To Marketplace Product Leaders: Your Users Need More Than Transactions

In marketplaces, product excellence is often measured by what happens at checkout — speed, reliability, and ease of use. But what happens after that moment? For many platforms, the answer is not much.

Too often, user activity drops off a cliff once a transaction is completed. In the digital marketplace economy, the success of a platform is increasingly measured not just by the number of transactions but by the depth of user engagement and the strength of its community.

Why the Transaction Is Only Half the Journey

Transactions solve a functional need. They are short, goal-oriented, and self-contained. Buying or selling is a one-time task. Once that task is complete, so is the user session unless there is something else to return for.

The problem is not user interest, but the product design.

Platforms seeing long-term growth are the ones that design for what happens in between purchases. If your product does not create value between purchases, users will disappear until they need something again. Or worse, they may not come back at all. This is the engagement plateau. So what drives platform stickiness is not just functionality, but also interaction, discovery, support, and shared knowledge. A sense that the user experience extends beyond the transaction.

What Users Want (But Are Not Getting)

Users want relevance, trust, and connection. They want a reason to come back that is not just price or inventory. Community delivers that and marketplace platforms that prioritize it are reaping the rewards:

Higher retention and loyalty: Users who engage with community features stick around longer. They form habits. They build identity around the platform.
Trust and safety: Communities introduce transparency. Ratings, Q&A, and public profiles help users make informed decisions and feel safe participating.
Greater engagement: Community makes the experience interactive. When users can share tips, answer questions, or join discussions, they stay longer and come back more often.
Organic growth: Engaged users invite others. They create content. They talk about your product without being asked and this becomes your most authentic growth engine.

The shift is simple: users who feel like part of something are far more valuable than users who just complete a transaction.

What Engagement Looks Like in a Modern Marketplace

So how does that expectation translate into the product experience?

Engagement is not just a function of how good the checkout flow is. It is tied to how many reasons a user has to return and how frequently those reasons show up between transactions.

In leading marketplaces, engagement often takes less obvious forms:

A seller responding to product questions from prospective buyers
Users swapping advice on usage or care for items in a specific category
A shared collection of travel tips among those booking trips to the same region
Verified profiles, trust signals, and helpful reviews that feel alive, not stale

These moments may feel small, but they signal something larger: the product is a living system. And that system includes the people using it.

A Case Study in Product-Led Community: AirAsia’s Super App

AirAsia began with a simple goal: make booking flights easier. But over time, they recognized that what travelers wanted was not just convenience but also connection. The result was a transformation of their app into something much more layered.

Today, the AirAsia app includes feeds, messaging, and real-time updates shared by users themselves. Travelers ask each other for tips, give local advice, and co-create itineraries.

What AirAsia shows is that community does not require starting from scratch. It starts by understanding what people are already trying to do and designing the product to make that visible, shareable, and participatory.

What to Ask As You Rethink Engagement

If you are leading a marketplace product, and you are seeing drop-offs after conversion, it is worth asking:

Where do users go when they have a question that is not in the FAQ?
What signals do buyers rely on when deciding between sellers?
Where do power users share their knowledge and are you hosting that, or is it happening elsewhere?
What makes users feel like this is their go-to platform beyond the transaction?

None of these are solved by a single feature. But all of them point to the same insight: the most engaging marketplaces today are not just transactional environments. They are shared spaces with product experiences that encourage participation.