[ ANONYMISED · NDA — MARKETPLACE / VENDOR DASH / SINGLE-CART CHECKOUT ]
Food Marketplace is an artisan UK food marketplace — small bakeries, fermenters, charcuterie makers, cheese-makers — selling under one brand with vendor-fulfilled shipping.
No off-the-shelf Shopify marketplace app supported their model: single-cart checkout where line items split across vendors, vendor-specific delivery rules (cold chain, frozen, ambient), automated commission payouts, and vendor self-service inventory.
Brief: build it on Shopify Plus. Single-cart checkout, multi-vendor split fulfilment, vendor dashboards for inventory and order management, automated commission payouts via Stripe Connect. Live in 16 weeks for Q4 sales.
Decided on Shopify Plus + custom marketplace app. Vendor data model: each vendor has products, variants, fulfilment rules, payout schedule. Single Shopify catalog with vendor metafields.
Embedded admin app on Polaris. Vendors log in to a Mara-branded dashboard, manage inventory, see orders, view payout schedule. Hosted on Vercel.
Cart Transform Function splits cart line items by vendor. Each vendor receives a fulfilment task automatically. Customer sees one order; vendors see their portion.
Built payout engine. Each vendor connected via Stripe Connect Express. Commission calculated per line item (18% platform take). Weekly payouts.
Self-service vendor signup, KYC via Stripe, contract acceptance, first product upload. Mara approves before vendor goes live.
Soft launch with 8 founding vendors. Phased opening to 20, then 47 over the first 12 months.
"We looked at every off-the-shelf marketplace app. None of them did single-cart split fulfilment with our cold-chain rules. We were quoted £180k for a custom build elsewhere. The Plus + custom apps approach delivered the same scope at a third of that, and we now own the marketplace IP."
Off-the-shelf marketplace apps cap at the easy 60%. The hard 40% — split fulfilment, custom payout, vendor onboarding — is custom work, but cheaper than a bespoke platform.
