Multi-Vendor Marketplace

The founders wanted to launch a marketplace in a niche where Shopify and established platforms didn't fit. Vendors needed branded storefronts (not subdomains of the marketplace), subscription-tier pricing with commission splits, and mobile apps because 60%+ of their target customers shopped on phones. They had raised a small round, hired a solo full-stack dev who burned out after six months, and landed at our door with half a data model and three paying pilot vendors getting impatient.

We built the backend with Django REST Framework, designing the data model around vendor-scoped resources so every query filters by tenant without leaking data across storefronts. React powers the web storefronts with per-vendor theming. React Native ships iOS and Android apps from one codebase. Stripe Connect handles the four-party money flow: customer pays the marketplace, platform takes commission, vendor gets paid out automatically, and the vendor's subscription tier gets billed separately. Each vendor can upload their logo, pick brand colors, and manage inventory through a self-service dashboard we shipped in week seven.

• Onboarded 500+ vendors in the first year; 80% of them subscribed to paid tiers within 30 days
• Sub-1% payment dispute rate across all platform transactions via Stripe Connect
• Mobile apps drive 65% of all marketplace transactions
• Platform hit profitability in month 11, eight months ahead of the board's plan

Stripe Connect was the only real choice once we mapped the money flow. DRF's nested serializers were crucial for the vendor-storefront-product-variant-order hierarchy. Other frameworks would have meant more custom glue. React Native over native-native was a budget call: one team, two stores, same release cadence. We use a single Postgres database with row-level security rather than one-database-per-tenant, which would have multiplied ops cost 500x.