Multi-Vendor E-commerce Marketplace

A marketplace operator in India needed the whole ecosystem rather than a shop: customers, vendors who list and fulfil their own stock, administrators overseeing both, and the orders, payments and notifications connecting them.

We built it as three connected experiences on one platform. Vendors get a dashboard for their products, stock, orders and payouts. Customers get a storefront and an account area holding their orders and history. Administrators get oversight of the whole marketplace -- approving vendors, settling disputes, watching the catalogue, and seeing the commercial picture across every seller.

The commission logic is what makes a marketplace a marketplace, and it is where these builds usually go wrong. Every order has to split correctly between platform and vendor, hold up when an order is partly refunded or partly cancelled, and reconcile at the end of a payout period without anyone recalculating it by hand. It is handled in the system, against the order records themselves.

Payments run through integrated gateways, and automated WhatsApp and email notifications keep three audiences informed of the same event: the customer that their order shipped, the vendor that they have one to pack, the administrator when something needs attention.

Inventory is managed per vendor but enforced centrally, so the catalogue cannot sell what a vendor does not have -- the failure that costs a young marketplace its vendors as fast as its customers.

The client owns the platform outright, code, database and gateway accounts, and onboards new vendors without us.