over 54,000 WordPress plugins. 
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Marketplaces built with WordPress would do well to install Wordfence. It is extremely adept at detecting vulnerabilities in ecommerce plugins as this cautionary tale from 2020 shows. The Wordfence Threat Intelligence team discovered a vulnerability in Welcart e-Commerce, a WordPress plugin with over 20,000 installations. They contacted the plugin publisher who fixed the vulnerability. Simultaneously the Wordfence firewall was updated to protect its users.
CobbleWeb does not use WordPress for the main transactional platform of custom marketplaces, but we still play it safe and install Wordfence for linked blog and CMS installations.

Socket.io

<h2>General usage</h2>
Online consumers now demand immediacy in on-platform communication. This has forced a shift away from delayed email/inbox messages to instantaneous chat messaging. Socket is the tool to make that happen.
It uses JavaScript libraries and an <span data-tooltip="1" data-content=" In event-based systems messages are decoupled, therefore not dependent on each other. They are also asynchronous; events are published as they happen. This means applications like chat can have multiple simultaneous users who can pick up disrupted conversations from where they left off. Read more: https://developer.ibm.com/articles/advantages-of-an-event-driven-architecture/" class="cw-tooltip">event-driven architecture to connect browsers and Node.js servers. Code-sharing between the browser and server offers better compatibility, easier implementation, and reduces maintenance and chances for errors.
Socket also offers great performance through its use of Websockets which enables interaction between a web browser and web server with lower overhead than HTTP.
By falling back to HTTP, when Websockets are not available, it offers strong reliability. It’s also highly scalable as it can be expanded to multiple servers.
Other super-useful features of Socket :
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It does automated browser testing.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It enables broadcasting to all users or to a subset of users, e.g. notifications that a new user has joined a chat room.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It handles live connection detection and automatic reconnection.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It doesn&#8217;t get disrupted by proxies and load balancers.</li>
</ul>
Outside of chat applications, Socket can also be used for real-time analytics, binary streaming, document collaboration, social feeds, and multiplayer online gaming.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Socket has shown rapid growth among the world&#8217;s top ten thousand sites:
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6275" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Socket-usage.png" alt="" width="722" height="586" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Socket-usage.png 722w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Socket-usage-300x243.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 722px) 100vw, 722px" />
Source: <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/Socket.IO" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Builtwith</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
CobbleWeb offers its clients custom messaging systems that support their specific marketplace user flows. Our messaging solutions cater for real-time user-to-user messaging, chat rooms, as well as system messages and automatic notifications.
IHSS Connect, a healthcare marketplace, required an instant messaging feature so that care recipients could discuss confidential information anonymously with potential care providers before shortlisting them.
CobbleWeb used Socket to build an asynchronous real-time messaging system that supports group chats, integration with CRMs like Salesforce, and sharing multimedia files, e.g. spreadsheets, PDFs, images and videos. It also includes auto-generated messages that notify care recipients of new care provider applications.

React Js

<h2>General usage</h2>
React is mainly used to create UI elements like menus, forms, and product listings from reusable blocks of code called components. These independent UI building blocks underpin why so many high-profile applications use React:
It contributes to a better user experience. Web pages are served faster by only updating affected components instead of re-rendering the whole page in the user browser after each user action.
It offers better flexibility than most front-end frameworks. Developers can use independent React components where and when they’re needed within custom business flows.
Applications can be launched and updated faster. The ability to combine reusable UI components means that complex features can be developed much faster. 
Its modular nature allows multiple developers to work on different UI elements simultaneously, since changes to individual components do not affect the rest. This also supports <span data-tooltip="1" data-content="Continuous integration is a development practice in which multiple developers' work is merged into a central repository on a regular basis. The merged code is then subjected to automated tests for early detection and solving of issues" class="cw-tooltip">continuous integration, which makes testing easier.
It&#8217;s compatible with most backend frameworks. It can be combined with Python, PHP, Ruby, Java or JavaScript based backend technologies. 
React is extremely extensible due to a huge number of add-on libraries and feature templates.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
React has been adopted by a growing number of the world’s top sites since its first release in 2013. As of 2020, it is used by almost a quarter of the 100,000 most popular sites and over a third of the top 10,000 sites.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6126" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/React-trends.png" alt="" width="715" height="584" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/React-trends.png 715w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/React-trends-300x245.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 715px) 100vw, 715px" />Source: <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/React" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Builtwith</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
The majority of marketplaces have to serve users a large amount of assets, such as images, style sheets and functionalities. Slow-loading pages or features exacerbate customer churn and cart abandonment rates. React speeds up your marketplace front-end with user interfaces that are lightweight and load almost instantaneously.
Complex marketplace features like admin dashboards, shopping carts, product navigation, and seller pages can be built quicker by combining React’s reusable UI components. They also make it easier to build custom UI features for individual marketplace scenarios.
We&#8217;ve used React in several marketplace projects such as FanPass, a ticketing marketplace that needed to be faster than its competitors &#8211; an important consideration for someone buying tickets to an event that is selling out. React components were also used to build innovative interactive features, which further enhanced the user experience.
React was a great choice for our client, Nestify&#8217;s cleaner app. This user-friendly mini-marketplace for rental property cleaners has resulted in better efficiencies and a 30% increase in revenue for landlords.

Forter

<h2>General usage</h2>
Forter focuses on identifying fraud at the point of transaction. It uses cyber intelligence, risk management, feedback from its global merchant network, and behavioral data analysis to improve the accuracy of its machine learning-driven solutions.
Except for fraud prevention, Forter also offers ways to optimise customer experiences and minimise cart abandonment by reducing false declines and other friction points.
Its solutions include:
Payment Protection: Leverage a network of global merchant data to automated real-time decisions that save time and resources.
PSD2 Solution: Minimise friction by only applying 3D Secure when necessary. Maximise conversions with full PSD2 compliance. 
Policy Abuse Protection: Identify and block abusers from returns, promotion, and reseller abuse.
Account Protection: Protect against identity theft, account takeover, and account opening fraud with advanced machine learning, continuous user authentication (from login to logout), and identity linking (uncovers hidden connections between digital identities). 
Smart Routing: Recover legitimate transactions that have been declined by offering alternative payment processors or payment methods.
Forter Element: Uses its global data network of over one billion online shoppers to automate real-time fraud decisions and minimise false positives and chargebacks.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Market confidence in Forter&#8217;s offering is reflected in its triple unicorn status after a $300 million funding round in May 2021 valued the company at $3 billion. Investors include VC heavyweights like Tiger Global Management, Bessemer Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital and Salesforce Ventures.
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
CobbleWeb mainly uses Forter’s Account Protection service to prevent fraudulent account creation. It allows us to customise fraud prevention interventions according to each marketplace’s customer journey.
Delivery.com&#8217;s fast order fulfillment expectation of under an hour made it very difficult to manually manage fraud reviews. This resulted in significant losses due to chargebacks. They therefore decided to use Forter&#8217;s Payment Protection solution to scale the fraud review process. 
Its real-time, fully automated, fraud evaluation and protection for every touchpoint along the customer journey, managed to minimise chargebacks without creating friction for shoppers.

React Native

<h2>General usage</h2>
React Native offers plenty of flexibility. As a component-based framework it can be used to create standalone iOS or Android apps from scratch or be added to existing mobile projects.
Its portability supports faster, cheaper mobile app development. Why? Because a single codebase can be shared between platforms, making it easier to simultaneously develop and maintain iOS and Android apps. 
Access to device platform APIs means that features like phone cameras or user location can be used. This can be used to enhance the user experience via features such as product image search or nearest store location
<h2>Popularity</h2>
React Native was first released by Facebook in 2015 and has since been maintained by them as an open source project. As of 2018 it had the second highest number of contributors on Github. It is further supported by partners such as Microsoft that have invested in its maintenance and further development.
Since 2019, React Native has gone head-to-head with Google&#8217;s Flutter as the most popular cross-platform mobile framework.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6130" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/React-native-trends.png" alt="" width="707" height="454" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/React-native-trends.png 707w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/React-native-trends-300x193.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 707px) 100vw, 707px" />Source: <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/869224/worldwide-software-developer-working-hours/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Statista</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
React Native is ideal for cost-and time-conscious marketplace startups. In addition to its cross-platform portability, JavaScript-based components allow code updates to be viewed without having to rebuild the native app each time. This promotes rapid iteration and makes testing of new product features much easier.
The world’s largest meta-marketplace for e-commerce businesses, Shopify, has given React Native a resounding long-term <a href="https://shopify.engineering/react-native-future-mobile-shopify">endorsement</a>. This included rewriting their flagship point-of-sale app in React Native.

NextJS

<h2>General benefits</h2>
Next.js provides built-in server-side rendering support. This prepares page content on the server instead of the client (browser), which reduces the flickering of first-time page loads caused by client-side rendering.
It also improves SEO by automatically prerendering React content on the server so search engines can index what users see &#8211; the full HTML files. Otherwise React would render content in the client browser which would mean search engines would crawl empty HTML files. 
React can use server side rendering, but that requires a much more time-consuming setup process. Instead, repeat page loads are handled by React in the client browser for increased speed.
Next.js uses file-based routing in place of React&#8217;s code-based routing. This removes the need for an additional React Router that allows single page applications to change screen content for different URLs without sending additional requests to the server.
It offers a full stack framework for React. This simplifies adding backend code (e.g. server files, databases, APIs) to a React project.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Despite its first release happening fairly recently in 2016, Next.js has shown rapid growth among the world’s top web applications.
&nbsp;
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6161" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/NextJS-trends.png" alt="" width="725" height="592" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/NextJS-trends.png 725w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/NextJS-trends-300x245.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 725px) 100vw, 725px" />Source: <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/framework/Next.js" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Builtwith</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Most marketplaces rely on organic search as a key driver of traffic. CobbleWeb has used Next.js successfully to improve the SEO of several marketplace projects. 
Images are notorious for slowing down applications, especially on product marketplaces. It can be time consuming and difficult to optimise thousands of user generated images though. Fortunately, Next.js offers us a great solution:
Its built-in image component lazy loads images, enforces image dimensions, makes images responsive, preloads selected images (for the initial images on the user&#8217;s screen), while automatic image optimisation uses new light-weight image formats like WebP and generates smaller image sizes for mobile devices.
Next.js has also increased our productivity. Automatic universal rendering (first on the server and then in the client’s browser) means our development teams can simply focus on building outstanding user interfaces without worrying where and when components are rendered.

RESTful API

<h2>General usage</h2>
An application programming interface (API) is a set of rules that allows different applications to communicate with each other. It allows one database to retrieve or use information from another database. This has huge implications for both growth and innovation in software development.
Representational State Transfer (REST) is simply an <a href="https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/rest-apis">architectural style</a> for the development of APIs that use HTTP to enable communication between applications. APIs that adhere to the REST style guidelines are therefore called RESTful.
Due to characteristics such as cacheability and flexibility (guidelines can be implemented as needed and most programming languages or data formats can be used), RESTful APIs are considered lightweight, fast and scalable.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
RESTful APIs are by far the most popular API format in use today.
<a href="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Popularity-of-API-protocols.png"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-9999" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Popularity-of-API-protocols.png" alt="Popularity of API protocols (2023)" width="680" height="500" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Popularity-of-API-protocols.png 680w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Popularity-of-API-protocols-300x221.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /></a>
Source: <a href="https://blog.postman.com/api-protocols-in-2023/">Postman</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
APIs can promote better efficiency in your marketplace. For instance, vendors can use an API to automatically upload product information from their internal systems to your marketplace instead of adding it manually.
Provide a superior user experience with enhanced functionality. APIs allow the integration of third-party applications (e.g. GPS location services like Google Maps) that add extra value to your platform. CobbleWeb has used APIs to improve many of our client’s marketplaces in areas such as product search, shipping, booking systems, product catalogues and customer reviews.

GraphQL

<h2>General usage</h2>
GraphQL can improve API performance in a number of ways:
It supports faster response times by reducing the number of <span data-tooltip="1" data-content="An API endpoint is a URL that gives users access to resources - data or an operation - on a server. Example: imagine cobbleweb.co.uk is the base URL of the CobbleWeb API. To access information about the team you need to append an endpoint like /about-us to the base URL to access that information." class="cw-tooltip">API endpoints needed for each user request. Data can thus be retrieved from multiple resources with a single request. 
Performance is also boosted by the ability to specify the exact structure of data returned by the server. Users receive only what they need, which eliminates over-fetching or under-fetching of data.
GraphQL also simplifies data management and speeds up application development. This is largely due to its flexibility. It can be added to existing APIs without having to create new versions, developers only have to update a single GraphQL query instead of integrating multiple API endpoints, and it is not limited to a specific database or resource.
These traits make GraphQL ideal for real-time applications like instant chat, applications that rely on multiple data resources, and mobile applications. 
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Originally developed in 2012, GraphQL is another Facebook gift to the open-source community. Today the GraphQL community is supported by the GraphQL Foundation, which counts heavyweight companies like PayPal, Shopify, IBM, Amazon and Airbnb among its members.
GraphQL and tools built for it, like Apollo Client have experienced explosive growth over the past five years: developers have voted them their most popular data layer technologies. 
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-6139 size-full" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/GraphQL-trends.png" alt="" width="1473" height="433" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/GraphQL-trends.png 1473w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/GraphQL-trends-300x88.png 300w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/GraphQL-trends-1024x301.png 1024w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/GraphQL-trends-768x226.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1473px) 100vw, 1473px" />Source: <a href="https://2020.stateofjs.com/en-US/technologies/datalayer/">Stateofjs</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Marketplace features like shopping carts can have multiple interdependent API endpoints (e.g. checkout API, user API &amp; product API) that have to be called at the same time. This can create performance issues. Since GraphQL queries can follow the links between endpoints, it only uses one request to get all the necessary data. That makes it a great solution to speed up your marketplace application, even on slow mobile networks, which is excellent for conversion rates.
Another common marketplace example is product listings. Instead of fetching all the information about each product, which will slow down the page, GraphQL allows you to only fetch relevant details such as the product name, short description and price.
Art marketplace, Artsy, uses GraphQL to be more consistent with the way data is fetched across their apps and to improve page speed. The latter was made possible due to (1) a reduced payload since only the data required are fetched and (2) the combining of multiple data fetches into a single request.
Yelp implemented GraphQL to make life easier for third-party developers that want to use relational data in their apps. Now they only need to configure one request to the Yelp database.

PHP (Symfony)

<h2>General usage</h2>
PHP is the most widely used server-side programming language, due to its versatility in adding functionality to web applications. In use since 1994, it can be considered a mature programming language, but that doesn’t mean outdated though. The PHP development team constantly adds new features to keep up with the latest enterprise-friendly trends, such as the ability to integrate new technologies like GraphQL and WebSockets. 
So why use a framework like Symfony instead of vanilla PHP? 
In a word, modularity. Prebuilt components reduce the need for repetitive coding of basic functionalities. Developers can thus deploy sites quickly and apply rapid iteration as part of an agile approach.
Symfony also offers:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Performance. It&#8217;s one of the fastest PHP frameworks.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Scalability. It’s well-structured and maintained, making it easy to extend with more servers.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Flexibility and interoperability. <a href="https://symfony.com/components">Standalone components</a> (e.g. validation, forms, password hashing, messaging) can be integrated into existing platforms without using the full framework. The framework itself is highly customisable.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Robust. The framework enforces good coding standards with built-in best practices. It also includes testing and debugging tools.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Popularity</h2>
PHP is used by <a href="https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php">79% of websites</a> whose server-side technology is known. More than 40% of the 10,000 most visited sites use PHP.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6122" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/PHP-trends.png" alt="" width="713" height="586" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/PHP-trends.png 713w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/PHP-trends-300x247.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 713px) 100vw, 713px" />Source: <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/framework/PHP" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Builtwith</a>
Symfony, first released in 2005, has a huge community of 600,000 developers in 120 countries.
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Popular platforms such as DailyMotion and Spotify have proven that Symfony can meet the scaling challenges of any marketplace. It’s flexibility makes it perfect for specific business flows, while it’s modular structure supports incrementality, i.e. adding functionality as needed.
As a full-stack framework, Symfony is ideal for complex marketplace applications with many functionalities. Its learning curve is steeper than other PHP frameworks though, which requires technically adept developers.

MongoDB

<h2>General usage</h2>
How is MongoDB different from SQL database solutions?
Flexible data structure. It organises data in schemaless documents that can have dynamic structures instead of the restrictive static structures (i.e. tables) used in SQL databases. This ability to quickly adapt to changing data structure requirements supports agile growth strategies, for instance rolling out new features.
Scalability. MongoDB can accommodate growing traffic by sharding, i.e. adding more servers to a NoSQL database. This is also called horizontal scaling which creates more capacity than vertical scaling (increasing an SQL database server’s RAM or CPU).
Performance. NoSQL databases require less processing and thus produce faster query results. That’s because, unlike SQL databases, they don’t need to combine data from multiple tables to resolve a query; everything is already in one document.
These characteristics make MongoDB a good option for applications that need to manage large amounts of unstructured data from multiple servers. This includes big data applications, content management systems, and fast-growing e-commerce platforms.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Founded in 2007, MongoDB has a huge community of developers. According to Statista it is the most popular NoSQL database solution in 2021.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6157" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/MongoDB-trends.png" alt="" width="992" height="632" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/MongoDB-trends.png 992w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/MongoDB-trends-300x191.png 300w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/MongoDB-trends-768x489.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 992px) 100vw, 992px" />Source: <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/809750/worldwide-popularity-ranking-database-management-systems/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Statista</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
CobbleWeb started using MongoDB instead of MySQL as a database solution for its marketplace clients for a number of reasons:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It works really well with Node.js and Express.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It scales better than previous platforms built with MySQL. </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Its flexible document schema is useful for storing third-party data with different structures.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It can handle dynamic queries, thus allowing users to find data using any criteria. This is valuable for marketplaces, where complex database queries are quite common. </li>
</ul>
Our client FanPass, for instance, used a search engine built with MySQL to filter and return queries for sport and other social events. When their marketplace grew rapidly and a higher number of users started looking for more events with multiple filters the search feature crashed. The solution was to switch to MongoDB which could handle the high number of filtered queries.
We applied the same approach to Care Connect’s healthcare job marketplace, which utilised more than twenty search filters. MongoDB was also the better option to handle the various queries in their analytics dashboard.

Stripe

<h2>General usage</h2>
Secure, user-friendly financial transactions lie at the heart of online commerce. Without a suitable payment gateway, your ecommerce platform will not succeed. 
Criteria for payment gateways include scalability, availability in local currencies, payment methods, ability to handle cross-border transactions and take care of regulatory burdens such as KYC. On top of that, they need to offer seamless payment experiences that support different revenue models, e.g. subscriptions for SaaS platforms or split payouts for online marketplaces.
Stripe became the world’s second-most valuable startup because it ticks all the above boxes and more:
Stripe supports 135+ currencies and can be used by businesses in 46 countries.
It accepts all modern payment methods including credit and debit cards, bank transfers, bank debits, bank redirects, buy-now-pay-later, vouchers, and digital wallets (e.g. Apple Pay and Google Pay).
It supports recurring payments for different billing types: subscriptions, usage based, volume tiers, promotions and trial periods. Billing frequency can be set daily, weekly, monthly or annually.
It supports pre-authorisation. Merchants can place a hold on a card to reserve funds which are only paid out after a product is delivered or a service has been rendered.
It provides high levels of security and automates regulatory compliance. Stripe is a PCI Level 1 service provider, the highest certification in the payments industry. All transactions are encrypted, screened by advanced anti-fraud technology and subject to KYC checks.
It supports split payouts. Customer charges can be split between multiple sellers, taxes and platform fees. This is especially important for <a href="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/seller-payout-guide-for-online-marketplaces/">multi-vendor marketplaces</a> where shopping carts may include products from more than one seller.
Stripe offers best-in-class flexibility for all types of online businesses. Smaller companies can use their modular out-of-the-box solutions, such as prebuilt UI components, that integrate with popular platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce. Larger or more complex applications can customise payment flows in a variety of programming languages like NodeJs, PHP and React to suit their specific business cases.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Stripe was rated the top global payments service provider in 2021 by <a href="https://go.stripe.global/rs/072-MDK-283/images/The_Forrester_WaveTM_Merchant_Payment_Providers_Q3_2020.pdf">Forrester</a>, a leading market research company. It’s therefore no surprise that it is used by 37% of the world’s top 1 million sites:
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6279" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Stripe-market-share.png" alt="" width="504" height="502" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Stripe-market-share.png 504w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Stripe-market-share-300x300.png 300w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Stripe-market-share-150x150.png 150w" sizes="(max-width: 504px) 100vw, 504px" />
Source: <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/payment/payments-processor" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Builtwith</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Stripe’s dedicated marketplace solution, <a href="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/which-stripe-connect-account-for-your-marketplace/">Connect</a>, has made payment integration for marketplaces faster, more adaptable, and more scalable. It caters for any marketplace business model as evidenced by its widespread adoption by marketplace heavyweights like Amazon, Deliveroo, Lyft,  Booking.com and Zillow.
CobbleWeb has used Stripe Connect to handle complex payment flows for a number of high-growth marketplaces. We’ve used it to accommodate a variable commission structure for Affordable Art Fair. Commision can be percentage-based or fixed amount and can be set globally or per seller. 
We improved property management platform, Nestify’s quality control by including a hold function for cleaner payouts. Property managers are able to review and approve a cleaner’s work before payouts are triggered.
Stripe Connect allowed us to grow event ticket marketplace, FanPass’s international client base with multi-currency support for a wide range of payment methods and payout types. Their payment flow also includes a variable commission structure with different payout frequencies for different classes of sellers. High risk sellers, for example, are only paid out after the ticket has been collected.

Nginx

<h2>General usage</h2>
Nginx is known as a fast high-performance web server. This is due its asynchronous event-driven architecture which bundles multiple requests within one thread. In comparison, process-driven servers like Apache create a new thread for each request. 
As a reverse proxy, Nginx can act as a middleman between users and backend servers. This is good for security since the server information stays hidden from direct access. One use case would be protection against DDoS attacks by rejecting traffic from blacklisted IP addresses or limiting the number of requests accepted from a user. 
Reverse proxies can also speed up response times by compressing and caching server responses (e.g. using gzip).
As a load balancer, Nginx distributes client requests among multiple servers, then returns the server responses back to the appropriate clients. This is good for when a single server can’t handle the volume of requests efficiently. Multiple servers sharing the workload make applications more scalable and reliable. 
&nbsp;
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Nginx, publicly released in 2004, serves almost 50% of the top 100,000 sites in the world.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6165" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Nginx-trends.png" alt="" width="715" height="583" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Nginx-trends.png 715w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Nginx-trends-300x245.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 715px) 100vw, 715px" />Source: <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/Web-Server/nginx" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Builtwith</a>
&nbsp;
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
The CobbleWeb team switched from Apache to Nginx for its better performance and scalability. Nginx performs better at scale because it caches content by default, while Apache has to be configured to do so.  
Nginx is also easier to set up since it includes by default functionality that needs to be added to Apache via modules.

Paypal

<h2>General usage</h2>
PayPal&#8217;s main strengths are its extensive ecosystem and global footprint. Its services cover consumer payments (PayPal Wallet &amp; Venmo), payment processing (PayPal Commerce Platform and Braintree), POS (iZettle), payouts (Hyperwallet) and fraud detection (Simility). As the most widely-used payments platform, PayPal accepts payments in more than 100 currencies across 200+ countries.
It supports most payment methods: PayPal, Venmo (in the US), credit and debit cards, vouchers, wallets, direct banking, bank redirects, recurring payments,  and buy-now-pay-later. The latter includes built-in credit services, PayPal Credit and Pay in 4, an interest-free option.
PayPal offers a range of anti-fraud measures such as automated transaction monitoring, <a href="https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/paypal-safety-and-security">purchase protection</a> and <a href="https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/security/seller-protection">seller protection</a>, as well as anti-money laundering, PCI and KYC compliance screening. Paying with PayPal adds an additional layer of security which, together with its widespread use and highly recognisable brand name, can drive more sales.
Payment gateway integration is relatively simple, with plug-and-play modules and UI templates for small ecommerce businesses. Customisable enterprise solutions are available for larger platforms with more complex payment flows.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
PayPal is the most popular payment tool on <a href="https://stackshare.io/payments">Stackshare</a>. Together with its digital wallet, Venmo, it is the fourth most popular online payment method in the world. 
<img class="size-full wp-image-6283 aligncenter" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Paypal-share-market.png" alt="" width="504" height="279" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Paypal-share-market.png 504w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Paypal-share-market-300x166.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 504px) 100vw, 504px" />
Source: <a href="https://www.wappalyzer.com/technologies/payment-processors" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Wappalyzer</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
PayPal’s marketplace solution, <a href="https://www.paypal.com/us/business/platforms-and-marketplaces">PayPal Commerce Platform</a>, offers global scale and flexibility. In addition to PayPal&#8217;s standard ecommerce features, it offers support for split payouts, delayed payouts, disputes and refund management.
Frictionless payouts nurture trust among sellers. This motivated Walmart Marketplace to integrate PayPal’s Hyperwallet for payouts to give sellers more payout options. Payout volume subsequently increased by <a href="https://assets.ctfassets.net/7rifqg28wcbd/20lsY5axN5rsU3Xv6aCV74/0f59ff1b2f7ea1bd902cdf68535281f6/PP_Walmart_-_Case_Study_120820_USA_FINAL.pdf">629%</a>.

<h2>General usage</h2>
Before the advent of APIs, EDIs were the preferred way to share business documents like invoices and purchase orders electronically. They are still widely used in the manufacturing industry and form an important part of most B2B supply chains and procurement processes.
EDIs can connect different types of business systems including e-commerce solutions, ERP software, warehouse management systems, and accounting software. 
Key EDI benefits:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Saves time and money through automation of paper documentation</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Improves efficiency and productivity by sharing and processing documents faster and with greater accuracy</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Reduces errors through standardisation of document formatting</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Improves tracking and reporting via integration with the rest of an IT system</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Robust security and privacy with secure connections opened between only two parties at a time. This makes them extremely safe from hacking or theft.</li>
</ul>
&nbsp;
EDIs can be difficult to implement since they often have to comply with changing government regulations, industry standards and individual business needs. Businesses situated in different countries may for example have seperate requirements for document formats.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
With its genesis in the 1960s, EDIs have a long history and are still used by many companies. In 2019 they enabled almost <a href="https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2020/06/01/why-edi-still-has-a-big-role-to-play-in-b2b-ecommerce/">eighty percent</a> of all B2B sales. Most supply chain executives believe that EDIs will continue to play a role in data transfer.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6152" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/EDI-trends.png" alt="" width="703" height="364" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/EDI-trends.png 703w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/EDI-trends-300x155.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 703px) 100vw, 703px" />Source: <a href="https://www.selecthub.com/electronic-data-interchange/edi-software-trends/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Selecthub</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
CobbleWeb has experience developing EDIs for complex business cases. One such advanced EDI protocol formed part of a quality analysis tool we built for Trelleborg, a high-tech manufacturing company. It helps Trelleborg&#8217;s business process management database, which runs on Microsoft Dynamics, to share data with the tool’s users.

ChargeBee

<h2>General usage</h2>
As the business world evolves from a mostly transactional model to a more relationship-driven one, the popularity of recurring revenue streams has risen among ecommerce and other digital applications. Financial services giant, UBS, expects the <a href="https://www.zuora.com/subscribed/ubs-declares-its-worth-investing-in-the-subscription-economy/">subscription economy</a> to grow by 18% per year, doubling to $1.5 trillion by 2025.
This trend is driven by a variety of factors:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The need for stable revenue streams and increased lifetime customer value among many startups</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Faster internet speed offered by 5G and fibre </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Cheaper cloud-based IT infrastructure (e.g. SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Mobile shopping </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Increased at-home consumption of entertainment, food delivery and technology services (Zoom anyone?)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The rise of <a href="https://a16z.com/2018/11/27/services-marketplaces-service-economy-evolution-whats-next/">service marketplaces</a></li>
</ul>
The caveat is that incorrect implementation of a recurring revenue model can hurt your business. Application owners that want to make the switch should do it with the right technology.
Chargebee does a great job of simplifying the implementation and management of recurring billing. Some of its most valuable features include:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Automated compliance management ( PCI DSS Level 1 certified)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Support for free trials, promotions and coupons</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Support for flat fee or usage-based billing (tiered, volume or quantity-based)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Upgrading / downgrading of subscriptions and pro-rata billing</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Support for over 100 currencies</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Automated global tax, invoice and refund management</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Integration with 30+ payment gateways such as Stripe, Braintree, WorldPay and PayPal</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Tracking of SaaS metrics</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Seamless integration with finance, marketing and sales applications like Xero, QuickBooks, Zendesk, Mailchimp and Salesforce</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Scalability &#8211; it can handle high volumes of subscribers</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Custom dunning logic: payment reminders, smart payment retries, reports</li>
</ul>
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Investopedia rated ChargeBee the <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/best-recurring-billing-software-5114532">best overall recurring billing software</a> in 2021. It is the second most popular billing and subscription tool on <a href="https://stackshare.io/billing-and-subscriptions">Stackshare</a>.
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
ChargeBee’s fast and easy setup is ideal for marketplace startups that want to implement and test subscriptions as part of their revenue model. It can also make recurring billing, collection and promotions more efficient.
RangeMe is a B2B product discovery marketplace that connects suppliers with retailers like Target, Whole Foods and Sephora. They experienced high churn rates due to failed payments.They also struggled to implement discounts that could increase subscription conversions. ChargeBee&#8217;s dunning process helped them to reduce churn rates dramatically, while automated discount coupons brought in more than 2,000 new subscribers.
Deliverr uses third-party warehouse space as fulfillment centres for merchants on Shopify, eBay, Amazon and other marketplace platforms. Manual invoicing and payment reminders resulted in hundreds of thousands of unpaid subscriptions. They used Chargebee to automate billing and accounts receivable which reduced unpaid invoices by 80%.

<a href="https://www.klarna.com/us/">Klarna</a>

<h2>General usage</h2>
38% of shoppers use buy-now-pay-later payment terms for purchases that would otherwise not fit their budget. According to <a href="https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/buy-now-pay-later-outlook/">CB Insights</a>, installment plan transactions are forecast to grow 10 &#8211; 15x  to $1T by 2025.
Klarna gives online consumers a number of options to delay payments for purchases from subscribed retailers. They can choose between splitting purchases into four interest-free installments spread over two months, paying the full amount interest-free after 30 days, or using 6 &#8211; 36 month credit finance.
Klarna’s flexible payment options have a number of advantages for merchants and marketplace platforms:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">As a marketing tool, it helps to attract and retain buyers</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It reduces cart abandonment rates and increases conversion rates (30% on average according to Klarna)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It boosts average order value and shopping frequency</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Klarna assumes the financial risk by paying merchants up front</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Integrates seamlessly with existing payment and shipping flows</li>
</ul>
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Klarna is the leading buy-now-pay-later technology among the world’s top million sites:<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6290" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Klarna-market-share.png" alt="" width="503" height="498" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Klarna-market-share.png 503w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Klarna-market-share-300x297.png 300w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Klarna-market-share-150x150.png 150w" sizes="(max-width: 503px) 100vw, 503px" />
Source: <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/payment/pay-later" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Builtwith</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Curated beauty product marketplace, Sephora, wanted to make its products more accessible for younger audiences. After implementing Klarna&#8217;s flexible payment plans the AOV of online purchases rose by 35%.

<h2>General usage</h2>
AWS is the world&#8217;s largest and most comprehensive provider of cloud infrastructure and associated services. Its growth has largely been driven by the move from self-hosted IT infrastructure to cloud-based services. This has freed companies up to focus on their core activities and accelerated the development of web applications.
The AWS platform offers more than 200 products, services and tools that can be used together or separately to build web applications. AWS&#8217;s DevOps tools can for example be used in conjunction with non-AWS clouds or even dedicated servers.
Some of AWS’s benefits are:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Easier deployment of infrastructure; all the necessary infrastructure components are in one place.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">You only pay for what you use.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Scalability.  Add additional resources, like servers, as your company grows.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Security. Infrastructure is monitored 24/7 and data is automatically encrypted. AWS supports 90 security standards and compliance certifications and is trusted by the US military and global banks.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Reliability. Its distributed global network of data centres prevents data loss.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Performance. Its network is optimised for low latency, with the largest footprint of data centres that bring servers closer to end users.</li>
</ul>
Common AWS products used for the development of web applications include:
Elastic Beanstalk automates the deployment and configuration of application code. This includes  scaling, application health monitoring, load balancing, and capacity provisioning. 
Amazon EC2 is a cloud computing platform made up of processors, storage, networking, and operating systems. AWS guarantees 99.99% uptime.
Amazon RDS is a relational database service that offers a choice of six database engines: Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server.
Amazon S3 is a scalable data storage service.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
The AWS Partner Network includes thousands of developers who specialise in using AWS services to build applications for customers. AWS <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/hosting/Amazon">hosts</a> more than half of the top 10,000 and more than a third of the top 100,000 sites in the world. According to <a href="https://www.statista.com/chart/18819/worldwide-market-share-of-leading-cloud-infrastructure-service-providers/">Statista</a> it is the leading provider of cloud infrastructure in 2021:
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6307" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/AWS-market-share.png" alt="" width="592" height="365" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/AWS-market-share.png 592w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/AWS-market-share-300x185.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 592px) 100vw, 592px" />
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
AWS offers a quick way to scale growing marketplaces horizontally by adding multiple instances of the same infrastructure component, such as web servers. AWS tools like CloudWatch help to monitor marketplace infrastructure and identify areas for optimisation.
Airbnb migrated most of its cloud computing functions to AWS a year after it was founded to simplify the management and customisation of its infrastructure stack. This freed their team up to focus on growing the platform. The rest is history.

OVHcloud

<h2>General usage</h2>
OVHcloud offers a range of computing services, from private and public cloud infrastructure to dedicated servers and virtual private servers. Its dedicated servers can be 5 -10 times cheaper than AWS cloud servers. Their drawback is that they have limited hardware resources, e.g. processing power and storage space, and are difficult to scale. 
<h2>Popularity</h2>
OVHcloud is the joint largest provider of dedicated server hosting in the world:
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6315" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/OVHCloud-market-share.png" alt="" width="503" height="499" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/OVHCloud-market-share.png 503w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/OVHCloud-market-share-300x298.png 300w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/OVHCloud-market-share-150x150.png 150w" sizes="(max-width: 503px) 100vw, 503px" />
Source: <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/hosting/dedicated-hosting" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Builtwith</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Talent, a global job marketplace, receives more than 70 million visitors per month. They needed a stable, scalable, secure infrastructure to support high data traffic. OVHcloud&#8217;s Public Cloud infrastructure with dedicated servers and private network provided the required performance and data storage security. This helped them reduce cost by half while maintaining scalability.
CobbleWeb mainly uses OVHcloud’s dedicated servers for clients who want to launch an MVP marketplace to test the market. Once product-market fit has been validated, we usually migrate the platform to a more scalable AWS infrastructure.
It’s worth noting that despite differences in service offerings, all three of our recommended infrastructure service providers &#8211; AWS, DigitalOcean and OVHcloud &#8211; provide high levels of security and best practices.

DigitalOcean

<h2>General usage</h2>
DigitalOcean is a pure play cloud infrastructure provider that differentiates itself through ease of implementation, affordable pricing and scalability. 
It speeds up deployment with preconfigured frameworks like Node.js and 1-click apps like Docker that can be added in under sixty seconds. A commissioned <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/resources/cloud-performance-report/">report</a> showed that DigitalOcean beat both Amazon and Google’s cloud services in performance and price.
Services include managed databases, networking, storage, virtual servers, load balancing, and performance monitoring. 
<h2>Popularity</h2>
DigitalOcean has shown rapid growth among the top million sites:
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6311" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Digital-Ocean-Usage-Trends.png" alt="" width="735" height="587" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Digital-Ocean-Usage-Trends.png 735w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Digital-Ocean-Usage-Trends-300x240.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 735px) 100vw, 735px" />
Source: <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/hosting/Digital-Ocean" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Builtwith</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
DigitalOcean is ideal for smaller marketplace startups that want to deploy quickly and conserve their budget, but still want high performance and scalability.

Elasticsearch

<h2>General usage</h2>
Users of on-site search features have almost <a href="https://moz.com/blog/on-site-search">double the conversion rate</a> compared to overall site conversion rates. It thus makes sense to invest in a fast, accurate internal search engine for your ecommerce application, especially data-intensive platforms like online marketplaces.
Elasticsearch is the go-to choice for storing, searching and analysing huge volumes of data quickly. This is an important consideration when you have lots of vendors who are selling multiple products to many customers who want fast transactions
It can be used in a wide range of applications, since it can handle most types of data, whether textual, numerical, geospatial, structured, or unstructured.
NoSQL distributed databases are used to deliver near instant search results. Autocomplete suggestions can further speed up the search process.
The relevance of search results can be improved in a number of ways:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Web crawlers can be configured to index and synchronise selected content at chosen intervals. </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Search algorithms can be fine-tuned with bigram matching, stemming, provision for typos and synonyms, and customised with page ranking and weight.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Faceted search (filters) can be added to refine search results by price, category, location and other product attributes.</li>
</ul>
A real-time analytics dashboard is available for logs and search metrics via Elastic’s customisable <a href="https://www.elastic.co/kibana/">Kibana user interface</a>. This can provide valuable insights that can be used for product line optimisation.
Other pluspoints include quick implementation via a few lines of code and resilience due to its distributed database backups.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Elasticsearch is supported by a large developer community (1650+ contributors on GitHub) and is the most popular Search as a Service tool on <a href="https://stackshare.io/search-as-a-service">Sharestack</a> by far.
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Elasticsearch is not generally used for early-stage marketplaces, but relatively easy to add once the platform’s growth demands it. It can be scaled very easily by adding additional servers to increase capacity.
We used Elasticsearch to build a robust search feature for MobyPark&#8217;s parking marketplace. It&#8217;s ability to deliver regularly updated near real-time search results was important since parking space bookings could be for as short as fifteen minutes. Subsequently, search failures decreaseded five-fold. The improved user experience contributed to a 4x growth in repeat purchases.
SoShop is a neobank with a searchable loyalty reward platform that handles more than 50,000 transactions per day. We used Elastic’s Kibana UI to visualise their search data, which provided them with valuable actionable insights.

Visii

<h2>General usage</h2>
More than 60 percent of <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/new-research-from-visenze-finds-62-percent-of-generation-z-and-millennial-consumers-want-visual-search-capabilities-more-than-any-other-new-technology-2018-08-29">Millennials and Generation Z</a> want to use visual search to find and buy products. Overall, <a href="https://www.blog.google/products/ads/shopping-google-images/">50 percent</a> of online shoppers say they have made a purchase based on product images.
Visii solves this need with a basket of AI-driven visual search features that produce highly relevant search results and product recommendations. This has proven to increase sales and user engagement, as well as reduce churn and product returns.
For AI and deep learning algorithms to work properly though, they need to be fueled with the right data. Visii combines the look and feel of products (texture, colour, shape), user behaviour and context (browsing or purchase history, time of day), and product trends (reviews, popularity) to refine its algorithm.
Solutions include:
Visii Similar &#8211; generates related product suggestions based on the images in search results or product pages.
Visii Explore &#8211; powered by deep-learning AI which refines search results based on previous product selections. Makes it easier to browse huge collections of products for more relevant results. Can be combined with existing search filters.
Visii Lens &#8211; reverse image search that allows customers to search for products by uploading an image. Visii will produce a product list as close as possible to the uploaded image.
Visii Assistant &#8211; intuitive chatbot that can deliver helpful suggestions at different stages of the buyer funnel. One of its benefits is to resolve out-of-stock scenarios with alternatives as they occur.
Visii can also be used for more relevant retargeting campaigns on third-party platforms and automating the curation of best-seller or seasonal collections.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Visii tends to be used by highly-visual niche applications such as art marketplaces.
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
CobbleWeb used Visi to create an intuitive image search feature for art marketplace, Affordable Art Fair. It allows novice art collectors to browse visually by clicking on images they like. It then uses machine learning and custom AI to provide users with more personalised search results and recommendations. 
We customised AAF’s search algorithm further with standard display conditions, such as number of reviews, stock levels, best sellers, and IP locations. The results were quite spectacular. Conversion rates jumped by 200% and revenue per user by 611%.

Redis

<h2>General usage</h2>
Redis (short for ‘Remote Dictionary Server’) has built a reputation for its superfast sub-millisecond response times. As an in-memory database it serves queries from computer memory (RAM), rather than the disk drive, so data can be accessed quicker and requires less processing. 
This speediness has made Redis very useful for real-time applications like online gaming, stock trading, and media streaming that need to handle millions of requests per second.  
Redis supports a wide range of data structures:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Bitmaps for images</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Text or binary data</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Data lists that can be used for message queues</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Hashes (field-value lists) used for authentication and validation </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">HyperLogLogs, a probabilistic data structure for fast accurate estimates used in big data and real-time analytics </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Streams, a log data structure for message queues and chat systems</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Geospatial data structure for location-based apps, such as ride-sharing </li>
</ul>
Due to its use of in-memory data storage, Redis can be used as a cache to take pressure off your primary database. This is especially useful for frequently requested data in read-heavy applications like social networks or CPU-intensive applications like the recommendation features used by Netflix, YouTube or Tinder.
As a <span data-tooltip="1" data-content="Message brokers help applications written in different languages or based on different platforms communicate with each other. They translate information from the messaging protocol of one application into the messaging protocol of another application. For example: digital platforms processing data received from IoT devices." class="cw-tooltip">message broker, Redis is mostly used for small transient messages. Message systems that require complex routings or extensive <span data-tooltip="1" data-content="Durable queues are recreated upon system restart. E.g. flight bookings should retain seats even if the system goes down, or chat systems where you don't want messages in the queue to disappear." class="cw-tooltip">durability are better off with a dedicated message broker like RabbitMQ.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Redis has been voted the most loved database for five years in a row (2017 &#8211; 2021) in the <a href="https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-database-love-dread">Stack Overflow Developer Survey</a>. In 2021 it was ranked the second most popular NoSQL database after MongoDB and fourth most popular overall database solution by ranking website <a href="https://stackshare.io/data-stores">StackShare</a>. 
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
We used Redis to build a sophisticated business intelligence tool for <a href="https://www.trelleborg.com/en">Trelleborg</a>, a global engineering group. Its ability to cache large volumes of data and flexible data structures helped to deliver a smooth user experience and ensured productive use of the tool. 
Image-heavy marketplaces like Airbnb use Redis as an in-memory database to reduce latency, while ride-hailing app, Uber, uses it for both caching and queuing to handle large amounts of real-time requests.

RabbitMQ

<h2>General usage</h2>
Message brokers help applications written in different languages or based on different platforms to communicate with each other. They translate data from the messaging protocol of a sending application into the messaging protocol of the receiving application. 
One use case would be when a digital platform needs to process data received from many different IoT devices. A message broker reduces the need for complex solutions like APIs to support each operating system and network protocol.
Message brokers use durable queue systems that store and order persistent messages until they can be processed, to guarantee that messages are always delivered. 
This is useful in the event of power or system failure. Think of critical data exchanges such as online credit card transactions, flight bookings, or chat systems where you don&#8217;t want messages in the queue to disappear.
Asynchronous queuing allows your application to handle high-volume requests. This is great for scaling your product. Message brokers can also route and distribute messages to different queues according to your business logic. 
RabbitMQ does all of the above and more. In addition to a wide range of messaging protocols, it supports delivery acknowledgement and flexible routing. This flexibility enables it to efficiently address a wide variety of messaging challenges.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
RabbitMQ is the second most popular message queue tool on <a href="https://stackshare.io/message-queue">StackShare</a>. Its main competitor, Apache Kafka, offers less flexibility, but higher throughput, making it more suitable for big data applications than complex e-commerce platforms.
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Marketplaces by their very nature need to integrate many different applications to provide the right features and functionalities to their users. Information sent from third-party applications should also be optimised for efficiency and speed so that your platform can scale. This has made message brokers like RabbitMQ more and more indispensable. 
CobbleWeb has used RabbitMQ to increase the performance of several marketplaces, such as MobyPark, a parking marketplace that requires reliable real-time status updates.
We also used it to build <a href="https://www.fanpass.co.uk/">Fanpass</a>’s ticketing system due its asynchronous queuing system which prioritises tasks to prevent bottlenecks. Thus when a ticket is bought, confirmation emails, Stripe payment validation, and UPS shipping requests are processed at different stages. This avoids conflicts and congestion and allows the platform to scale rapidly. 
Zalando used microservice architecture to build their new communication platform which had to process millions of daily messages. REST APIs were considered too slow for the integrations. They ended up using RabbitMQ due to its proven reliability for guaranteed message delivery, flexible routing of messages and support for high availability.

Cloudflare

<h2>General usage</h2>
Users demand 24/7 access to online applications that load instantly. Failure to meet their expectations will lead to high bounce rates, cart abandonment, and lower conversion rates.
Cloudflare helps applications to scale globally with a basket of plug-and-play features that provide users around the world with fast, secure and reliable access to content:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">180+ data centres in more than 100 countries put 99% of the developed world within 100 milliseconds of Cloudflare’s cloud network. </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Static web content is cached and served from their data centres instead of the application’s servers.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Dynamic content is compressed and routed on the fastest, least congested path to the end-user.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Image files are optimised and resized for mobile devices.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The Rocket Loader feature defers the loading of JavaScript files so that static content can be loaded first. </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Load balancing decreases latency by routing requests to your nearest server.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Cloudflare increases reliability by redirecting traffic around congested networks and away from failed servers.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Security features include protection against DDoS attacks (i = Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks try to overload an application&#8217; servers with massive  request volumes from multiple sources) and other malicious requests, firewalls, API shields, bot management, and SSL encryption.</li>
</ul>
Part of Cloudflare’s huge popularity is because of its quick implementation with no code changes required. Instead it uses an easy-to-use management dashboard for configurations.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Cloudflare is by far the most popular Content Delivery Network according to Stackshare. More importantly, it has grown rapidly to be used by almost a third of the world’s top 100,000 sites:
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6178" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Cloudfare-trends.png" alt="" width="703" height="582" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Cloudfare-trends.png 703w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Cloudfare-trends-300x248.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 703px) 100vw, 703px" />Source: <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/cdn/Cloudflare" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Builtwith</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Auto Trader, the largest car marketplace in the UK, were using a number of applications to manage their platform&#8217;s performance and security. This complex setup was expensive and required a lot of maintenance. 
Switching to Cloudflare increased their team&#8217;s productivity by allowing them to manage everything from one dashboard. Cloudflare&#8217;s built-in security features improved the detection and blocking of malicious activity, while performance features decreased latency by 50%.
Shopify powers more than one million businesses in over 175 countries worldwide. They wanted to help merchants increase their sales by providing customers with a faster shopping experience. The decision was made to migrate all their merchants to Cloudflare, which they managed to do without disruption. 
Shopify then used Cloudflare&#8217;s load balancing feature to better distribute traffic between its servers. The acid test was Black Friday 2019. The results were spectacular; Shopify merchants achieved record sales with a 60% increase over the previous year. Peak sales volumes averaged more than $1.5 million per minute.
CobbleWeb uses CloudFlare mostly to decrease application load speed  for international users. For instance, we implemented it for FanPass’s event ticketing marketplace because their buyers are situated all over the world.

Envoy

<h2>General usage</h2>
<span data-tooltip="1" data-content="Reverse proxies act as gatekeepers for an application's main ('origin') servers. They monitor, route, cache, compress and encrypt user requests and server responses for better performance, reliability and security." class="cw-tooltip">Reverse proxies like that offered by web servers such as Nginx are great for improving an application’s security, reliability and performance. However their effectiveness decreases when an application is built with a distributed architecture such as <span data-tooltip="1" data-content="A microservices architecture is a modular cloud-native approach to application development. Each microservice operates as an independent component that uses its own tech stack and process to perform a single function. They can be deployed in different combinations, connected to each other via APIs or message brokers, to support specific business logic scenarios. Examples include search, payment and review features. Microservices architecture offers better resilience, enhanced scalability, faster development and simplifies feature expansion." class="cw-tooltip">microservices. 
The challenge. Advanced applications like marketplaces can have hundreds of interdependent microservices. The more complex the microservices architecture, the more difficult it becomes to detect, trace and fix issues. This has important implications for the reliability, performance and security of an application. Especially since monitoring and maintaining each microservice separately is very time-consuming and resource-intensive. 
Envoy solves this challenge by providing an infrastructure layer (‘service mesh’) to monitor and manage communication between microservices. This service mesh consists of independent mini proxies (‘sidecar proxies’) for each microservice, which makes it much easier for developers to pinpoint the sources of issues and remedy them.
Each sidecar proxy does the usual proxy jobs of:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Service discovery &#8211; detecting the microservice servers</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Health checking &#8211; finding out if the servers are operational and able to accept requests</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Load balancing &#8211; routing requests around on-functional or overloaded servers</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Caching &#8211; server responses with content that don’t change often (e.g. logos and stylesheets) are saved in server memory for faster response times</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Security features &#8211; e.g. rate limiting, authentication, and DDoS mitigation</li>
</ul>
Stats and logs for the whole application network can be exported to a central interface that gives a birdseye (application) and granular view (individual microservices) of performance and issues. This allows developers to configure proxy settings at application or component level.
Since microservices can be built with many different technologies, it’s important to note that Envoy works with any programming language, framework or combinations of them. 
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Envoy has quickly established an enthusiastic support base since its release by Lyft in 2016. <a href="https://www.cncf.io/reports/cncf-envoy-project-journey/">Contributors</a> to Envoy ongoing development include some of the world&#8217;s largest digital platforms like Google, Amazon, Alibaba, Salesforce, Apple, Shopify and Airbnb.
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
When the ride-hailing app, Lyft, migrated from a single-tier architecture to hundreds of microservices, it led to a growing number of service failures. Their developed team subsequently created Envoy to help them track and manage the health of each individual component, as well as global application health. A 95% reduction in load issues made a huge improvement in user experience.
CobbleWeb has integrated Envoy with a number of marketplace platforms to improve their performance and maintenance.

Varnish

<h2>General usage</h2>
Fast page load speed is important for two big reasons. Impatient consumers want a good user experience and search engines use it as an important ranking factor in their search algorithms. Slow pages will chase both away. 
The more complex an application, the more content they have to serve, which makes fast page load speeds even more challenging. Varnish, designed for content-heavy dynamic web applications and APIs, solves this two ways:
Scalability of performance. Reduces the number of HTTP requests that have to be processed by the main server by storing often-used content that doesn&#8217;t change frequently, like style sheets and images, in a virtual memory. It also uses separate worker threads for each user request.
Flexible configuration. Varnish uses its own domain-specific language, Varnish Configuration Language, which allows developers to create rules for user requests such as what content should be served, from where it should be served and if any changes should be made to user requests or server responses.
Varnish works well with your CDN and has been known to increase page laid speed 300 &#8211; 1000 times!
<h2>Popularity</h2>
First released in 2006, Varnish is the most popular caching solution as of 2021:
First released in 2006, Varnish is the most popular caching solution as of 2021:
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6187" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Varnish-market-share.png" alt="" width="570" height="285" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Varnish-market-share.png 570w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Varnish-market-share-300x150.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 570px) 100vw, 570px" />Source: <a href="https://www.wappalyzer.com/technologies/caching/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Wappalyzer</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Deliveroo, a service marketplace, is one of the largest food delivery platforms in the world. Stiff competition between delivery service platforms makes the user experience a critical aspect of their value proposition. 
Deliveroo therefore wanted to improve the speed with which users could access and order from restaurant options in their area. They decided to swap their CDN solution for Fastly, a CDN built with Varnish. The result was a 7% improvement in average load times and a 1% increase in conversions, not bad for a company with a £1.2 billion (2020) turnover.

Salesforce

<h2>General usage</h2>
Salesforce is arguably the most comprehensive CRM platform available. In addition to customer relationship management, it offers a host of complementary products for customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development.
Its core CRM features include contact, lead and sales opportunity management, workflow rules and automation, analytics, and customisable reports and dashboards.
Organisations love it because:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It is extremely customisable. Pick and choose which features are essential to your business.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It can integrate with 100s of third-party software</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It offers advanced analytics tools for very granular reporting</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It is very scalable</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It is renowned for its customer support</li>
</ul>
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Salesforce is used as a CRM by 57% of the top one million sites:
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6378" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/CRM-market-share.png" alt="" width="503" height="505" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/CRM-market-share.png 503w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/CRM-market-share-300x300.png 300w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/CRM-market-share-150x150.png 150w" sizes="(max-width: 503px) 100vw, 503px" />
Source: <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/crm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Builtwith</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Its comprehensive bouquet of services has meant that some of our clients prefer to prospect, qualify and onboard sellers via Salesforce. This meant that we had to integrate bi-directional information flows between Salesforce and their marketplace platform. Thus the platform can send lead information to Salesforce where it gets qualified before sending onboarding information back to the marketplace if the seller was approved or signed up.

Mailchimp

<h2>General usage</h2>
Mailchimp has expanded its immensely popular email marketing service to a full marketing platform with landing pages, sign-up forms, automation, social media scheduling and much more.
Marketing emails that notify prospects of discounts, new product offerings, and exclusive events remain at the heart of its offering though. Each marketing campaign will require a different approach and format, which means you will need multiple email templates.
Fortunately, Mailchimp’s user-friendly drag and drop email editor and 100+ pre-designed templates make email design relatively easy. There’s also a huge community, which means hundreds of additional templates that have already been developed and available for use. 
Some additional reasons to use Mailchimp for marketing campaigns:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Integrations &#8211;  It offers hundreds of integrations with ecommerce, web development, business, marketing and customer support tools like Zendesk, WordPress, Stripe, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey, ChargeBee and Canva.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Reporting &#8211; Use conversion data to gain insights into the effectiveness and ROI of email campaigns. A/B testing and customer surveys are also supported.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Deliverability &#8211; A beautifully designed campaign does not help much if emails land up in spam folders. Mailchimp uses strict opt-in rules, a scalable server network,  ISP feedback loops and whitelists, abuse-detection technology and domain authentication (DKIM and SPF) to ensure high delivery rates.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Targeting &#8211;  Create audience segments based on purchase behaviour, site navigation, and previous marketing campaign engagement.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">List management &#8211; Import contacts from your CRM, sales pipeline or database. Contacts can then be segmented into separate target audiences. </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Automation &#8211; Scheduling an email campaign is simple with Mailchimp’s one-click process which provides step-by-step assistance and previews. Custom audiences can be created mid-flow with conditional imports from your existing contact lists. </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Scalability &#8211; Kick-off with their free plan with 10,000 emails a month to 2,000 subscribers to test your product-market fit. Mailchimp offers <a href="https://mailchimp.com/pricing/marketing/">four pricing tiers</a> based on number of emails and contacts.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Mailchimp occupies more than 50 percent of the marketing automation market:
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6371" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Mailchimp-market-share-1.png" alt="" width="505" height="503" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Mailchimp-market-share-1.png 505w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Mailchimp-market-share-1-300x300.png 300w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Mailchimp-market-share-1-150x150.png 150w" sizes="(max-width: 505px) 100vw, 505px" />
Source: <a href="https://www.wappalyzer.com/technologies/marketing-automation" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Wappalyzer</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Mailchimp is a cost-effective, easy to implement, and scalable solution for marketplace startups that want to test and grow different target audiences.
CobbleWeb has assisted a number of marketplace clients with the integration of Mailchimp into their marketing strategy. We use tags and custom fields to send user data to their Mailchimp audience lists.

Google Merchant Center

<h2>General usage</h2>
The main reason for Google Merchant Center&#8217;s existence is to ensure that your product info, like price and availability, is correct when shown to potential customers across Google&#8217;s paid and unpaid services: Google Shopping, Google Search, local inventory ads (offline products only) and Shopping Actions (sell across Google Images, YouTube and voice search).
How it works:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Populate the various fields in your Google Merchant Center feed and let Google use this information to automatically generate Shopping ads on your behalf.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Google uses the following key fields to determine if a product is relevant to a search query: product title, product image, and product category.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Public reviews of your products are integrated into Google Shopping listings.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">You can automate product updates with a scheduled fetch of a data feed file or use an API connection.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It’s free to list products on Google Shopping, but they can be further promoted with paid ads.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">You can use promotions &#8211; discounted prices, free shipping or free gifts &#8211; on free and paid Google Shopping listings to offer special deals to prospects.</li>
</ul>
There are some excellent reasons to have accurate product listings on Google Shopping. Firstly, it allows you to reach a global audience in 90 countries. Forty percent of consumers say they use Google to find the best deals. 
Google Merchant Center creates holistic reports that show how you&#8217;re doing across Google’s ecosystem.Its Opportunities page provides actionable insights on pricing, merchandising and ways to improve your product data or campaigns to drive more clicks.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Google Shopping showcases <a href="https://blog.google/products/shopping/more-ways-to-shop/">24 billion product listings</a> from millions of merchants worldwide!
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
We combined Google Merchant Center with Snowplow (collect &amp; model data), and Amazon Kinesis (capture &amp; analyse streaming data) to build a data pipeline for Affordable Art Fair’s marketplace platform. Data is moved from Snowplow and Kinesis to Google Merchant Center for marketing automation and personalisation. This has helped AAF to increase user engagement two- to three-fold.
Turkey&#8217;s largest marketplace platform, Trendyol, used Google Merchant Center to drive an 8 &#8211; 15% increase in conversions. It refined Google Shopping ads with product feed rules to get its portfolio of popular products in front of potential customers across Google&#8217;s platforms.

Hubspot

<h2>General usage</h2>
Hubspot is another contender for the most versatile CRM around. It combines core sales CRM functionality with lots of marketing, content management, and customer service features. 
Its marketing hub offers lead generation, marketing automation and analytics features, while the sales CRM includes meeting and quote features. Tickets, customer feedback and knowledge bases are handled by its customer service hub. Hubspot also offers content management software with a drag and drop editor, ready-made page templates and SEO assistance. 
The magic happens when all four hubs are combined to give a unified view of the customer journey. This is achieved by linking the different hubs through operational features such as data cleaning, synchronisation, and programmable automation.
Its email tracking software is a good example of how Hubspot links the various touchpoints in the customer journey. Sales teams are immediately notified when a prospect becomes a lead by opening a sales email or clicking a link inside it. This means more time can be spent on serious leads than cold prospects.
From a scalability point of view, Hubspot’s free CRM option (available for up to 1M contacts) is perfect for a new marketplace startup. It offers all the necessary core features to run a young sales team: reporting dashboards, company insights, deal tracking, pipeline management, contact management, prospect tracking, call tracking, email tracking, email templates builder, meeting scheduler, live chat, and a sales quote system. 
Free marketing features include a form builder, ad management, lead generation,  landing page builder, email marketing, contact website activity, marketing report dashboard. Customer service teams have free access to help desk and ticketing systems, conversations inbox, live chat, chatbots, team email, tickets closed reports and time-to-close reports.
Business owners are not forgotten either. Data sync, productivity tools, a reporting dashboard, contact database management, customer profiling, task management and document tracking can be used to gain business insights for informed decision making.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Hubspot has more than 120,000 customers in over 120 countries. It is rated the second-best CRM overall by <a href="https://www.g2.com/categories/crm?utf8=%E2%9C%93&amp;order=g2_score">G2</a> and <a href="https://www.trustradius.com/crm">TrustRadius</a>.
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Its comprehensive bouquet of services has meant that some of our clients prefer to prospect, qualify and onboard sellers via Hubspot. This meant that we had to integrate bi-directional information flows between Hubspot and their marketplace platform. Thus the platform can send lead information to Hubspot where it gets qualified before sending onboarding information back to the marketplace if the seller was approved or signed up.

ActiveCampaign

<h2>General usage</h2>
ActiveCampaign’s main selling point is that it automates the whole customer funnel from marketing and sales to customer service. Its products include email marketing, marketing automation, sales automation and a CRM.
Omnichannel marketing is another strong aspect of ActiveCampaign’s offering. Organisations can support customer engagement across all channels &#8211; email, SMS, landing pages, social, and chat &#8211; with automated workflows:
Its email marketing solution can leverage data from the entire customer lifecycle with personalised messages. A drag and drop email template builder includes 125+ responsive templates. More than 500 pre-built automation flows are available, lessening the need for custom coding. Email campaigns can also make use of predictive routing, predictive scheduling, and dynamic content. 
WhatsApp and SMS messaging allows you to increase customer engagement via the channel customers use the most &#8211; their phones. It also enables real-time support and helps to resolve issues faster.
Landing pages for marketing campaigns can be implemented quickly with an intuitive, drag-and-drop builder and customisable templates. Collect customer data with preconfigured forms and chatbots.
Connect with customers across channels with live chat, automated chatbot workflows and a unified inbox  to offer real-time customised support. Conversation threads from email, social media or web chat can be managed in one centralised place to offer a cohesive customer experience. 
Integration with Facebook Custom Audiences allows you to leverage customer data stored by  ActiveCampaign. E.g. reach out with targeted social posts based on a contact’s industry, purchase history, or past email engagements.
ActiveCampaign has a good reputation for email deliverability. It uses spam checks, domain verification, infrastructure scans that check for abuse, ISP and email service provider feedback loops, adherence to compliance requirements, authentication protocols (SPF and DKIM), custom mail server domains, and pre-warmed dedicated IPs.
AcdtiveCampaign&#8217;s CRM solution allows organisations to centralise the management of contacts. Team members can quickly update a contact&#8217;s details for all channels, access lead histories, and have an overview of the whole sales pipeline. This promotes better collaboration between team members and offers customers a more seamless experience.
The CRM includes other useful features such as lead scoring, integration with hundreds of sales and marketing tools, task assignment, as well as automated lead segmentation, deal updates and sales reports.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
ActiveCampaign is used by 150,000 businesses in more than 170 countries. It  is ranked #1 in Marketing Automation by <a href="https://www.g2.com/categories/marketing-automation">G2</a> and  <a href="https://www.trustradius.com/marketing-automation">TrustRadius</a>.
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
ActiveCampaign provides early-stage marketplaces with a one-stop shop for managing marketing, sales and customer success. Granular user segmentation, omnichannel communication and quick implementation of different campaign flows make it a perfect fit for testing and growing product-market fit.
We implemented ActiveCampaign to help Affordable Art Fair’s marketing team segment their platform’s users. When users subscribe, information, such as their user location and buying profile, is sent to the ActiveCampaign marketing automation tool. It allows the marketing team to create segmented email lists for more personalised newsletters.

<h2>General usage</h2>
Handling the <a href="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/everything-you-need-to-know-about-planning-a-marketplace-shipping-strategy/">logistics of shipping</a> and delivering products on behalf of sellers can be a powerful drawcard for them to join your online marketplace. Taking charge of the shipping process also gives you more control over the customer experience. A centralised approach makes it, for example, easier to ensure that deliveries happen on time and at the right location. 
Obviously there&#8217;s a lot of logistics involved in the shipping process, from packaging and labelling to tracking and delivery. Dropping the ball can really hurt your marketplace &#8211; shipping-related issues (e.g. high delivery costs or surprise fees) are the main reasons for shopping cart abandonment. 
The complexity rises when your marketplace does business across international borders. UPS offers a proven solution with a global delivery network that covers more than 220 countries. Its comprehensive API ecosystem allows ecommerce platforms like marketplaces to integrate various aspects of their shipping functionality.
Areas that UPS APIs cover include:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Ordering: Improve accuracy of orders with Street Level Address Validation, Rating or Time in Transit APIs.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Shipping: Automate fulfilment and global shipping processes with Collection and Shipping APIs.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Customer Service: Provide visibility to customers and your customer service centre with Rating, Tracking and Locator APIs.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Popularity</h2>
In 2021, UPS was rated the world’s most valuable logistics brand for the seventh year in a row by <a href="https://brandfinance.com/press-releases/ups-delivers-7th-consecutive-year-as-worlds-most-valuable-logistics-brand">Brand Finance</a>. It is the most popular shipping solution for the top million sites:
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6357" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/UPS-market-share.png" alt="" width="504" height="507" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/UPS-market-share.png 504w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/UPS-market-share-298x300.png 298w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/UPS-market-share-150x150.png 150w" sizes="(max-width: 504px) 100vw, 504px" />
Source: <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/shipping" target="_blank" rel="noopener">BuiltWith</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
UPS&#8217;s API system allows CobbleWeb to develop solutions for almost any shipping use case. It provides separate APIs for different aspects of shipping, which allows us to develop powerful features that make marketplace users&#8217; lives easier.
For example, we use their Shipping API to get shipping rates and delivery dates in real time, the Tracking API to generate labels for sellers and allow buyers to track packages, and the Locator API to create a network of drop-off and pick up locations.
Shipping cost estimates provided by the UPS API can be used to increase conversion rates. Cart abandonment decreased significantly after we provided Affordable Art Fair’s buyers with automatic estimates of shipping costs on product pages.

ShipStation

<h2>General usage</h2>
ShipStation streamlines and automates every step of the fulfilment process: order management, shipping, branding and inventory management.
It imports orders from selling channels, marketplaces, ERPs or CRMs, automatically applying shipping configurations. Scan-based workflows, bulk updates, and automation processes are used to quickly fulfill shipments. 
ShipStation keeps sellers and buyers updated with shipment status notifications, e.g. via SMS, and tracking tools. It also provides tools for managing inventory and returns, such as multi-channel shipping and product analytics for sellers.
Some of the benefits of using ShipStation:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Sellers save time by importing orders automatically from your marketplace.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Global footprint via multi-shipping integrations. ShipStation automatically creates customs declarations for orders with an international shipping address.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Support for multi-package and split shipments.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Sellers can customise notification emails, packing slips and shipping labels.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Flexible shipping rates:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="2">Compare shipping rates for different package sizes and destinations</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="2">Discounted shipping rates from some of the world’s top carriers</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="2">Shipping calculator</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="2">Offer buyers different shipping options at checkout</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
ShipStation offers marketplace platforms quick and easy integration through its APIs.Its full-stack automation of the shipping process removes many of the pain points for both marketplace owners and sellers. Conversion rates benefit from its multi-shipping offering, discounted shipping rates and seller branding.

Zendesk

<h2>General usage</h2>
We all know how important a great user experience is for any application&#8217;s success. However, it is often forgotten how important customer service is as part of the overall user experience. 
A sound customer service experience is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, it can be a competitive advantage when compared to similar platforms. Secondly, it strengthens the iterative feedback loop that drives better product-market fit. Thirdly, for marketplaces, it can improve seller quality control, by enforcing minimum service levels.
At its core, a customer service system should make it easy for users to log tickets and find solutions to issues from wherever and whenever their needs arise. Zendesk does this by centralising all support channels on one platform. Its omnichannel approach means users can access customer service via email, text, live chat, mobile app, social media or phone. 
With Zendesk you can automate many repetitive tasks to free up resources. Queries are automatically routed to the appropriate person (as a trackable ticket) or information repository based on preset business rules. Knowledge bases can be hosted as self-service information portals or combined with AI-driven chatbots for a faster interactive service.
The customer service team can work more efficiently with prefilled templates that include customers&#8217; details as well as their transaction and interaction histories. Zendesk can be integrated with hundreds of applications for a seamless exchange of information, e.g. CRMs, shipping platforms or project management tools like Jira.
Each ticket can be integrated with reporting dashboards by way of automated surveys or service ratings.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Zendesk is the most popular help desk application on <a href="https://stackshare.io/help-desk">Stackshare</a> and the highest rated on <a href="https://www.g2.com/categories/help-desk">G2</a>.
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Many of our marketplace clients use Zendesk as a help desk for platform issues. It allows buyers and sellers to log tickets in different categories which are then automatically allocated to the appropriate administrators. 
We use widgets, JavaScript and APIs to ensure a smooth journey between the platform and Zendesk. For example, when an issue is reported, additional information such as the order identification number is automatically retrieved .

Sentry

<h2>General usage</h2>
With Sentry developers can spot and fix issues quicker, helping them build better applications faster. It can be used with all major programming languages, frameworks, and libraries.
It is more powerful than simple error logging, because it contextualises issues by highlighting the impact of errors and where they originate from. Developers can for example trace a front-end error back to the backend issue that caused it. 
It speeds up development by channeling notifications of issues to the developers responsible for that particular code. Issues can be assigned to developers straight from Sentry.
Sentry not only supports faster, more thorough application development. Its pre-emptive approach means less buggy application releases which in turn increases user adoption and engagement. 
&nbsp;
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Sentry is the <a href="https://stackshare.io/exception-monitoring">#1 exception monitoring tool</a> on Stackshare.
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Food delivery platform, DoorDash, handles millions of orders from over 50,000 restaurants across web, iOS, and Android platforms. Rapid growth and a huge tech stack made it challenging to track where errors originated from and enforce a common approach to solving issues. Sentry helped them contextualise errors so that teams could collaborate more productively in fixing them.

CloudWatch

<h2>General usage</h2>
CloudWatch’s most important benefit is that it improves the observability of the health of complex applications such as marketplaces. Observability is the ability of collected data streams to produce accurate and actionable insights about an application’s inner workings.
CloudWatch collects data in the form of logs, metrics, and events from your entire AWS ecosystem and presents it on one platform. This helps developers and application administrators gain system-wide insights into the health and performance of an application, which makes it easier to resolve issues, optimise resources, and scale infrastructure.
Key features of CloudWatch include:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Manage resources better and optimise scaling with automated actions, e.g. increasing data storage or server resources when a certain usage threshold is reached.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Quickly detect and action anomalous behaviour by setting alarms for certain events.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Make data more digestible and easier to interpret by visualizing logs and metrics.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Add custom metrics to support your business logic.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Popularity</h2>
CloudWatch is the most popular cloud monitoring service on <a href="https://stackshare.io/cloud-monitoring">Stackshare</a> by far.
<h2>Marketplace benefit</h2>
CobbleWeb uses CloudWatch to monitor how well we are scaling AWS infrastructure. It also helps us track any system errors via logs, as well as overall application performance. 
Just Eat, a food delivery marketplace, implemented CloudWatch to accelerate code changes and optimise resource usage. They used alerts to help them manage scaling of their backend, which lowered resource costs without impacting on the user experience.

Google Analytics

<h2>General usage</h2>
Google Analytics’ ubiquitous presence in the digital universe is due to its easy implementation (just add an auto-generated code snippet to your application), its many uses (it provides insights for marketing, sales, development and design functions), and its painless integration with other Google and third-party tools.
Use it to:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Evaluate the performance of your content, and products or services. Are visitors engaging with content by scrolling all the way through a blog post or clicking call-to-action links? </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Evaluate the performance of your marketing strategy. Which campaigns or acquisition channels are driving traffic?</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Optimise your platform for search engines by linking with Google Search Console. Which keywords and pages are driving organic traffic to your platform?</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Evaluate your product or service offerings. Which product categories or services are converting into sales?</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Monitor your application&#8217;s technical performance. Are users bouncing away due to slow load speeds or lack of responsiveness on mobile devices?</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Track visitor behaviour to understand how they interact with your application&#8217;s design. Where on the page should you put a call to action? Which navigation structure drives the most conversions?</li>
</ul>
The above are just a few general examples of insights that can be gathered with Google Analytics. Data points can be segmented and combined in many different ways to analyse specific user funnels.
Google Analytics can provide even more insights when it is combined with other data sets. Use data visualisation tools like Data Studio to blend data from Google Ads or a CRM to create a more detailed picture of your business. 
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Google Analytics is the leading tool for audience analysis:
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6341" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Google-Analytics-market-share.png" alt="" width="590" height="276" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Google-Analytics-market-share.png 590w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Google-Analytics-market-share-300x140.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 590px) 100vw, 590px" />
Source: <a href="https://www.wappalyzer.com/technologies/analytics" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Wappalyzer</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Google Analytics can be used to track many <a href="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/aarrr-pirate-metrics-improve-marketplace-performance/">marketplaces metrics</a> such as monthly active  users,  bounce rates,  liquidity (visits / conversions), and time on platform. It is particularly handy to determine where in the shopping or checkout funnels customers drop off.  
CobbleWeb used Google Analytics to track art marketplace, Affordable Art Fair&#8217;s key performance indicators, such as traffic sources, conversion rates, and average spend per customer. These KPIs helped us to quantify improvements due to platform upgrades and optimisation, e.g 65% increase in customer spend.
Minted is an online marketplace for independent artists and designers. Insights gained from Google Analytics data helped them to optimise their platform and content, which contributed to a 400% increase in year-on-year revenue.

Snowplow Analytics

<h2>General usage</h2>
Behavioural data is the holy grail of data. It gives companies deep granular insight into how customers and prospects interact with products and services. These insights can be leveraged in powerful ways to make businesses grow faster.
Here are just a few ways in which behavioural data can power competitive advantages: 
Product analytics, personalisation, custom marketing attribution, content analytics, churn reduction, A/B testing, machine learning, dynamic pricing and recommendation engines.
Building and running a behavioural data platform for complex applications like marketplaces are not simple tasks though. Collecting and processing data from multiple sources across platforms and devices and then redeploying it in suitable format to different teams via their chosen applications are beyond most startups. 
Snowplow&#8217;s robust, flexible data delivery platform is a game changer that enables any company, including early-stage startups, to collect, process and distribute behavioural data at scale. It runs in a cloud environment like AWS, giving companies full ownership and control of data and the flexibility to define their own data structures, data modelling logic and data pipeline configuration.
Some of the great benefits of using Snowplow:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Collect rich behavioural event data from any platform or product using its trackers for web, mobile, server-side apps, IoT, or chatbots.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Up-front validation, based on your parameters, ensures high-quality data in the pipeline. Failed events (bad data) get sent to separate storage where it can be analysed to fine-tune validation parameters.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Enrich datasets by adding complementary first-or third-party data. <a href="https://docs.snowplowanalytics.com/docs/enriching-your-data/available-enrichments/">Enrichments</a> can expand the scope and depth of behavioural, demographic and geographic datasets. An example would be to add the size of a subscriber’s organisation with a tool like Clerabit.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Snowplow makes validated data available in near real-time and can be visualised with a BI tool such as Cube.js or Google Data Studio. This empowers faster decision making and can be used for real-time dashboards and dynamic personalisation.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Snowplow was recognised in<a href="https://emt.gartnerweb.com/ngw/globalassets/en/information-technology/documents/insights/734793-cool-vendors-2020-digital-innovation-thriving-amid-winds-of-change.pdf"> Gartner&#8217;s Cool Vendors 2020 Report</a> as a &#8216;Cool Vendor in Marketing and Data Analytics&#8217;. Since its first release in 2012, there’s been steep growth in the adoption of Snowplow among the world’s top 100,000 sites:
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6349" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Snowplow-analytics-usage-trends.png" alt="" width="694" height="535" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Snowplow-analytics-usage-trends.png 694w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Snowplow-analytics-usage-trends-300x231.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 694px) 100vw, 694px" />
Source: <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Snowplow" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Builtwith</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
CobbleWeb has developed powerful data pipelines with Snowplow. For instance, our client, Affordable Art Fair, a global marketplace for art, wanted better behavioural data for their marketing campaigns:
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Snowplow allowed us to track specific user events, such as which product categories were viewed or which artists were added to wish lists, across applications and devices, e.g. front-and backend frameworks, mobile apps, email and ads.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">We combined the collected data with Amazon Kinesis (captures &amp; analyses streaming data), Google Merchant Center (for marketing automation) and Cube.js (for BI dashboards) to create their marketing data pipeline.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Affordable Art Fair used the data pipeline to create more targeted Google, Facebook and Pinterest ads, based on different buyer personas such as Art Lover or Art Investor. This increased user engagement 2 &#8211; 3 times.</li>
</ol>

Segment

<h2>General usage</h2>
Social media, email, apps, online help desks and other digital platforms have fragmented the customer experience. Applications need a tool to coordinate all those customer touchpoints to gain better insights and deliver better user experiences.
Segment does this in four stages:
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Data collection from different sources, e.g. mobile apps, websites, payment gateways, and help desks. Segment provides quick integration with hundreds of applications.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Data validation and transformation so data is accurate and reliable</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Data processing (combining and segmenting data) to create more complete customer profiles and discover how users navigate through different stages and touchpoints.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Data activation by distributing processed data to other tools or teams, e.g. CRMs, email marketing tools, or advertising platforms.</li>
</ol>
This process unifies your customer’s touch points across all platforms and channels, which enables a better understanding of the user journey. It allows the creation of audience personas by combining various data points, e.g. events that put customers in a specific position and customer traits such as last product bought.
Marketing teams can now target a specific customer segment with the right message at the right time via the right channel. It also enables a more personalised, consistent, real-time customer experience across all touch points.
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Segment is used as a customer data platform by half of the top one million sites in the world:
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6345" src="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Segment-market-share.png" alt="" width="499" height="500" srcset="https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Segment-market-share.png 499w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Segment-market-share-300x300.png 300w, https://www.cobbleweb.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Segment-market-share-150x150.png 150w" sizes="(max-width: 499px) 100vw, 499px" />
Source: <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/customer-data-platform" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Builtwith</a>
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
CobbleWeb has integrated Segment for clients who want to improve their marketing pipeline. It allows us to pull customer data from different sources into one repository before distributing it to multiple marketing tools. 
Instacart has three types of users: customers, personal shoppers, and retail shops. They used Segment to collate data from all the channels (platform, apps, email, and helpdesk) they use to better understand how they interact with each other. Sendgrid made it easy to pull data from the various data sources such as SendGrid and Zendesk. 
The combined data helped Instacart to understand where users got stuck and how Instacart can help them smooth their interactions. For example,  they discovered that some customers were opting out of the ordering process at a certain stage. The fix was to insert customer support managers at that stage to help them before they leave.
Peerspace is a P2P marketplace for meeting and event venues. They wanted to address different types of customers in a personalised yet scalable manner to maintain high conversion rates. Segment was implemented to capture and digest event and conversion data, which was then shared with different team functions such as paid acquisition and A/B testing. 
Peerspace also combined Segment data with Mutiny (a tool that identifies visitors according to certain attributes, e.g. industry, funnel stage, and web activity) to personalise Peerspace’s landing pages. Thus a business person in NYC will see venues with business equipment, while a recently engaged couple will see wedding venues. This personalisation increased user signups by 98%.

<h2>General usage</h2>
Ecommerce fraud is expected to top <a href="https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210425005002/en/Juniper-Research-eCommerce-Losses-to-Online-Payment-Fraud-to-Exceed-20-Billion-Annually-in-2021">$20 billion</a> in 2021, while transactions incorrectly flagged as fraudulent are estimated to cause annual revenue losses of <a href="https://blog.clear.sale/new-data-balancing-false-declines-and-fraud-prevention">$443 billion</a> &#8211; 22x more than the fraud itself!
Stripe’s Radar tool offers a solution to balance this conundrum. It uses an adaptive machine learning system to evaluate the risk level for individual payments in real time. Hundreds of signals and data from millions of businesses that use Stripe are collated to predict whether a payment is fraudulent.
Radar is built into Stripe and does not require additional setup. In addition it offers several powerful features:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Radar’s algorithms adapt quickly to shifting fraud patterns and to your unique business.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Radar uses data from every layer of the financial stack to assess fraud risk.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Platform owners can set custom rules to flag, block, or dynamically apply 3D Secure to high-risk transactions.</li>
</ul>
&nbsp;
<h2>Popularity</h2>
Since Radar is bundled with Stripe’s payment platform it is widely used by <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/payment/payments-processor">37%</a> of the world’s top 1 million sites.
<h2>Marketplace benefits</h2>
Our client, an event ticketing marketplace, started noticing an increase in fraudulent transactions with popular events such as the Champion’s League final. 
Radar allowed us to create custom rules for different risk levels. High risk transactions, for instance, are paused until the administrator unblocks it after verification has been done. 
Stripe’s checkout tools also automatically track the platform’s buyer patterns to help detect anomalous payments. For example, if a UK-based buyer mostly uses his card in the UK and France, and Stripe detects that the buyer is paying from Indonesia, the transaction will be flagged as high risk.

Google Data Studio

Who uses this technology?

General usage

Popularity

Marketplace benefits

ADAPT OR DIE
Cobble Web discusses Lean Startup Pivoting On BBC Radio

Google Data Studio

Who uses this technology?

General usage

Popularity

Marketplace benefits

ADAPT OR DIECobble Web discusses Lean Startup Pivoting On BBC Radio

ADAPT OR DIE
Cobble Web discusses Lean Startup Pivoting On BBC Radio