Two sides of a market, brought together properly
A platform where your suppliers and your buyers find each other, agree terms and pay, with your commission taken cleanly every time.
- Typically costs
- £65k–£200k
- Live in
- 18–40 weeks
Marketplaces
5 parts01Where this usually starts
You have a genuine two-sided market and it currently runs on introductions, email and invoices you raise yourself. It works, and it will not scale past the number of deals one person can hold in their head.
02What changes
What you end up holding.
- 01Both sides signing up, being checked, and transacting without you introducing them
- 02Money handled properly: held, split, released on your terms and paid out on a schedule
- 03Your commission taken automatically and reconciled without anyone working it out
- 04Trust built in, through verification, reviews and a record of what actually happened
- 05A live view of the market you are running and where it is thin
A market that runs without you introducing anybody, and a commission that reconciles itself.
03The pieces
What a system like this is usually made of.
You will not want all of it on day one, and you should not pay for all of it on day one. The estimator lets you choose, and shows what each one adds.
Taking payment
Card, bank transfer and direct debit, reconciled against the invoice without anyone matching them up.
Holding and splitting money
Funds held, split between parties and released on your terms, with your commission taken cleanly.
Members looking after themselves
Their details, their colleagues, their payments and their own record of what they have paid.
The supplier side
The other half of the market: joining, being checked, listing, and being paid.
Reviews and verification
Checks, ratings and a record of what actually happened, so both sides can take a risk on each other.
The sort of detail that matters
- Paid from a link in the invoice
- Direct debit collected on the day it is due
04How it would run
18 to 40 weeks, in five phases you approve one at a time.
01
Getting to the truth
A written account of how your work really runs today, what the current way is costing you, and what your new system has to do about it.
02
Shaping it
Every screen and every decision your system will make, in front of you and signed off, with your live date fixed at the end of it.
03
Building it
Your system takes shape week by week in your own account, with something you can click on and try at the end of every fortnight.
04
Proving it
Your own people put it through real work with real records, and everything they find is fixed before anybody depends on it.
05
Going live
Your team moves across trained, with their history intact, on the date fixed months earlier.
05Asked most often
The questions that come up.
How is the money handled?
Through a regulated payments provider built for marketplaces, usually Stripe Connect, so funds can be held and split without your business having to hold other people's money. That distinction matters a great deal and it shapes the design from week one.
How do we solve the empty-marketplace problem?
Not with software alone, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling. What the build can do is make one side valuable on its own before the other arrives, and that decision drives what gets built first. It is the conversation for the opening fortnight.
Do you take equity instead of fees?
No. You own what is built, outright, and the fee is for building it. That is what keeps the advice you get worth listening to.
06The rest of it
Most projects are two or three of these at once.
- 01Customer and salesEvery customer, conversation and deal in one place, arranged the way your business works rather than the way a software company guessed it might.£45k–£120k
- 02Invoicing and paymentsInvoicing that matches your contracts however awkward they are, takes payment the way your customers want to pay, and follows up on its own.£38k–£95k
- 03Access and auditAccess controlled to the person and the record, every change recorded, and your answer ready the day an auditor, a client or a regulator asks for one.£32k–£85k
- 04Planning and schedulingWork, people and equipment scheduled against real constraints, reshuffled in seconds when something changes, and visible to everyone who needs to know.£48k–£140k
- 05ReportingOne honest set of figures drawn from every system you run, assembled by nobody, argued over by nobody, and ready on the first of the month.£30k–£75k
- 06Quoting and proposalsYour pricing rules, however involved, applied correctly by anyone on the team, inside a document that looks like it came from you.£34k–£88k
- 07Client portalsA calm, private place your clients sign in to, see exactly where their work has got to, and get what they need without emailing anybody.£30k–£80k
- 08Documents and approvalsForms filled in once, routed to whoever has to agree, signed, filed where you will find them again, and chased the moment they stall.£30k–£70k
- 09Field work and jobsThe job tracked end to end, your engineer given what they need on their phone, and the paperwork finished before the van leaves site.£55k–£160k
- 10BookingsAvailability your customers book against themselves, with every one of your real rules applied, and far fewer people failing to turn up.£30k–£70k
- 11Stock and assetsStock, tools, vehicles and installed equipment tracked accurately enough that you stop buying things you already own.£35k–£90k
- 12Joining systems upThe systems you already pay for, talking to each other reliably, so a thing entered once appears everywhere it belongs within seconds.£30k–£65k
- 13Leaving a systemA planned, reversible move off the system that is holding you back, without losing a single record or a day of trading.£35k–£110k
- 14Reading documentsPaperwork arriving by email or on a phone camera, read accurately, checked against what you expected, and put in front of a person only when it needs one.£38k–£95k
- 15MembershipsMembers joining, paying, renewing and getting what they pay for, without anybody in your office administering a single one of them.£32k–£85k
- 16Compliance recordsThe records your regulator, your insurer or your biggest client requires, captured as the work happens and produced on demand in minutes.£32k–£80k
Put a date on it.
Half an hour with whoever would build it gets you the shape of the work, a figure you can take to your board, and the week it could start. No deck, no discovery fee, no follow-up sequence.
Or ring 01603 552024. A person answers it.