I ran a design & UX department at an e-commerce company for two years and have been doing various product and website UX since before those things we're codified as "UX".
So there's a few factors here:
* You have a new product that you've brought to market quickly
* You have users telling you they are confused.
Regardless of hiring a consultant or an employee, you likely need someone with UX experience to help improve your customer's experience. What you need to do first is look at your flow and funnel. Where are users abandoning your site? is it before they add to cart? at checkout? at some other point? You will have abandonment, but the goal is to maximize converting the number of people coming in the door through the entire flow.
Your flow may have multiple end points. One might be "sign up for daily/weekly emails", another might be to actually finish a transaction and buy something.
You can hire an expert, but a lot of the basics are covered in a series of reports and checklists from Baymard Institute (baymard.org). A UX expert could help you prioritize and break those into actionable tickets/issues/tasks for your engineering staff.
Another thing to think about is the overall customer journey map. How does your marketplace fit into their daily flow? What are they doing before and after engaging with your website or native app? This is called journey mapping and it can help make the site/app feel more natural.
Regardless of who you hire, you need to do more research with customers and watch them use the site in addition to them telling you where there are problems. Often, they'll gloss over things that are the actual issue.
The goal is to identify the problems, find the ones that will give the biggest ROI on engineering time, and get those fixed asap. That should increase your profit and allow you to fix more issues with that new budget.
Happy to chat further with any questions you may have.
