The challenge
The client ran a growing network of sellers trading simultaneously on three marketplaces and through their own storefronts. Stock lived in spreadsheets, orders landed in three separate seller dashboards, and receiving was recorded in a notebook at the warehouse. Sellers reconciled stock by hand every day and there was still always a discrepancy. Half the shops had no link a customer could order through at all.
What we built
- Storefronts. Every seller gets their own shop page to list products, set prices and attach descriptions. The link can go straight into an ad: the buyer arrives, fills a basket, pays and gets the order with courier or postal delivery.
- Marketplace synchronisation. Products are pushed into each marketplace through its own API; stock and prices flow both ways every twenty minutes, so a seller sees one true picture across every channel.
- Dropshipping. A second selling model where the seller holds no stock and builds orders from a shared supplier catalogue. Payment splits three ways automatically — the buyer pays the platform, which forwards the seller's share and the supplier's.
- Inbound shipments. A seller assembles a batch, attaches photos, barcodes and labels, and files a request. The receiver opens it, enters actual quantities line by line, and an invoice for assembly and dispatch is raised from what was really counted.
- Pricing and a repricing bot. Automatic repricing by internal rules, a wholesale price list, and per-item price history.
- Chat. Between seller, supplier and admin, with threaded comments, attachments and screenshots pasted straight from the clipboard. Notifications go to web push and email.
One problem worth recording
At launch, link previews in messengers showed the platform's name rather than the seller's shop. The cause was mundane and easy to miss: preview crawlers do not execute JavaScript, and React was setting the meta tags after the page had loaded. We added server-side prerendering for bot user agents, which pulls the current markup, substitutes the right meta tags and serves that to the crawler. Sellers got links worth advertising.
The result
One screen instead of five browser tabs. The warehouse sees the same orders the seller does. Receiving runs off a scanner and the invoice follows the count. Stock moves over APIs with no manual reconciliation.