Building Marketplace Products and Measuring Trust

Marketplaces are as popular as ever as a way to solve matching problems between suppliers and customers. Lots of product work would focus only on 1 side. However, some problems impact both sides equally, and require a different approach to product thinking. Does your marketplace design scale or is it built around a specific region or narrowly focused problem? What are the unit economics and commercial case? Next I’ll narrow down to specifically look at trust, and share insights from our research trying to define and measure a quantifiable trust metric. How do those findings relate to conversion, sales, repeat and other traditional KPIs, showing the complexity of identifying trust with each side of users in your marketplace – whether existing users or new customers (to your marketplace, or the product or industry overall). Finally, I’ll share examples of trying to build trust across the marketplace and the rarity of changes and policies that all sides appreciate. Every decision and policy can have a lasting impact on trust and your ability to scale.