What’s the Marketplace’s Current Stage of Development?

Warning Banner Header on Particl Desktop

Before getting into the finer details, we first need to understand a very important fact — Particl’s Open Marketplace is still in its Beta phase, meaning it is still early software that’s in its testing/development phase. It is not a final product, far from that, and that’s true even though it is currently running on mainnet.

While Particl Desktop is certainly one of the most appealing crypto wallets out there, and while the Open Marketplace itself is pretty impressive for a live blockchain product, it is still missing key features intended for its final version. It is also relatively complex to use for most people (in this case, think in terms of “non-crypto users”), both of which make adoption a real challenge.

That, alone, explains the marketplace’s relatively low level of adoption compared to traditional online marketplaces. Particl’s current users can still definitely be considered as pioneers, and perhaps still at this point, testers. Only once Particl gets “adoption-ready” will it start seeing any significant increase in the levels of adoption.

But the same key question remains — how do we make that marketplace adoption-ready? The answer is more obvious than it may seem — you just gotta fix what makes people NOT want to use it, and then, once that’s done, you can start reaching out to people and actually expect a decent “lead conversion rate”, aka the number of people you reach out to that convert into marketplace users.

What are the Marketplace’s Current Pain Points?

The first step to increase the marketplace’s adoption is to first understand what’s preventing it from getting said adoption. What could be better? What’s missing? To that end, the Particl team has recently received a feedback report from a very prominent crypto company which ended up being directly in line with what had been observed by the Particl team itself.

As it currently stands, the reasons can mostly be separated into 4 different categories:

Missing features

Because Particl is not a final product yet and still in Beta, it is in no way feature complete. That means a lot of features simply aren’t ready or even started yet. These features could be tools that make sellers’ life easier, indicators that help buyers make better-informed purchasing decisions, etc.

And while the release of Market Management will mark the end of an important development phase for the marketplace, one that was mostly focused on developing the base layer of what the marketplace was always intended to be when Particl was first launched, the next phase that will then begin will also have its load of very important features, although they might not impact the overall structure of the marketplace the same way Market Management will.

And even then, once Market Management and other features will release, they probably will have to be improved further moving ahead in time. Which brings us to the second category…

Required improvements on some features/functions

Releasing a feature is something. Making sure it’s as efficient and smooth as it needs to be is another. That much is made pretty evident with the major refactoring of the marketplace that is currently underway and will hit mainnet on the same release as the Market Management. Indeed, it is expected to significantly improve the marketplace’s performance, make it much lighter, and will also noticeably change the look and feel of it. Not surprising when you learn the update introducing Market Management touches around 80% or more of Particl’s marketplace components…

As time goes by, developers figure out more efficient ways to implement features and functions. The process of making those changes, after a feature is released, is called “refactoring”. Code refactoring is also important when introducing new, major features that touch components also touched by other previously released features. That’s to make sure the code’s health remains good and that the network doesn’t end up being a big pile of spaghetti code.

But more specifically in the context of user adoption, features that are already out or about to be released may need improvements moving forward before they become user-friendly. Additionally, features may be released in many different phases, first bringing the base layer for it, and then improving on it by adding more functionalities and efficiency in following updates.

Required improvements on the marketplace’s performance and stability

Sometimes, the required improvements can be harder to pinpoint because they are not directly related to specific features or functions. That’s because it may be the whole back-end that requires some refactoring and improvements. While these changes are more difficult to track and, at times, to even feel their impact, it definitely shows over multiple releases, each containing its own set of general improvements.

Those improvements are what make the marketplace generally faster. They are what makes listings sync up more quickly, what makes listing fees smaller, what makes loading times shorter, etc.

It’s easy to overlook this particular category. After all, it’s a normal reflex to be thinking that once all the key features are in place, the product is ready to market. But there is much more than that, and each feature needs to be appropriately integrated and feel right before it can be considered as ready.

Considering that today’s traditional online marketplaces are built on the web, and also because most people access those with pretty decent internet connections, speed and “hassle-free” user experience is expected from both sellers and buyers now more than ever. Even more so, users will generally be willing to spend a little more if it means simpler and more pleasant user experience. Which leads us to the fourth and final category…

Required improvements to the user interface (UI) and experience (UX)

“UI/UX is everything”, or so… Referring to the previous statement, “users will generally be willing to spend a little more if it means a simpler and more pleasant user experience”.

Of course, UI/UX is not the only thing that matters, but it is what glues everything together so that it makes sense and just feels right. You can have all the features in the world, but if they are displayed confusingly or unpleasantly, people will generally not even bother. That becomes even truer as a product’s learning curve gets steeper.

The reason behind this is mostly due to time constraints and the over-saturation of options available to users. Especially in the case of marketplaces — there are hundreds, if not thousands of them. Even if a marketplace’s value proposition is significant, it’s pretty hard to change people’s habits and get them to move from a marketplace they know and feel comfortable using to one that is complicated to understand and doesn’t look as good (it’s pretty fair to say…looks do matter).

So, is Particl’s Open Marketplace complicated to use? The answer might be “no” to you, but be assured it’s probably a resounding “YES” for most people you know. So how do you make these people leap forward and into this new age for online marketplaces? You gotta make sure that each of these 4 categories is being taken care of by the development team and bring the marketplace to a point that it may finally be considered “adoption-ready”.