Playing sports is undoubtedly remarkable for overall fitness, personality development, and personal growth. But finding sports grounds, fitness places, and clubs can be a challenge. This is where a sports search marketplace comes in. Platforms like Wooter and ClassPass are helping game players and fitness enthusiasts in searching sports activities and centers in their area.
A sports search marketplace bridges the gap between vendors offering activities and players searching new sports adventures. It connects local sports-related organizations with clients through an online marketplace.
Through this post, FATbit analysts have put light on:
- Detailed Business model and target market
- Features and working of such marketplaces
Business Model and Active Players
As we said, sports search marketplace allows individuals to discover sports and activities in their area along with direct booking options. The leading platforms are free to use for anybody looking for sports and fun activities. A sports search marketplace generally charges owners and professionals a small processing fee each time they get a new client, and that’s it!
Some of the best sports search portals:
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Wooter is the popular resource for all the sports and fun activities. The marketplace for sports and adventure activities in the US is more than $130 billion with more than 15 million grownups, and 35 million youngsters.
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Coach Up is a search marketplace that connects athletes with private coaches but in limited sports categories (currently around 30). Comparatively, Wooter gives complete access to more than 1000 sports and recreational activities.
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Class Pass is another fitness membership search portal in the same line focusing on fitness studios.
Must-have Features and Critical Website Aspects
Whether you plan on launching a sports search portal by building from scratch or using a clone script, these are the website features that you cannot afford to ignore:
Homepage
Your sports search portal should have a beautifully designed homepage with enough white space that puts the focus on the main message. It must be motivating and thus encouraging more viewers to follow sports and other recreational activities.
The search portal should permit the user to refine search by providing activity information. Apart from the search feature, it must provide the provision to make a search through listed cities in the world.
Also Read: FunAway-An Advanced Tour & Travel Activity Marketplace Website Builder
Search Listings
Plan advanced search listing pages to list all the top activities performed in a particular area along with the complete address and cost details to make it convenient for the user to take a quick decision. Make sure that your listings are optimized from search engine aspect to generate more traffic.
Simple Signup Process
Registration process is critical for such search based ventures. Sign up process should be impressive and carry clearly defined fields that ask only relevant information.
Some of the sports search portals make it possible for vendors to sell their offerings through the site with marketing tools, payment options, two-way reservation process, and administering dashboard.
Vendor Account Page
Vendors need access of the site to sell their activities and manage their offerings. From editing account to payment details, everything should be manageable with ease. Below are some of the most prominent sections of the vendor account that a sports search portal clone shouldn’t miss:
Editing details – Provide with multiple provisions to update personal details including company name, phone number, and company email anytime. Highly intuitive and UX focused vendor section is important to promote ease of use.
Managing activities – Help vendors keep a full record of activities searched and performed by them through activity name, date, activity status, and category at particular time duration. This will help vendors in making strategic changes and gather platform insights.
Vendor Payment Option – Allow vendors to edit payment details and methods as per their requirements. To simplify payments, they should be allowed to switch payment method anytime. Integrating multiple payment options can also help your clone gather more regular users. This flexibility works in favor of the vendors and hence is highly crucial. Make sure it is present in your chosen script.
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User Account Page
Offering personalized pages can help users to track their activities and purchases in the sports search website. This feature will help users in managing their activity over time, and also play a crucial role in user engagement.
Add a cart window that contains all the information about the name of the activity with its price details, and total fee. Having more than one payment option (Credit Card and PayPal) to make it easy for users to pay for activities as per their convenience.
Pro tip – Make sure your sports search script brings multiple payment gateways. Popular marketplaces like ClassPass and Wooter already do this.
Also Read: Maximize Earnings of Your Travel Booking Marketplace with These Proven Revenue Sources
Sport/Activity Search
An ideal sports search portal involves searching all types of activities like Skydiving, Hiking, and Paintball. Selecting a particular activity should provide users with complete details about the prices, offers, and map location along with other highlights of the activity. This feature will be the backbone of your sports activity search engine. Don’t get this wrong.
Payment Process
Once the user is ready to buy a particular sports offer, there should be an activity page which provides an option to purchase the offer that takes the user to payment options. This makes the payment process highly secure to earn user and vendor trust.
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Refreshing Blog
Having an active blog adds value to a website, engages visitors and leads to more brand interactions. Social media links on the blog page help in gaining more exposure for the business. A sports search marketplace must include a frequently updated blog with good social media integration that positions it as an authoritative resource. In short, get a blog for your sports search clone.
Also Read: Things An Entrepreneur Ought To Know Before Planning a Travel Based Start-Up
Frequently Asked Questions
New users always have queries about the website, sign up, products, and services, and offers available on a particular product. So, a well-organized FAQ page is a must to address such user and vendor queries. Add search functionality to make query discovery easy for all.
Customer Reviews
Customers care what others say about the product they are interested in. If your product page carries customer reviews, you are helping customers to reach a decision quickly. Obviously not all the offerings will have positive reviews. Some will have both positive and negative reviews, which will make decision-making easier. So, consider adding reviews in your sports activity search portal.
Live Chat
Live chat helps resolve customer queries quickly and speed up the purchase process. So adding this feature to your sports search clone will be highly beneficial. Go for it even though it comes with some added investment in human resource.
Also Read: 7 Reasons Why Live Chats Are Crucial For a Business & Its Consumers
But Why specific sports search portal? Why not Google for search?
Google searches are sometimes very annoying because of a large number of results and irrelevant links. Also, finding and signing up through it requires numerous phone calls and in-person visits. But a sports search portal will keep it focused. It is a better search solution that allows players and sports leagues to connect with one another. Apart from that, it might permit the user to buy services straight from the site. Here are some more insightful points:
- Make management easier for coaches, sports leagues and owners of recreational facilities.
- Provide exposure to businesses through targeted listings. It also takes care of marketing.
Also Read: Go Mobile First to Make Your Mark in the Saturating Online Travel Industry
The final fitness whistle
The potential in sports search marketplaces like CoachUp and ClassPass is phenomenal. It is a fast and convenient way one could find all the sports and fun activities, and this is the reason it is growing so quickly. A similar search platform for a different region can work magic as well. Launch with a sports search script or build from scratch, the possibility of success is high!
FATbit technicians have listed all the features and suggestions critical to building a super sports search website. Need any kind of help regarding features, enhancements or any other technical detail? We will be obliged to help you in every way
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