As you’re building your marketplace, consider which tools and technology to leverage. There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel as new infrastructure solutions are emerging to help facilitate transactions on your platform, including: payment software, background checks, shipping and fulfillment solutions, and data privacy.

With help from the Marketplaces Facebook Group, we have curated a list of recommended B2B tools by marketplace founders.

You’ll see that most of these tools are relevant and useful to any software startup, and not just marketplace companies. However, a marketplace is unique in that it deals with distributed supply (and demand) and there aren’t many marketplace-specific tools out there yet to help with this.

With that said, some of the products on our list are designed to help third parties provide services/sell products:  Shippo (our portfolio company), Boostable, ShareTribe and Near Me, Payable and previously, Balanced (which has since shut down but most customers have moved over to Stripe).

The bottom line is if you’re building a marketplace, leverage good tools wherever you can, so you can focus on more valuable tasks like making connections and refining your business model.

The other takeaway is that we believe there is significant opportunity to develop infrastructure solutions for marketplaces. This is especially true given the rise of the 1099 worker from the on-demand economy. There are various services (insurance, tax, finance) targeting independent workers, but few of these are B2B/directly integrated with marketplaces.  You can check out a list of these services compiled by CoVenture and Karlin Ventures.

Thanks again to the Marketplaces Facebook Group for their help compiling this list of tools. And if you are building or have built an online marketplace, we would love to know which tools you like most.  Are we missing anything?