Match rate is the percentage of demand requests on a marketplace that successfully find supply and result in a completed transaction or fulfilled request. It is one of the clearest direct measures of marketplace liquidity and overall health. A low match rate points to a specific problem: not enough supply, weak search and discovery, or a mismatch between what buyers are asking for and what sellers actually offer.
By Pitchkit · Last Updated October 10, 2026
Match rate tells you, category by category and city by city, exactly where your marketplace works and where it does not. Investors ask for it because it predicts churn long before churn shows up in your revenue numbers.
Divide the number of fulfilled requests by the number of total valid requests in the same period, then multiply by 100. Exclude spam, duplicate requests, and anything canceled by the buyer before a seller could respond.
In a given month, a platform receives 5,000 valid requests and fulfills 3,650 of them. Match rate equals 3,650 divided by 5,000, or 73 percent.
A good early target is 60 to 75 percent in your core, most-served categories. Enterprise or highly bespoke use cases, where requests are very specific, commonly run lower, in the 40 to 60 percent range, simply because fewer sellers can fulfill an unusual request.
Counting spam or duplicate requests as valid demand, which understates the true match rate. Not excluding out-of-stock or unavailable supply from the denominator. Ignoring response time service levels, since a request technically matched after three days may as well have failed for the buyer's purposes.
Add a liquidity panel to your traction slide showing match rate for your top five categories with the month-over-month trend. Example line: a match rate of 73 percent in core categories, up 6 points month over month.
Turn your metrics into a pitch narrative investors can follow.
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