ACE Krt: Architecting a Multi-Vendor Marketplace for 25K+ Products

The platform is, in the buyer's eyes and usually in the chargeback. Your only real lever is payout timing. Pay vendors at checkout and there is no money left to refund with, so you eat it. Hold funds until delivery confirms, add a rolling reserve, and the loss lands on the vendor who caused it.

Technically yes. Practically it is a rewrite. Single-vendor schemas assume one owner for inventory, orders and payouts, so retrofitting means splitting every transaction, reworking the order model, and backfilling ownership across the existing catalogue. Multi-vendor from day one costs more in week one and much less once vendors start arriving.

Three surfaces. Vendor approval before any listing goes live. Product review for miscategorisation and pricing abuse. Dispute handling once orders and split payments are in flight. Fully manual review stops scaling once vendor counts climb, so auto-approve vendors with a clean track record and queue the rest for a human.