Why Businesses Need a Marketplace App Development Company to Leverage Geospatial Insights

It is possible to create your own marketplace in various ways. However, when considering a marketplace builder versus a marketplace app development company, the latter wins in terms of flexibility, precision, and advanced ways of working with geospatial data. Marketplace builders often enable basic geospatial data. These are:

• calculating delivery costs, 
• picking a store location, or 
• basic geo-targeting for marketing. 

With a marketplace app development company, your marketplace can leverage geospatial intelligence. This includes using:

• integrated advanced geospatial API solutions,
•  real-time data processing, 
• geofencing for security alerts and location-based promotions, 
• and real-time tracking. 

Here is the list of a few marketplaces that  would not have been market giants without custom development for geospatial insight:

• DoorDash, 
• UberEats, 
• Lyft, 
• Airbnb, 
• TaskRabbit, and 
• Doctor-on-Demand.

Let’s dive into the possibilities of custom marketplace app development for leveraging geospatial insight for your marketplace. 

Enhancing Business Strategies with Location-Based Data

Geospatial insight is processed raw data such as city locations in combination with other data layers such as real-time traffic data, environmental conditions, and environmental risks. It is not simply tracking particular geographical data. Geospatial insight means layering different data against geographical locations, interpreting it, and adjusting it based on real-time data.

For instance, in the image below, the layers of data are used for a preventative health app. By combining these different layers of data, a preventative health app can map the highest health risk neighborhoods to a variety of causes and offer tailored solutions for each area. 

Source

In the context of a marketplace app, let’s imagine a home services marketplace. On top of the core geospatial data layer, we’ll require population data such as household density, homeownership data, and age distribution. On top of that, historical data should be layered such as booking data, seasonal trends, and cancellation rates. The next step in forming insight would be combining the traffic & mobility layer as well as socioeconomic data. All in all, these layers together will provide the home services marketplace app with:

• Ability to predict areas with high demand for services;
• Optimize dispatching service providers or incentivize them enough to match the demand and ensure the lowest waiting times;
• Ability to queue jobs in certain areas for maximum efficiency of the service providers;
• Adjust pricing dynamically to create fairer costs;
• Create localized marketing.

It is vital to emphasize, that unlocking these features is not possible with any of the marketplace builder solutions. Geospatial insight is a unique, business-specific combination of data internal to the business as well as coming from open-source APIs and paid DaaS (Data as a Service) providers.

 

According to Veena Muralodharan, a GIS expert, the geospatial insight is a new powerful strategic tool such as:

“LI (Location Intelligence) is creating a new wave of spatial analysis with methods and techniques that focus on solving business problems by embracing open source tools and dynamic data streams.”

How Marketplace Apps Use Geospatial Insights for Competitive Advantage

As shown above, geospatial insight opens up new opportunities. A marketplace app development company can combine layers of data to achieve unique business outcomes. For instance, geospatial insight translates into understanding and determining health-risk areas. That, in turn, allows the company to suggest effective interventions to improve health outcomes and reduce healthcare costs. In the end, it leads to evidence-based and data-informed decision-making. 

In the home services marketplace app example, your app can take balancing demand and supply to the next level. The biggest challenge of most marketplace is balancing demand and supply. With geospatial insight, you will be able to launch a promotion to generate higher demand at a quiet time in a certain location. On the other hand, you will be able to incentivize service providers to take on more jobs. Moreover, you might be able to offer a service provider to accept jobs as a package. For instance, 3 jobs in a remote area. A service provider will get substantial revenue while the system splits the transportation costs and offers customers a fairer price. A marketplace that can consistently keep both parties engaged and satisfied wins in the market.

In the table below, geospatial insight is broken down by features, involved data layers, and business outcomes. The top online marketplace app development company often analyzes the business case individually, and involved data layers may vary.

 

Feature	Data layers on top of the geospatial layer	Competitive Advantage
Heatmaps	Demographic data Historic demand Consumer behavior patterns Real-time data	Determining underserved areas and high-demand zones, Reducing waste, targeted effort Adaptive pricing.
Resource allocation	Traffic data & mobility patterns Forecasting with ML (machine learning) or DL (deep learning) Resource distribution data	Lower operational costs, More efficient resource allocation, Removing bottlenecks dynamically.
Dynamic decision-making	Socioeconomic trends Market changes in demand and supply Environmental & sensory data	Enabling business agility, Adapting to changes faster than competitors, Detecting market disruptors.
Improved user experience	Behavioral patterns Movement patterns Hyperlocalized demand tracking	Product recommendations based on user history, location, and behavior patterns – hyper-personalization, Greater convenience for user retention and loyalty.

 

Hyperlocalized Marketing

In addition, the best marketplace app development company will always help to capitalize on hyperlocalized marketing. After all, anticipating customer needs is a golden standard of exceptional customer service. For instance, a nationwide home service marketplace upon detecting an oncoming heat wave may issue promotions for A/C maintenance service in affected areas. Not only it will manage to capture the market demand, but it will also gain loyalty points with customers. 

Grabbing the market share with localized promotions for particular events will allow your marketplace app to overtake long-standing competitors. For instance, not all business people or travelers are aware of events and may struggle to get a taxi in some areas. So, if your ride-sharing marketplace manages to foresee this and make a time-sensitive offer, customer satisfaction will increase while service providers will feel secure in terms of available jobs.

Conclusion

Geospatial insight, put simply, is a deeper use of data linking it to the geographical location, often in real-time and factoring in behavioral patterns. Leveraging geospatial insight allows customers experience a more personalized and convenient user experience. Many service marketplaces rely at least on one side on human effort and time. Optimizing their effort creates benefits throughout the marketplace:  

• make service providers feel more valued,
• let customers enjoy more reasonable pricing,
• create a competitive advantage for the business.  

In addition, geospatial insight provides with two key advantages:

• Hyperlocalized marketing,
• Being first to react to market shifts.