Marketplaces — Diagnosing Buyer-Side and Seller-Side Friction

Short answer: treat buyers and sellers as separate users with separate funnels. Buyers get stuck on search, trust, and contacting or paying a seller. Sellers get stuck on onboarding, creating their first listing, and getting their first response. A weak seller funnel shows up later as a weak buyer funnel, because there is nothing good to buy.

Table of Contents

1. Two Products, One Platform
2. Buyer Funnel
3. Seller Funnel
4. How the Sides Affect Each Other
5. Setting Up Measurement
6. Key Takeaways

Two Products, One Platform

A marketplace's health is often summarised as liquidity: the likelihood that a buyer finds what they want and a seller gets a sale. Liquidity is an outcome. The causes sit in two different experiences that different people use for different reasons.

Averaging them hides everything. A site-wide conversion rate on a marketplace is nearly meaningless.

Buyer Funnel

1. Search or category viewed
2. Listing viewed
3. Seller contacted, or item added to cart
4. Transaction completed
5. Repeat purchase

Zero-result searches are worth special attention. They tell you exactly what demand exists that supply does not meet.

Seller Funnel

1. Seller signup started
2. Account verified
3. First listing started
4. First listing published
5. First enquiry or order received
6. First transaction completed

The gap between listing published and first enquiry decides whether a seller stays. Sellers who hear nothing in the first weeks rarely return.

How the Sides Affect Each Other

When a buyer metric falls, check the seller funnel before redesigning the buyer experience.

Setting Up Measurement

Separate the two audiences. Tag each identified user with a role so every report can be split:

deepsync("identify", user.id, { role: "seller", plan: "free" });

Build one [funnel](/features/funnels) per side, using custom events for confirmed outcomes such as listing_published and order_completed.

Watch the right sessions.

• Sellers who started a listing and did not publish. Listing creation is a long form, and recordings show the field where they stop.
• Buyers who searched several times without opening a listing.
• Buyers who contacted a seller. What did they see before deciding to?

Check errors on uploads. Image upload is a frequent silent failure, especially on mobile browsers (JavaScript errors).

Mask messages and contact details. Marketplace screens show names, phone numbers, addresses, and private messages between users. Add masking to those elements and block message threads from recording (PII masking).

Illustrative scenario. A services marketplace sees buyers contacting providers and rarely booking. Seller-side recordings show the new-enquiry notification is easy to miss on mobile, so replies arrive a day late. Making the notification prominent improves buyer conversion without touching the buyer interface.

More: DeepSync for marketplaces.

Key Takeaways

• Build separate funnels for buyers and sellers.
• Seller friction appears later as buyer problems.
• Time to first response is a key health measure.
• Mask private messages and contact details in recordings.

Conclusion

In a marketplace, the fastest way to improve the buyer experience is often to fix something on the seller side. Measure both and look for the connection.

Start free with DeepSync.