What is the difference between a marketplace and a storefront?

At Holaplex, when we first started out, our first product was the Holaplex Storefront. We have come a long way since then, but storefronts remain a hugely popular feature, even to this day.

Holaplex Storefronts allows you to create your own store where you can mint your NFTs and sell them via auctions or as an instant sale. You can customize it and add your own logo, cover and customize the theme any way you want. You get to do all this without writing a single line of code. Holaplex stores also contain a secondary market of their own, where your buyers can list and trade NFTs that they bought in your store.

You can do most of the above things on your Holaplex profiles now, along with some fun additional features like following other creators and see what they’re collecting and trading on your feed. Holaplex profiles are also escrow-less, which means your NFTs don’t leave your wallet when you list them and you can receive offers on your NFTs even if you don’t list them.

Holaplex marketplaces takes the above feature-set a step further and offers custom marketplaces for those established / upcoming NFT projects that need a separate marketplace of their own. There’s no longer a need to wait for a closed-source marketplace’s permission to list your project on their marketplace, when every project can have their own marketplace now. On your own marketplace, you can decide what gets listed, what the transaction fees are going to be, and who is going to be controlling it. There are also useful analytics like volume, floor price, average price, and more, right out of the box!

There are always more features coming along the way, but remember that these are all open source tools, which means you can contribute any features you’d like to get added or fork our products and make it your own! As a part of our community, you can also vote or ask for any features that you may find useful, and we’ll help build them!

Now, which should you choose?

If you’re a new creator just starting out your journey, storefronts or profiles are what you go with. If you run a NFT PFP project, a DAO of artists or musicians, or anything similar in scale, a marketplace is your best option.