Multi-vendor marketplace development
Seller onboarding, catalogue approval, commission rules, split payouts and the admin tooling to police all of it. You are commissioning software, not a store.
Anyone who quotes a marketplace from a phone call has not understood what you asked for. We scope it properly first, and that scoping is a paid piece of work you own.
Most marketplace ideas that reach us should launch as something smaller first. We will say so before taking your money.
Payout run, this week PENDING APPROVAL
3 sellers
The software is the easy part
Marketplaces fail commercially far more often than technically. Most of what kills them has nothing to do with the build, and a developer who does not raise that is not doing you a favour.
Could you run this for the first six months with a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group and manual payouts? If yes, do that first. You will learn what to build, and it costs almost nothing to find out you were wrong.
The chicken and egg problem
Buyers will not come without sellers, and sellers will not stay without buyers. You need a credible answer for which side you solve first, before anyone writes code.
Sellers will try to go around you
Once a buyer and seller know each other, the next order often happens on WhatsApp. Your commission has to buy them something they cannot get by transacting directly.
Somebody owns quality
A bad seller damages your brand rather than theirs. Approval queues, ratings and removal policies are operational work that needs a named owner from day one.
Returns get complicated fast
Who refunds, from which pot, and what if the seller has already been paid out. This single question reshapes your payout schedule and your terms.
Compliance is not a footnote
Collecting money on behalf of sellers, GST treatment and marketplace regulations need a chartered accountant and a lawyer. We build to their advice rather than substituting for it.
Six systems, and three of them are invisible
Buyers see the storefront. The parts that decide whether the business works are the seller panel, the admin and the settlement engine.
Seller onboarding
Getting a seller from interested to selling, without your team chasing documents over email.
- Registration with document upload
- GST and bank verification steps
- Agreement acceptance recorded
- Approval queue with reasons for rejection
Catalogue and approval
Sellers listing products without turning your category structure into chaos within a month.
- Product submission against your taxonomy
- Review queue with edit and reject
- Bulk upload with validation
- Duplicate and prohibited item checks
Commissions and payouts
The engine that decides who is owed what. Get this wrong and you will be reconciling by hand forever.
- Commission by category, seller or tier
- Split settlement through the gateway
- Payout schedule with a hold period
- Statements sellers can reconcile against
Split orders and shipping
One cart, three sellers, three parcels. The customer should still feel like they placed one order.
- Cart split into per-seller sub-orders
- Shipping charged per seller or pooled
- Independent dispatch and tracking
- One clear order view for the buyer
The seller panel
If sellers cannot run their business from it, they will email your team instead, and your margin disappears into support.
- Orders, dispatch and labels
- Stock and pricing management
- Earnings, deductions and payout history
- Works on a phone, because it will be used on one
Your admin
The screen your operations team lives in. We design this before the storefront, because it decides whether the business is runnable.
- Seller, catalogue and order oversight
- Dispute and refund handling
- Payout runs with approval
- Reporting by seller, category and period
Why we will not quote this from a phone call
A marketplace has more unknowns than any other project we take on. Discovery converts those unknowns into a specification and a fixed price, and it is quoted separately so you can stop after it.
What discovery produces
- A written functional specification
- The commission and payout model, in detail
- Technical architecture and stack choice
- Admin and seller panel wireframes
- A phased plan with a fixed price for phase one
What it settles
- Who holds the money and for how long
- What happens on a return after payout
- Who approves a seller, and against what
- How disputes between buyer and seller resolve
- Which features are genuinely phase two
It is yours either way
The specification belongs to you. Take it to another developer for a competing quote if you want to. We would rather you compare properly than commit to us on a number neither of us could stand behind.
Ask what discovery would coverWhat founders ask us first
Happy to sign an NDA before you describe the idea. Ask anything else on WhatsApp.
Can we use a ready-made marketplace plugin?
For a first version, often yes, and we will tell you when that is the sensible route. A marketplace plugin on WooCommerce can validate the model at a fraction of the cost. Where it stops working is when your commission rules, payout logic or seller workflow differ from what the plugin assumes, because that is precisely the part plugins make hardest to change.
How do payments to sellers actually work?
Through a payment gateway that supports split settlement and seller sub-accounts, so money moves under a licensed provider rather than sitting in an account we built. Sellers complete their own KYC with the gateway. Your accountant should confirm the model before development starts, because it affects your GST treatment and your terms with sellers.
What should phase one include?
Less than you think. Enough sellers to make the category look real, a working order and payout path, and an admin you can operate. Ratings, seller analytics, promotions and mobile apps are almost always phase two, and half of them turn out not to be needed at all once you see how the marketplace actually gets used.
Who handles customer support and returns?
A business decision that shapes the software, so it gets settled during discovery. Customers usually expect the marketplace to be accountable regardless of which seller shipped. Whatever you decide, the return policy has to align with the payout hold period, or you will be paying refunds from your own pocket on money already released.
Will a marketplace rank in search?
It can, but marketplaces have a specific problem: sellers paste the manufacturer's description, so you end up with thousands of duplicate pages. Category pages, content and enforced listing quality carry the search performance. Worth planning during the build rather than discovering later. The SEO service page covers how that ongoing work runs.
Do we need a mobile app?
Not at launch, in almost every case. A fast mobile website reaches everyone immediately with no install friction and no app store review cycle. Build the app once you have repeat buyers who would genuinely benefit from it, funded by revenue rather than by hope.
Tell us who sells, who buys, and why through you
That last part is the one that decides whether this works. We will give you an honest read on it before discussing any build.
hello@ecommercepune.in
We will come back with an honest read on the model and what a discovery phase would cover. If we think you should start smaller, we will say that too. If it is urgent, call or WhatsApp +91 88620 92781 .