How do I setup a beer marketplace?

Check out https://www.balancedpayments.com/ They are made for marketplaces. Airbnb CEO among others invested in them and they have some of the best pricing/payout fees. Also some good info on http://www.collaborativeconsumption.com/2013/10/08/online-marketplaces-are-hard/ One of Balanced Payments co-founders is writing this blog series on marketplaces.

Hone decor / furniture industry is one of the highest profit promising industry today. The profit margins on home decor ranges from 20% - 45% depend on the price of the product. If you're looking to get quickly popular, I suggest you start with the online store and promote it on offline as well. Keep the margins low initially so that you can attract more buyers. As the business grows, reinvest the amount back on the business so that you can stock more varieties. All the very best.

It's very important. (first, read this article by Josh Breinlinger - http://acrowdedspace.com/post/47647912203/a-critical-but-ignored-metric-for-marketplaces) The way you achieve success in a marketplace is by driving liquidity for both your supply & demand. Demand-side Liquidity = When users come to your marketplace, they can achieve their goals. Supply-side Liquidity = When supply comes to your marketplace they can achieve their goals... which are almost always to make money. If you're making a large amount of your supply-side users a full-time income, then you're helping them achieve liquidity. Now it's not so black and white and it doesn't always have to be a "full-time income." It depends what their goals are. E.g., 1) At Airbnb, renters aren't looking to quit their day jobs and become landlords full-time... they're just look to earn a substantial amount of income to offset their rent, mortgage, etc. So in this case, I would probably goal on # of renters that earn >$500 / month... and (in the first 1-5 years) try to grow this number by 10-20% MoM... and maybe by just 5% once you're in the mid-high tens of millions in yearly revenue. 2) At Kickstarter, the goal of the supply-side is to get their project successfully funded. They don't care if the project creator is "full-time"... they just want to make sure they meet their funding goal. This is why they talk about their 44% project success rate all the time - http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats 3) At Udemy, our instructors want a substantial amount of their income to be driven from their Udemy course earnings... so we look at how many instructors are earning >$2k / month.

There is quite a bit of information available online about eCommerce conversions rates. According to a ton of sources, average visitor-to-sale conversion rates vary from 1-3%. This does not mean the Furniture conversions will be the same. The bigger problem is that visitor-to-sale conversions are not a good data point to use to measure or tune your eCommerce business. All business have some unique friction factors that will affect your final conversion rate. It's very important to understand each of these factors and how to overcome them. The best way to measure and optimize is to take a conversion funnel approach. Once you have defined your funnel you can optimize each conversion rate to better the total effect. For example: Top of the funnel: - All web site visitors, 100,000 / month First conversion: View a product page, 50% of all visitors Second Conversion: Add to Cart, 10% of people who view products Final Conversion: Complete Checkout, 80% of people who put items in a cart In this example we see that only 10% of people who actually view products put them in to a cart, but 80% of those people purchase. If you can figure out why visitors are not adding items to their cart and fix the issue to increase the conversion rate, revenue should increase significantly because of the high checkout rate. You can use free tools like Google Analytics to give you a wealth of information about your site visitor and their behavior or there are some great paid tools as well.

It depends on a number of factors but I'd boil it down to two key things to start: 1) What is your real cost to provide a free plan or trial? 2) Who exactly is your customer and what are they used to paying and who and how do they pay today? When you say "online workforce marketplace" it sounds as though you're placing virtual workers. If that's the case, or if you're paying for the supply side of the marketplace, the question is how much can you subsidize demand? Depending on where you're at in the process, I'd also question how much you can learn about the viability of your marketplace by offering a free version, assuming again, that free is actually a real cost to you. I was part of a SaaS project that started charging people for early access based mostly on just a good landing page (we clearly stated they were pre-paying) and were amazed at the response. I've also run a SaaS product that offered free trials and realized that the support costs and hand-holding and selling required to convert from free trial to paid wasn't worth it, this despite the product's significant average ARR. You might be better off providing a "more information" sign-up form (to capture more leads) and let them ask for a free trial while only showing your paid options. I've been amazed at the lead capture potential from a simple "have questions? Click here and we'll contact you" This is all the generalized advice I can offer based on the limited information I have, but happy to dive-in further if you'd like on a call.