Marktplaats Zakelijk
The Netherlands' largest marketplace, for business
Marktplaats is the largest online selling platform in the Netherlands. Marktplaats Zakelijk is its business platform, offering services to car dealers and general business users looking to sell at scale. Each service is managed by a different internal team, which made the website as fragmented as the organisation behind it. I was brought in as sole designer to redesign and restructure it from the ground up.
Role
6 month – project via Hike One
Sole product designer
Delivery & Usability testing
Outcome
New information architecture that improved clarity around the value proposition
Website launched to millions of customers within 6 months
The Problem
A christmas tree of a website
The site had been built and extended by marketers over time. Page by page, team by team, without a coherent structure underneath. Existing UX research confirmed the core issue: users didn’t understand the value proposition. But the problem ran deeper than copy or design. Nobody had a birds-eye view of what Marktplaats Zakelijk actually offered, or who each service was really for.
Missing information
No pricing, no examples, no specifics. Users couldn’t judge whether a service fit their needs, so they left.
No clear starting point
Multiple services aimed at different customer groups, with nothing telling users which one was meant for them.
Jargon everywhere
Navigation labels and headers used internal company language. Users had no idea what they were clicking into.
How might we restructure a fragmented, stakeholder-heavy website so that business users can immediately understand which services are right for them — and convert?
Process
Alignment before architecture
The most important step wasn’t the design. It was the stakeholder workshop we ran before touching a single wireframe. Because each service was owned by a different team, there was no shared understanding of what each service offered, who it was for, or how it differed from the others. Stakeholders were actively contradicting each other.
The workshop forced a single, unanimous answer to a deceptively simple question: which service is for which customer? That clarity became the foundation for everything that followed.
The Core Decision
Two user groups, two distinct sections
The workshop surfaced a clear structural insight. Marktplaats Zakelijk serves two fundamentally different user groups: car dealers and general business users. Different needs, different services, different information requirements. The old site treated them as one.
Splitting the website into two dedicated sections wasn’t just a UX decision. It also solved an operational problem. Each team could now manage their section independently, without stepping on each other’s content.
The solution
A few key improvements
Each service now has its own page with pricing, features, and real examples — giving users what they need to make a decision.
Dedicated service pages
Each service now has its own page with pricing, features, and real examples. Users get everything they need to make a decision in one place, without having to piece it together from across the site.
Comparison tables
For similar offerings, side-by-side comparison tables let users evaluate options without navigating back and forth. Particularly useful for car dealers choosing between service tiers.
Local navigation
A page-level navigation menu makes it easy to move through longer service pages without losing context. Small change, meaningful difference on content-heavy pages.
Plain language
Internal jargon replaced with descriptive labels throughout. Headers, navigation, and CTAs all rewritten for clarity. If a user couldn’t immediately tell what a service was for, the label got rewritten until they could.
A good reminder that clarity of structure often starts with clarity between people. Getting stakeholders aligned before touching the design made everything that followed easier and more durable.
