Multi-vendor Marketplace

01The challenge:

Two hundred makers, and every sale settled by hand

MarketHub started as a curated directory of independent home-goods makers. A customer who wanted a lamp from one maker and a rug from another sent two emails, got two invoices and paid twice. Each maker shipped and billed on their own terms, and MarketHub heard about a sale only through a monthly report.

The finance lead spent the first week of every month matching vendor spreadsheets against bank deposits. Commission went uncollected on sales nobody reported, and buyers who wanted pieces from several makers often gave up after the first invoice.

02What we built:

One cart across every vendor, with the split done at payment

The storefront is Next.js, backed by a Node.js API and a MongoDB catalog where each vendor owns their listings, stock and shipping rules. A customer checks out once. Stripe Connect takes the single payment, splits it by vendor, keeps MarketHub's commission and schedules each maker's payout.

Vendors get a dashboard for orders, payouts and listing edits, with photos uploaded straight to S3 and resized on AWS Lambda. Order events pass through an SQS queue, so a slow shipping-label call never holds up checkout. A refund reverses its share of the split on its own.

03What changed:

$2M a month in sales, and a month-end close that takes an afternoon

Gross merchandise value reached $2M a month within eight months of launch, across more than 200 vendors. Carts with two or more makers now account for 34% of orders, and commission is collected on every sale because no payment reaches a vendor before the split.

Reconciliation that used to take a week now takes an afternoon. We still operate the platform day to day, on call for payout problems, and ship vendor-requested features every two weeks from a backlog that MarketHub's operations lead ranks.