Marketplace App Development in Sydney & Melbourne
Two-sided and multi-vendor marketplace apps engineered for Australian businesses, with seller payout infrastructure, liquidity planning, and ATO SERR tax reporting built in from day one.
Planning an app? Let’s talk.
Tell us what you’re looking to build, improve or solve. We’ll get back to you within a few hours, often within minutes.
A marketplace is two products at once: one for the people selling, one for the people buying, with payments, trust, and rules sitting in the middle. Most marketplace projects that stall do not fail on the technology. They fail because the seller experience was an afterthought, the payout flow was bolted on late, or nobody worked out how the first hundred sellers and the first thousand buyers would actually arrive.
Software Co builds marketplace apps for founders and established businesses in Sydney, Melbourne, and across Australia, from a focused first version through to a platform handling real transactions. We build the software, and we are direct about what software cannot do: it cannot create demand or supply on its own. That is why our marketplace work starts with who is on each side and why they would transact on your platform, before any development is scoped.
Australian marketplaces also carry obligations that overseas agency pages rarely mention, including the ATO’s Sharing Economy Reporting Regime for many platforms that let sellers supply goods or services through an app. We scope that during discovery, not after launch.
Why Australian Founders & Enterprises Partner With Software Co
Plenty of agencies will quote a marketplace. Fewer will tell you that the hard part is usually the cold start, not the code. Our approach is to treat the marketplace model, the launch plan, and the build as one conversation, so what gets built first is the smallest version that lets one side of the market get real value from the other.
Marketplace products also sit on top of money movement, identity, and disputes, which is where cheap builds tend to break. We plan seller onboarding, split payments and payouts, ratings, and dispute handling as part of the core design, with Australian rules in mind, rather than adding them once the first complaint arrives.
Australian Marketplace Compliance, Tax Reporting & Financial Architecture
ATO Sharing Economy Reporting Regime (SERR) Integration
Automated seller transaction tracking and data export structures designed to comply directly with ATO reporting guidelines for ride-sourcing, short-term accommodation, asset hire, and personal service platforms.
eKYC, AML/CTF & Seller Identity Verification
Frictionless merchant onboarding workflows integrating digital identity verification protocols to comply with Australian Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing standards without frustrating legitimate sellers.
Australian Consumer Law & Financial Governance
Transaction logic engineered to handle mandatory buyer refund rights, dispute resolution holds, clear fee disclosures, and enterprise data protection hosted within local Sydney and Melbourne AWS or Azure data centers in alignment with the Privacy Act 1988.
Core Engineering Solutions for Two-Sided & Multi-Vendor Marketplaces
Our 6-Step Marketplace App Delivery Lifecycle
Discovery & Marketplace Model
We define who is on each side, what each side gets, how you earn (commission, subscription, listing fees, or a mix), and which side has to be won first.
Launch & Liquidity Planning
We shape the first version around the smallest viable market, for example one niche, one city, or one category, so the product launches with something worth transacting on instead of an empty directory.
Compliance & Payments Scoping
We work through payment provider requirements, seller identity and verification, and tax reporting obligations that may apply to your platform, including SERR, before development is quoted.
Design
We design the buyer and seller experiences together, with seller onboarding treated as a first-class journey rather than an admin screen.
Development & Testing
Development runs in short, visible sprints. Testing covers the edge cases marketplaces actually hit, such as partial refunds, cancelled bookings, failed payouts, and disputed orders, alongside normal functionality and load.
Launch & Growth Support
We handle app store submission and stay involved after launch for fixes, new seller and buyer features, and scaling as transaction volume grows.
Marketplace & Custom Software Portfolio
Clinic 1 - All-in-One Practice Management Software
BizCap - Australia’s Most Open-minded Lender
RebateApp - Your Ultimate Rebate Companion
Shoprun - World’s First Livestream Shopping Centre
Fieldr - Productivity, Time Tracking and Task Management
Twine - A New Kind of Match-making
HealthMate - Decentralising Allied Health. Reimagining Care.
AI Medic - AI-assisted healthcare when you need it
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you build a marketplace to compete with Airbnb, Uber or Amazon?
No. Large horizontal marketplaces compete on network effects and capital, not on software, and an app alone will not displace them. We build niche and vertical marketplaces where a defined group of buyers and sellers already has a reason to transact, which is where a new platform can realistically win.
Does the ATO's Sharing Economy Reporting Regime apply to my marketplace?
How do marketplace payments and seller payouts work?
How do you solve the chicken-and-egg problem?
Should my marketplace be a native app, a web app, or both?
How long does a marketplace take to build, and what does it cost?
Insights & Ideas
Local, Offshore, or Hybrid App Development in Australia: An Honest Guide to When Each Model Actually Makes Sense
Oct 05, 2026Let’s Work Together
Have a project in mind? We’d love to hear about it. Let’s create something great together!
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