Two Sided Marketplace App Development

What makes a marketplace different from a normal app, according to Tepia

A marketplace is two products pretending to be one. Sellers or providers want demand, fast payment and low hassle. The app has to serve both at once, and the hard part is not the code. It is that neither side shows up until the other one does.

Tepia builds marketplaces for founders and operators who already understand their supply side: a trade association launching a contractor marketplace, a rental business opening its platform to other owners, a wellness company matching practitioners with clients, a regional B2B exchange for surplus inventory. Marketplace templates such as Sharetribe are a reasonable starting point for some of these, and Tepia says so on the Sharetribe vs custom marketplace page. This page is for the cases where the transaction, the matching or the trust model needs to be yours.

The step by step guide is at how to build a two sided marketplace app.

Feature matrix Tepia builds for each side

Tepia scopes a marketplace as three surfaces sharing one backend. The matrix below shows the features that typically appear in an MVP and the ones that come later.

Tepia pushes hard on keeping the MVP column small.

Payments and payouts with Stripe Connect

Payments are where marketplace builds go wrong, and Tepia builds them on Stripe Connect for a specific reason: it lets the platform take a fee, route the rest to the seller, and handle the tax and compliance paperwork without the platform ever holding card data or becoming a money transmitter.

Tepia typically implements the buyer paying the platform, the platform holding funds until the service is delivered or the return window closes, and an automatic transfer to the seller’s connected account minus the platform fee. Payout timing (instant, daily, weekly, on completion) is a business decision Tepia configures rather than codes.

Seller onboarding uses Stripe’s hosted identity and bank verification, which takes the platform out of collecting sensitive documents. PCI DSS scope stays minimal because card data is tokenized at the edge. For service marketplaces that involve deposits, cancellations and tips, Tepia models each as a separate charge or transfer so the accounting is clean. Tepia has also built payments on Square for marketplaces tied to in person retail.

Trust, safety and liquidity strategy

Trust and safety is a product feature, not a policy document. Tepia builds identity verification at seller onboarding, two way reviews that open only after a completed transaction, a report button on every listing and message, a dispute flow with evidence upload and an admin decision, and moderation queues for new listings and flagged content. Fraud controls (velocity limits, new account holds, mismatched location checks) are added as rules in the admin portal so your team can tune them without a developer.

Liquidity is the reason most marketplaces fail, and Tepia designs the product to help you manage it. That means admin tools to seed supply manually, a waitlist by geography so you can open one city at a time, the ability to concierge match early transactions by hand, and analytics that show fill rate (requests that found a match) and time to first transaction by cohort. Tepia describes this as apps engineered for retention, and in a marketplace retention is measured on both sides.

Tepia’s rule: launch with the supply side closed and curated, open demand in one geography or category, and expand when fill rate holds above a threshold you set. The software should make that sequence easy rather than force a nationwide launch on day one.

How Tepia approaches two sided marketplace app development

Tepia’s six phase process applies, with discovery focused on the transaction and the liquidity plan rather than on screens.

1. Discovery (typically 1 to 3 months). Tepia interviews prospective buyers and sellers, maps the transaction end to end including money movement, and reviews third party services such as Stripe Connect, identity verification and mapping. Deliverables: Investigation Summary, Interview Summary and User Stories for all three surfaces, plus a written MVP scope.
2. Design. Design questionnaire, moodboards, a style guide and detailed wireframes for the buyer search and checkout, the seller listing and earnings screens, and the admin moderation queue. Sample designs are tested with a handful of real sellers.
3. Development and Testing (typically 2 to 6 months). Alpha and Beta schedules with functional, user acceptance and nonfunctional test plans, including full payment and payout testing in Stripe test mode and a closed Beta with seeded supply.
4. Training. Hands on sessions for your operations team on the admin portal, using user story scenarios such as a dispute and a fraudulent listing.
5. Launch (about 1 month). App Store and Google Play submission, migration of any existing seller data, a single market launch, and Tepia support reps on rollout.

The process is documented at tepia.co/process, and finished products are at our work.

Frequently asked questions