A marketplace isn't a bigger eCommerce store — it's a different business with a different operational core. The moment a cart can hold products from multiple vendors, you're dealing with order splitting, automated split payments, independent per-vendor inventory, and real accountability questions a single-vendor store never has.
Five decisions to make before a wireframe gets drawn:
- Who owns the customer relationship — you or the vendor?
- How granular does vendor-level inventory control need to be?
- What's your logic for partial cancellations on multi-vendor orders?
- Do vendors get sub-storefronts, or just listings?
- How are vendors verified before going live?
Stack we'd actually recommend for a 2026 build:
- Frontend: React/Next.js (Next.js when SEO and fast loads matter — for a marketplace, they always do)
- Vendor dashboard: a genuinely separate app, not a view bolted onto the storefront
- Backend: Node/Express or Laravel (Laravel's queueing tooling suits commission calculations and payout batching well)
- Database: PostgreSQL/MySQL for transactional data, MongoDB alongside for variable catalogue attributes
- Payments: Razorpay Route/Cashfree for India-focused split payments, Stripe Connect for international vendors
- Cloud: AWS (S3 + RDS + Lambda combine well for bursty, image-heavy marketplace traffic)
Commission models: percentage-per-sale is most common — 15–20% fashion, 5–8% electronics, 25–30% services. Graduated onboarding (reduced commission for a vendor's first 30 days) helps solve cold-start.
Compliance (India-specific): TCS under GST Section 52 applies to eCommerce operators facilitating supply through their platform; TDS obligations interact directly with your payout ledger; vendor GST verification belongs in onboarding KYC, not a later manual step.
Full guide with the complete payout ledger architecture and cold-start playbook: https://auraveni.com/blogs/multi-vendor-marketplace-development-guide
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