Hesson Mak recently took me through a full video demo of the Arcadier marketplace platform.  He’s a super friendly guy, based out of their head office in Singapore, and in this video interview Hesson kindly answered my freelancer market-focussed questions.  It offers an idea of what kind of marketplace entrepreneurs can build on their platform.

If you’re looking for a services or rentals marketplace that just works out of the box, Arcadier is a great option.  With a few clicks, you can choose one of their pre-built themes, customise your landing page, and launch the site.  If you’ve got some tech know-how, you can also customise the other pages.

The products are simple to set up too.  Create a few categories, create your items, and determine the metric you’re using to count them.  For example, you can sell a service per hour, or you can rent an item per month or on specific days of a calendar.  The system is closer to Fiverr than Upwork, but Sellers can create a unique add-on to an existing service package to offer a custom service to a Buyer.

In terms of payments, Stripe and PayPal are available out of the box, with split payments.  If you’re looking for additional gateways, for example, to offer Escrow or operate in a particular country, you can set up a custom gateway, which will involve some tech work.

Arcadier also offers a plugin marketplace to extend functionality further.  It currently offers 9 plugins that enable blogs, newsletters, coupons, analytics and more, and they’re working on getting external developers to contribute to this pool, so more functionality is definitely on the way!

For companies looking for full customisation, and don’t have internal tech resources to use their API, Arcadier offers two options.  The mid-budget option is to find a partner development firm to build you a custom site.  But if you’re a larger firm and you want the reliability of having Arcadier manage your marketplace project themselves, go for the Enterprise option.  It’ll cost you $5,400/month, but you know it’ll work perfectly and will be fully supported and future-compatible.

We allow anyone to build their own online marketplace within minutes, without needing how to code.

In terms of pricing, entrepreneurs can launch a marketplace on Arcadier immediately, with a free package for one month, then moving up to the Basic package of $79/month.  The packages are mainly separated by a transactional limit: 500 transactions for the Basic package, moving up to 2,500 transaction with the Growth package at $199/month (which includes API access for fully customisation), and finally up to 10,000 transactions with the Scale package at $499/month.  Examples of Arcadier marketplaces include clients Heya, Kinly and SnapSquad.

 

In my view, here’s where Arcadier offers major advantages:

=> Affordable package (and free 30 days) to test your marketplace MVP

=> API available for full customisation

=> Enterprise option available for larger firms

 

 

To learn more about Arcadier, check out their website, or reach out to Hesson on LinkedIn.