How Complex Is It to Build a Business Exchange?

In Germany, there are now over 60 websites listing businesses for sale. From classic bulletin boards to sophisticated marketplaces with login areas and complex matching algorithms.

Since we started building viaductus.de, several new marketplaces have launched. Besides the classic go-to-market challenges (two-sided marketplaces are notoriously difficult to grow), there are also numerous technical pitfalls that can become your downfall.

After three years of development and observing many failed competitors, we have identified the most common mistakes—and drawn our own lessons from them.

Agencies: Expensive and Too Far from the Vision

The problem with large iterations: Agencies work in big leaps. They take your briefing, disappear for 2-3 months, and come back with an MVP that is already outdated. The small, crucial iterations—which decide success or failure in marketplaces—fall by the wayside.

Too far from the real problem: An agency builds what you described, not what the market needs. Without direct user contact, features are created that no one uses, while critical pain points remain unresolved.

Cost trap: What starts at €50,000 quickly balloons to €150,000. Changes are expensive, adjustments take weeks, and in the end, you have a system that is difficult to maintain.

Enterprise Software Stack: Overkill for Marketplaces

Blazor: Enterprise hammer for consumer nails
We have seen competitors using Blazor for their business marketplace. The result: login errors right on the homepage, misaligned buttons, and unusable mobile views. Blazor may work for internal corporate applications, but for customer-facing marketplaces, it’s like using a tank to fetch bread rolls.

Java backend: Slow and overly complicated
Java enterprise stacks bring complexity that overwhelms small teams. Spring Boot, Hibernate, complex application servers—all technologies designed for banks, not agile marketplaces. The result is long development cycles and performance issues.

Go backend: Microservices overkill
Go is fantastic for high-performance services, but for most business marketplaces, it’s completely oversized. Teams spend more time on service discovery and inter-service communication than on actual business logic.

Low-Code: The Golden Cage

Vendor lock-in from day one: Low-code platforms promise quick results, but you buy yourself a golden cage. Once you need specific marketplace features—advanced search filters, custom workflows, integrated payment processing—you hit limits.

Exploding costs: What starts at $100 per month suddenly costs$2,000 monthly with 1,000 active users. Per-user pricing makes no sense for growing marketplaces.

Performance issues: Low-code platforms are optimized for simple CRUD applications, not for complex marketplace logic with matchmaking, reviews, and multi-user flows.

WordPress: The Plugin Nightmare

Good for starting out, dangerous for scaling: WordPress marketplace plugins are tempting. $200 for a “complete marketplace system” sounds fantastic. But once you have more than 100 listings or need custom features, it becomes a nightmare.

Performance collapse: WordPress was designed for blogs, not data-intensive marketplaces. As user numbers and complex queries increase, performance plummets.

Security risk: WordPress plugins are popular attack targets. For platforms handling sensitive business data, this is unacceptable.

Plugin conflict hell: An update to the marketplace plugin breaks the SEO plugin, the theme update breaks payment processing. You spend more time managing plugins than developing your business.

Our Learnings: What Really Works

Separate app and public website
One of our key insights: the public marketing website and the actual marketplace application must be separate. Different target audiences, different performance requirements, different update cycles. A monolithic system slows everything down.

Reusable components for consistency
Consistent UI components not only save development time but also help with later adjustments. If you want to change the design of the login button, you should be able to do it in one place, not 15 different ones.

Branch deployments for every feature
Short release cycles are crucial. Every feature branch gets its own deployment environment with us. Teams can develop, test, and iterate in parallel. Instead of waiting months for the next big release, features go live immediately.

API-first from the start
Your business marketplace won’t just remain a website. Mobile apps, partner integrations, white-label solutions—all require APIs. Those who tightly couple backend and frontend will have to rebuild everything later.

The Reality: Time Is More Important Than Perfection

The market for business marketplaces is fiercely competitive. While you wait 8 months for your agency, your competitor launches a pragmatic solution and gains market share.

Start fast, iterate fast: Better an 80% solution in 4 weeks than a 100% solution in 6 months. The market teaches you more than any briefing.

Technology as an enabler, not an end in itself: The best technology is the one that doesn’t get in your way. Blazor, Java enterprise stacks, and low-code platforms solve problems you don’t have.

User feedback over perfection: Real user problems matter more than elegant architecture. First understand what the market needs, then perfect it.

Conclusion: Learn from Our Mistakes

Building business marketplaces is more complicated than it seems—but not for the reasons you think. Technology is the smallest problem. Much more critical are wrong tool decisions that cost you months and still don’t get you to your goal.

Our recommendation: Start pragmatically, iterate quickly, and invest your time in understanding your market, not fighting self-inflicted technical problems.

Are you planning a business marketplace or already stuck in one of the described problems? Let’s talk about how you can reach your goal faster and more cost-effectively.