Online Marketplace Examples, Sorted by What You Can Copy

Sort marketplace examples by what carries the transaction, not by size: an order split between several vendors (Etsy), a booking for a date range (Turo, Airbnb), a quote (service marketplaces), a fee on the listing (Craigslist) or a procurement request (B2B). That choice decides what you can launch without developers, and what is the company’s own machinery that you cannot copy.

Online buying is no longer the question. In the EU in 2025, 95% of people aged 16 to 74 had used the internet in the previous 12 months, and 78% of them had bought or ordered goods or services online, against 62% in 2015 (Eurostat, data extracted February 2026). What remains open for a founder is which model to pick, and that is what the examples below are for.

If you are already past examples, the marketplace solutions page lists the types we support, and a 30-minute call is bookable on office hours. For a definition of what a marketplace is, start with what is an online marketplace.

Marketplace examples at a glance

Find the row closest to your idea, then read its section. “Not sourced here” means we did not collect a reliable figure, and we prefer leaving the cell empty to guessing.

Model	Example	What carries the transaction	How the platform earns	Closest Kreezalid type
Products, many vendors	Etsy	An order with several vendors in it, and a payout to each	$0.20 per listing + 5% transaction fee + optional ad fees (Marketplacer, February 2025)	Products
Peer-to-peer resale	Vinted	A sale between two individuals, with a payment they both trust	No seller fees, according to Dokan	Peer-to-peer
Rental	Turo	A booking of someone’s vehicle, with insurance options	Not sourced here	Rental
Rental and stays	Airbnb	A booking of a space for a date range	Not sourced here	Rental
Listings and directories	Craigslist	The listing itself	$25 to $75 per job listing, $5 per car listing in certain regions (Marketplacer, February 2025)	Directory
Services	Treatwell, TaskRabbit, Lawn Love	A booking or a quote	Not sourced here	Services
B2B procurement	Spryker-type buy-side platforms	A procurement request that suppliers compete on	Not sourced here	B2B, a layer over any type
Brand-run resale	Zara Pre-Owned	A sale between two customers of the same brand	Not sourced here	Peer-to-peer
Retailer-run	Debenhams Group	A third-party seller’s order on a retailer’s site	Not sourced here	Products

Kreezalid supports six types: services, rental, products, directory, peer-to-peer and B2B, with B2B working as a layer over any of the other five. That is where the last column comes from; it is our mapping, not the companies’.

Product marketplaces: Etsy and the multi-vendor cart

Etsy is the example everybody gives, and Dokan’s point about it is the useful one: most real marketplaces are a blend, and Etsy started as a pure peer-to-peer site and now has plenty of full-time shops selling on it (Dokan). A product marketplace is the model that grows out of that drift.

On fees, Marketplacer lists Etsy’s model as $0.20 per listing, plus a 5% transaction fee, plus optional ad fees (Marketplacer, February 2025). Dokan describes the same shape: a 20-cent listing fee on top of a commission. Both are vendor blogs and fee levels change, so check Etsy’s own page before you put a number in a business plan.

What you can copy is the mechanism: a buyer fills one basket with items from several vendors, and the money is split afterwards, one payout per vendor. That is a payments problem more than a design one. Kreezalid has Stripe Connect and Lemonway built in, and Mangopay is available on request. If this is your model, the product marketplace page shows how we set it up.

Can you build a marketplace on Shopify?

Partly, and it has been done: Shipturtle, which sells an app for it, lists 19 multi-vendor marketplaces built on Shopify (Shipturtle). That is a vendor’s claim, and it says nothing about how well vendor onboarding or payouts work for your case. Our Shopify marketplace guide covers the options.

Peer-to-peer resale: Vinted and the payment problem

Dokan says peer-to-peer and C2C mean the same thing in practice, and that is how we use both terms. Vinted is the clean example: individuals resell clothes to each other, and according to Dokan there are no seller fees. That comes from a competitor’s blog, not from Vinted’s own page.

The hard part of this model is the money between strangers. Mangopay says it powers payment flows for platforms including Vinted, Wallapop and Chrono24 (Mangopay). That is the provider’s own claim, but the lesson holds: with strangers on both sides, you buy a payment layer rather than build one.

What you can copy: profiles, reviews, and a payment provider that handles payouts. What you cannot: Vinted’s audience, which is the reason a listing sells. Without it, a peer-to-peer launch in a broad category has no supply and no demand on day one. The peer-to-peer marketplace guide and the peer-to-peer solution page go further.

Rental and booking marketplaces: Turo and Airbnb

When the thing sold is a date range, the transaction changes. Nobody buys a listing; they book a period, and the platform has to know what is free, what a deposit is and who pays when something breaks.

Dokan presents Turo as a place where car owners rent out their vehicles, with insurance options that remove the fear from both sides. Airbnb is the standard illustration of a point from Andrew Blachman of Marketplace Capital, speaking on Sharetribe’s podcast: successful marketplaces unlock new supply or demand that did not exist before, like Airbnb did for short-term rentals (Sharetribe).

Our advice: settle insurance with a partner before you open to the public. A calendar is the easy part. Start with what insurance you need to manage risk on a peer-to-peer marketplace, then the rental marketplace page.

Service marketplaces: when the price is a quote

Dokan’s list of SaaS-enabled marketplaces includes Treatwell, TaskRabbit and Lawn Love (Dokan). What they share is that the buyer rarely adds something to a basket. They book a slot or ask for a price, and the provider’s time is the product.

The money question follows from that. You can take a commission on the booking, charge providers for leads, or sell a subscription. Each has a leak: if the first job goes well, the two sides can agree to continue outside the platform. Our service marketplace business models guide compares the three. Start from the services solution page if this is your model.

Listing and directory marketplaces: Craigslist

Craigslist, as Marketplacer describes it, charges for the listing, not for the sale: $25 to $75 per job listing and $5 per car listing in certain regions (February 2025). A fee on the listing needs no basket and no vendor payout, so it needs no marketplace payment flow.

That is why a directory is the lightest model to launch. It is also the one most dependent on traffic. A $75 job listing is worth paying for only where employers know candidates will see it. You can copy the fee on the listing; you cannot copy the traffic that makes the fee acceptable. The directory solution page is the place to start.

B2B and procurement marketplaces

B2B describes who buys, not how the transaction works. Spryker describes procurement marketplaces as platforms where multiple suppliers compete on price, availability and delivery (Spryker). A freelance board with companies as clients is also B2B in that sense, but it runs on a different mechanism, so the two should not share a row in a list.

On our side, B2B is a layer over the other types, not a type of its own. A company can sell products in bulk, rent equipment or offer services, and the B2B solution page covers that. The Deskmanager case study shows one that we built and host as an Enterprise project.

Distributors and manufacturers who ask whether they can run their own B2B marketplace should read the next section: the question is the same as for a retailer.

Brands and retailers running their own marketplace

A company that already sells can add third-party sellers. Two examples show the range.

Zara launched its own online marketplace for repair, resale and donation of clothes on 7 September 2023, and Zara Pre-Owned is its C2C marketplace for second-hand clothes of its own brand. Both facts come from Origami Marketplace, a software vendor, in a French-language article (Origami Marketplace).

Debenhams Group, a retailer, was announced as selecting Mangopay to power marketplace growth, in a Mangopay press release from October 2025 (listed on Mangopay’s pricing page). Marketplacer’s pitch to retailers is the commercial reason: sell new product categories through third-party sellers without ever having to invest in or hold product inventory (Marketplacer). That is a vendor’s pitch, not an audited result.

The lesson is that the model matters more than the logo. A brand’s resale site starts with the brand’s own customers; you do not have them. For projects that must connect to ERP, PIM, CRM or SSO, see our Enterprise offer.

What you can copy from an example, and what you cannot

Copy these:

• The narrow start. Dokan’s advice for the chicken-and-egg problem is to start in one narrow niche or city, win it completely, then expand. Etsy’s own drift from pure peer-to-peer to full-time shops is an example of widening after a narrow start, not before.
• The transaction design. Basket and payout, booking, quote, listing: choose one and make it work before adding another.
• The fee structure. A listing fee, a transaction fee or a commission can each be set on day one. They do not depend on size.

Do not copy these:

• The audience. It is what makes an Etsy listing sell and a Craigslist job post worth $75.
• The insurance and logistics arrangements. Turo’s insurance options exist because an insurer agreed to them; yours need a partner of your own.
• The supply already in place. An example you see today has a full catalogue. Yours starts empty.

If you stop reading here, how to create a marketplace like Amazon, Etsy or Airbnb is the next step.

Which example is closest to your idea, and when not to use Kreezalid

Match your idea to a type:

• You sell vendors’ products: products.
• You rent things or spaces for dates: rental.
• You sell people’s time: services.
• You charge for listings: directory.
• Individuals sell to each other: peer-to-peer.
• Companies are the buyers: B2B, on top of any of the above.

There are more than 50 templates to start from, and the marketplace builder is the product page: our promise is a launch in about 7 days. That is a promise about the product, not a guarantee for your project; the time depends on how fast you settle your offer and content. The four main plans run from €39 (Build) to €599 (Extend) a month, with Launch at €129 and Grow at €299, and Plus and Enterprise on quote; see pricing.

A platform is the wrong route in a few cases:

• You want to sell your own stock. That is e-commerce, not a marketplace. The differences between a marketplace and e-commerce are worth reading first.
• Your model needs a payment provider other than Stripe Connect or Lemonway. Mangopay is available on request only, so ask before you start the trial.
• Your idea depends on running its own dispatch or fleet. No marketplace builder replaces an operation you have to run yourself.
• You need something we may not do and cannot name yet. Book the demo before the trial.

If you are comparing routes rather than platforms, the platform versus building from scratch and Kreezalid versus Sharetribe pages cover the trade-offs.

Frequently asked questions

Can you give me some examples of digital marketplaces?

Yes: Etsy for products, Vinted for peer-to-peer resale, Turo and Airbnb for rentals, Craigslist for listings, Treatwell and TaskRabbit for services. Zara Pre-Owned and Debenhams Group show that brands and retailers run marketplaces too. The table above gives each model, what carries its transaction and how it earns.

How do marketplace commissions work?

A commission is a share of each sale, taken by the platform. It is one fee among several: Etsy combines a listing fee, a transaction fee and optional ads, Craigslist charges for the listing alone, and Vinted is described as having no seller fees. Our marketplace business model guide helps you choose between them.

What is the difference between e-commerce and an online marketplace?

An e-commerce store sells its own stock, while a marketplace lets other sellers sell on its platform and earns from the transactions or the listings. The practical consequence is that a marketplace needs vendor onboarding and payouts, which a shop does not. The ten differences are listed in a separate article.

Can you build a marketplace like Airbnb or Etsy without coding?

You can build the model without coding, not the company. Softr, for one, claims you can build a branded two-sided marketplace with no code (Softr). Kreezalid offers a launch in about 7 days as a product promise. What you cannot copy is the audience, so read the no-code marketplace guide.

What is a peer-to-peer marketplace?

A peer-to-peer marketplace is one where individuals trade with each other and the platform hosts listings, payments and trust. Peer-to-peer and C2C mean the same thing in practice, according to Dokan. Vinted is the usual example. Most real marketplaces blend individuals and professionals, as Etsy does today.

Try your model for 14 days

Kreezalid has a 14-day free trial, and no credit card is required to start it. Pick the plan on the pricing page, or book a 30-minute demo call on office hours if you want to check your model first.