Build a Multi-Vendor Marketplace with Bagisto: Part 3 - Product & Inventory Management

So far, we've installed Bagisto with the Marketplace extension (Part 1) and onboarded sellers (Part 2).

Now we get to the thing sellers actually came for: products.

Product management is where the marketplace model really diverges from a normal store, so it's worth being precise about what changes and why.

Multi-Vendor vs Traditional E-commerce: How Product Management Differs

In traditional e-commerce, the admin manages the catalog. One team adds every product, sets every price, and tracks every unit of stock.

In a marketplace, that responsibility spreads out: multiple sellers manage their own catalogs.

That single shift creates a set of problems a single-vendor store never has to solve:

• Product ownership - every product must belong to a seller, and permissions and orders follow from that ownership.
• Duplicate products - several sellers may want to sell the same item, so the system needs a way to handle one product offered by many vendors.
• Inventory tracking - if two sellers stock the same product, their stock counts have to stay completely independent.
• Quality approval - with sellers adding products freely, the platform needs a gate to keep spam and bad data off the storefront.

This part walks through how Bagisto's marketplace handles each of these -

creation, ownership, approval, inventory, and variations - mostly through the seller and admin GUIs.

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How Sellers Add Products in Bagisto Marketplace

A seller adds products from their own dashboard, not the admin panel:

Seller Dashboard → Products → Add New Product

Open Products from the seller dashboard and click Add New Product in the top-right corner. Bagisto gives the seller two ways to list an item:

• Add New Product - create a completely new product with the seller's own details.
• Product Mapping / Catalog Mapping – Sellers can assign products from the marketplace's shared catalog instead of creating duplicate listings.

This allows multiple vendors to sell the same product while managing their own pricing, inventory, and product-specific details.

The feature enables customers to compare prices and offers from different vendors on a single product page, making it easier to choose the best option.
(This is the mechanism behind shared products.)

For a brand-new product, the seller first defines its structure:

• Product Type - Simple, Configurable, and so on (covered in Product attributes and variations Section ). Sellers can only create the product types the admin has allowed for them.
• Attribute Family - the attribute set that defines which fields the product has.
• SKU - a unique code identifying the product.

After clicking Continue, the seller fills in the full details:

• Name
• Description
• Price
• Images
• Categories
• Quantity / stock

The important concept here is ownership: whichever seller creates the product owns it.

It shows up only in their product list, their orders for it are theirs alone, and the permission boundaries from Part 2 apply.

A product is never floating in the marketplace unattached - it always belongs to exactly one seller.

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Bagisto Product Approval Workflow (Manual vs Auto-Approval)

Letting sellers publish directly to the storefront would invite spam, bad data, and off-brand listings.

So by default, a seller's product doesn't go live the moment it's saved - it starts as Disapproved and waits for the admin.

The admin reviews products at:

Admin Panel → Marketplace → Products

This screen lists every seller's product with its approval status.

To approve one, the admin ticks its checkbox, opens the Select Action dropdown, chooses Update Status, and sets it to Approved.

Only then does the product appear on the storefront for customers.

flowchart TD
    A[Seller creates product] --> B[Status: Disapproved]
    B --> C[Admin reviews under Marketplace → Products]
    C --> D{Approve or reject?}
    D -->|Approve| E[Status: Approved → visible on storefront]
    D -->|Reject| F[Stays hidden from customers]

Manual vs auto approval. Not every marketplace wants a human in the loop for every listing.

The extension also supports an auto-approval option, where seller products are approved automatically and appear on the storefront without manual review.

It's a trade-off: manual approval maximizes quality control, auto-approval maximizes seller speed.

Which one you choose depends on how much you trust your seller base and how much moderation bandwidth you have.

Why approval exists. The approval process does more than prevent spam products from appearing on the marketplace.

It helps admins verify product details, images, and listing quality before making them available to customers.

Think of it as the product-level approval workflow, similar to the seller approval process covered in Part 2.

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How Independent Seller Stock and Pricing Work

This is the concept that trips people up most, so let's make it concrete.

Imagine two sellers both offer the same product:

Product: iPhone 15

Seller A → Stock: 20
Seller B → Stock: 15

These are two independent inventories. When a customer buys from Seller A, only Seller A's count drops to 19 - Seller B still has 15.

Each seller sets and manages their own stock and their own price for the same underlying product.

This is exactly what the Add Existing Product flow from vendor product creation Section enables.

Instead of each seller creating duplicate listings for the same product, sellers can use a shared catalog structure.

This keeps the marketplace organized while allowing sellers to manage their own price, quantity, and product condition.

The result is a single product page where customers can compare the same item across multiple vendors - each with their own stock and pricing.

Practically, per-vendor inventory means:

• Stock management - each seller updates their own quantities from their dashboard; one seller's changes never touch another's.
• Quantity updates - selling, restocking, and adjustments are scoped to the individual seller's listing.
• Availability - a product can be out of stock for one seller and available from another, and the storefront reflects that per seller.

Keeping inventories isolated is what makes the "many sellers, one catalog" model work without sellers stepping on each other.

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Configuring Product Types, Attributes, and Variations in Bagisto

Not every product is a single fixed item. A phone case is - but a t-shirt comes in sizes and colors.

Bagisto handles this distinction with product types built on its attribute system.

Simple product - one standalone item: one SKU, one price, one stock count. A phone charger, a book, a single mug.

Configurable product - a parent product with multiple variations generated from its attributes. This is the t-shirt case:

Product: T-Shirt (Configurable)

Size:  S, M, L
Color: Black, White

That produces variations like Small / Black, Small / White, Medium / Black, and so on -

Each with its own SKU, price, and stock, all grouped under one product page the customer chooses from.

Three pieces make this work:

• Attributes - the individual characteristics, like size and color. To be used for variations, an attribute is marked as configurable.
• Attribute families - a named bundle of attributes that defines the fields a product has. When a seller picks an Attribute Family during creation, they're choosing which attributes - and therefore which possible variations - the product supports.
• Variations - the concrete combinations the configurable product generates from its chosen configurable attribute values.

For a seller, this means catalog structure is a setup decision, not custom code:

choose the right product type and attribute family, define the values, and Bagisto generates and tracks each variation.

Attribute families and attributes are usually managed at the admin level to maintain a consistent product structure.

Sellers use these predefined options instead of creating their own attributes, keeping the marketplace catalog organized.

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Wrapping up Part 3

In this part, we covered how products live in a marketplace:

• Seller product creation - new products and listings against the shared catalog
• Product ownership - every product belongs to exactly one seller
• Approval - the disapproved-by-default gate, plus the auto-approval option
• Per-vendor inventory - independent stock and pricing for the same product
• Attributes and variations - simple vs configurable products and how variations are built

In Part 4, we will explore marketplace orders and commission handling -

how a single checkout splits across sellers, and how the platform calculates its cut and pays vendors out.