Marketplace DevelopmentWe build marketplaces
that reach liquidity,
not empty directories.
A marketplace lives or dies on whether both sides show up. We build production two-sided platforms — listings, search, payments, trust — and design for the cold-start problem from day one. We know it works, because we built and run one ourselves.
app.yourmarketplace.com
Live marketplace
Two-sided liquidity, one platform
Supply and demand, matched. Listings, search, payments, and trust — built to move volume.
Recent activity
NNew listinglive
BBroker onboardedverified
EEnquiry matchedsent
PPayment cleared£4,200
Platforms and marketplaces we have built and worked on
sellyourboat.iobusesforsale.comeuropeanyachtbrokers.comKompiPayLoopa
What we buildThe hard parts of a marketplace,
built properly.
A marketplace is a normal application plus the problem of matching supply and demand. That second part is where most builds fall down. We engineer for it directly.
01
Listings & supply
Structured, searchable supply that is easy to add and easy to trust.
02
Search & discovery
The right result surfaced fast — the difference between a live market and a dead one.
03
Payments & trust
Transactions, reviews, and the trust layer that lets strangers do business.
04
Seller tooling
The admin and dashboards that make the supply side actually stick around.
05
Owned by you
The whole codebase and data model, no marketplace-SaaS lock-in, fixed price.
A marketplace is not a feature list, it is a liquidity problem
Most people describe a marketplace by its screens: listings, profiles, search, checkout. Those matter, but they are the easy part. The thing that actually decides whether a marketplace works is liquidity — whether there is enough supply for buyers to find what they want, and enough demand for sellers to bother listing. A marketplace with beautiful screens and no liquidity is a very well-designed empty room.
This is why we start every marketplace build with the market, not the interface. Which side is harder to get, and how do we seed it. Where is the niche narrow enough to reach critical mass instead of spreading thin across everyone. What gives one side value before the other shows up. These answers shape the product, and getting them right is worth more than any amount of polish on a checkout flow.
It also shapes what we build first. A focused marketplace MVP is not a smaller version of the full vision — it is the smallest thing that can prove one side will show up and transact. Build that, prove the liquidity, then expand. Build the whole vision first and you often just build an expensive way to discover the market was not there.
Cold startHow we design around the cold-start problem
The cold-start problem is the chicken-and-egg at the heart of every marketplace: no buyers means no reason for sellers, no sellers means no reason for buyers. There is no clever line of code that solves it, which is exactly why it needs to be a design decision rather than an afterthought bolted on after launch.
The strategies that work are structural. Seed the hard side first, often manually, before the product is even public. Narrow the market to a niche where a small absolute number of participants is enough to feel busy. Build a single-player mode, where one side gets real value from the tool even with nobody on the other side yet — a seller who gets great listing management, or a buyer who gets a genuinely useful search, stays around long enough for the other side to arrive.
We build the product around whichever of these fits your specific market, rather than shipping a generic two-sided shell and hoping liquidity appears. That is the difference between marketplace development as software delivery and marketplace development as building something that actually has a chance of working.
ProofWe built and run a real marketplace: sellyourboat.io
The most honest thing we can tell you about marketplace development is that we did not just bill someone for one — we built one of our own, and we run it. sellyourboat.io is a Wall & Fifth venture: a yacht marketplace and a white-label software platform for brokerages, carrying over 12,000 listings from more than 100 vetted brokers across 18 countries.
Building and operating it means we have hit the real marketplace problems on our own product: seeding the broker side, making search good enough that buyers stay, structuring listings so supply is trustworthy, and adding a Claude-powered assistant that helps buyers find the right boat and brokers manage their listings. We made those decisions with our own money on the line, not on a slide.
We have also delivered marketplace work beyond our own ventures — the audit and design revamp for busesforsale.com, and the platform tooling and revamp for europeanyachtbrokers.com. Marketplaces are a category we keep choosing to work in, because we understand what makes them hard.
The buildProduction stack, fixed price, owned outright
Under every marketplace we build is a real production stack: Next.js, React, and TypeScript, with PostgreSQL behind it, deployed properly. A marketplace has more moving parts than a standard app — two user types, listings, search, payments, trust — so the foundations have to be solid. A flaky marketplace on shaky infrastructure is several problems at once.
We build to a fixed price so you are not exposed to open-ended hourly billing on a project with a lot of surface area. From 16,000 GBP for a focused marketplace MVP, from 30,000 GBP for a larger build with payments, reviews, seller tooling, and admin. Any third-party usage — payments, mapping, AI inference — is passed through to you at cost, never marked up.
And you own all of it. The full codebase, the data model, the infrastructure, handed over on delivery. No marketplace-SaaS you have to keep paying, no licensing, no lock-in. Yours to run, change, and scale, with us or with any team you choose.
ProofWe built and run a real marketplace, not a demo
sellyourboat.io is a Wall & Fifth venture — a live yacht marketplace and white-label brokerage platform. The numbers are real.
PricingFixed price, scoped to the market
No hourly billing on a project with a lot of surface area. A defined price for a defined build.
Marketplace MVP
from £16,000
Listings, search, accounts, and a first transaction or enquiry path. The smallest thing that proves one side will show up.
Extensive Build
from £30,000
Payments, reviews and trust, seller tooling, and admin — the systems to handle real liquidity as it grows.
Embedded Partner
from £8,000 /mo
Ongoing senior involvement once it is live: evolving the product, the systems, and the growth of the market.
Build a marketplace
that reaches liquidity.
Tell us the market and which side is harder to get. We will scope it, price it, and build a marketplace designed to actually fill up.