The Challenge
The client wanted a marketplace for physical goods in which independent vendors sign up, open their own stores and sell side by side, while the platform earns a commission on every sale. That model breaks down quickly without proper tooling: a customer expects to pay once for one cart, yet each store has its own products, shipping terms, returns and money owed.
The business also spans several countries, so each store belongs to a country and customers should only see what can actually be sold and delivered where they are. Vendor onboarding, commission rules and payouts needed to live in one system rather than in manual follow-up.
Our Solution
We built a Laravel platform with a web storefront, an admin panel, a vendor panel and a Flutter customer app for iOS and Android. At checkout the customer pays once; the order is then split into one vendor order per store, each with its own shipping method, shipments, returns and refunds. The catalogue is filtered by the customer's location, which is resolved to a country.
Vendors onboard with documents and bank accounts, manage their products and orders, and can add staff with 12 granular permissions. The platform side applies commission plans with per-vendor overrides, and tracks everything vendors are owed through a wallet ledger and payouts. Cash on delivery is live, and a hosted card-payment flow is built and provider-agnostic, ready to connect to a gateway.
- Catalogue: products, variants, attributes, brands and translated content
- Cart and checkout: cart grouped by store, shipping zones, tax classes and rates, coupons, and multi-currency prices stored in minor units
- Community: reviews with replies and helpful votes, product Q&A, and wishlists
- Back office: admin areas for finance, marketing, moderation, reports and staff, plus CMS, FAQ, newsletter, content reports, activity log and sitemap
- Access and messaging: six roles, email and phone verification codes, and FCM push notifications
The customer app talks to a Sanctum-secured REST API (v1) documented with an OpenAPI spec, and is built with BLoC, Dio, Firebase Messaging and geolocation.
The Results
- One payment, many stores: a single cart splits automatically into per-vendor orders with their own shipping, returns and refunds.
- Self-service vendors: stores onboard with documents and bank accounts, and owners delegate work to staff through 12 granular permissions.
- Platform revenue under control: commission plans with per-vendor overrides feed a wallet ledger and payouts.
- Multi-country by design: stores are tied to countries and the catalogue follows the customer's location, with multi-currency pricing.
- Tested API and full bilingual support: over 300 automated tests cover the API, including 182 for the 73 vendor endpoints, and the experience has full Arabic/English parity with RTL.
