We've built the store (Part 1), onboarded sellers (Part 2), and stocked the catalog (Part 3).
Now a customer clicks "buy" - and this is where a marketplace does the most work behind the scenes.
Order management is one of the biggest differences between a regular store and a marketplace.
A normal store has one seller, so an order is simple: one buyer, one fulfiller.
A marketplace has to handle a single checkout that touches multiple sellers, then split it, track seller earnings, and take the platform's commission.
- All from one customer transaction.
Let's follow the money from cart to payout.
Multi-vendor cart behavior
The key thing to understand is that the customer experience is completely normal.
They don't think about sellers - they just add products and check out.
Consider a cart with two items from two different vendors:
Cart:
Product A → Seller 1
Product B → Seller 2
One checkout.
The customer goes through checkout exactly as they would in any Bagisto store: address, shipping, payment, place order.
There's no separate checkout per seller and nothing extra for the buyer to do. The checkout flow is the standard Bagisto flow.
Behind that single, unified checkout, though, one order is about to become multiple seller-scoped orders.
That's the split.
How Bagisto Splits a Marketplace Order by Seller
When the order is placed, the marketplace looks at each line item, figures out which seller owns it, and routes fulfillment to the right vendor.
Each seller only sees and handles their portion of the order.
flowchart TD
A[Customer places one order] --> B[Marketplace reads each line item]
B --> C[Identifies the owning seller per item]
C --> D[Splits into seller-wise orders]
D --> E1[Seller 1 fulfills Product A]
D --> E2[Seller 2 fulfills Product B]
E1 --> F[Invoice + shipment per seller]
E2 --> F
In practice this means:
- Each seller gets their own view of the order, showing only their items.
- Each seller can generate their own invoice and own shipment for their items - if the admin granted those permissions (see Part 2).
- Each seller can cancel their portion, again subject to permissions.
- Taxes, shipping, and totals are tracked per seller, so each vendor's paperwork reflects only what they sold.
The customer sees one order and one delivery experience; each seller sees a clean, self-contained order for just their products.
That separation is what lets many independent vendors share a single checkout without their operations bleeding into each other.
How to Set Up Marketplace Commission Rates
The commission is how the marketplace earns revenue.
It's a cut of every sale, retained by the platform, with the rest belonging to the seller.
The model is a percentage. Take a simple order:
Order total: $100
Commission: 10%
Marketplace keeps: $10
Seller earns: $90
Global commission. In the marketplace configuration, the admin sets a global commission percentage that applies to all sellers by default.
Set it once and every sale is split on that basis.
Per-seller commission. You'll often want to give specific sellers a different rate - a lower cut to attract a big vendor, or a promotional rate as an incentive.
Bagisto supports this per seller:
Admin Panel → Marketplace → Sellers → (Edit seller) → Seller Commission
Enter the custom rate, switch the Status toggle ON, and save. That rate now applies to just that seller.
Turn the toggle off and the seller falls back to the global rate.
For example, if the global rate is 10% but Seller A is set to 5%, only 5% is deducted from Seller A's sales while everyone else stays at 10%.
This transparency runs both ways: sellers can see the total commission they've paid over time in their sales reporting.
There are no hidden fees - which matters for trust between the platform and its vendors.
Vendor payout processing
Commission tells you how much a seller earned. Payouts are how they actually get the money.
It's worth being clear about how the money moves, because it's a common point of confusion.
In the base marketplace, the platform collects the full order amount at checkout and settles with sellers afterward.
The system tracks each seller's earnings after deducting marketplace commissions.
Payments are handled through a request-and-release process instead of real-time splitting during checkout.
(Real-time gateway-level splitting - e.g. Stripe Connect - is a separate, advanced integration you can add, not the default behavior.)
Here's the request flow:
Seller side - request the payout. Once orders are completed, the seller requests their earnings:
Seller Dashboard → Order → Payment Request
The seller clicks Payment Request, and it's submitted to the admin for review.
Status lifecycle. A payout request moves through three states:
flowchart LR
A[Pending] --> B[Processing]
B --> C[Paid]
- Pending - the request has been submitted and is waiting on the admin.
- Processing - the admin has reviewed it and is settling.
- Paid - the payout has been released.
Admin side - release the payment. The admin manages all payout requests from the marketplace dashboard, reviewing and releasing them.
Once released, the payment shows up in the seller's Transactions section as a record.
Seller earnings at a glance. The seller's dashboard summarizes their finances with three figures:
- Total Sale - everything they've sold.
- Total Payout - what has already been paid out to them.
- Remaining Payout - what they're still owed.
Together, the commission split and the payout flow close the loop.
A customer completes a single checkout, and the marketplace divides the order among multiple sellers.
The platform applies its commission, while each seller gets a clear record of their earnings and pending payouts.
Wrapping Up: Bagisto Marketplace Orders & Commissions
In this part, we followed a marketplace transaction end to end:
- Checkout flow - one unified checkout across multiple sellers
- Order splitting - dividing that order into seller-wise fulfillment
- Commission - global and per-seller percentage models
- Seller earnings - payout requests, the Pending → Processing → Paid lifecycle, and transaction records
In Part 5, the final part, we'll move on to advanced marketplace configuration - shipping, taxes, reviews, and dispute handling.
That will round out a production-ready marketplace.
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