Zyabaa
A multivendor marketplace where independent sellers run storefronts under one roof — vendor onboarding, per-vendor order splitting, commission accounting, and payouts.
Overview
Zyabaa is a multivendor e-commerce platform: one storefront for buyers, a full back office for each vendor, and an operator console in the middle that handles commissions, disputes, and payouts. I led the build from schema design to launch.
The problem
Single-vendor store builders couldn't express the marketplace model: a cart spanning three vendors is really three orders, three fulfilments, and three ledger entries wearing one checkout. Off-the-shelf multivendor plugins buckled under real catalog sizes and made commission accounting a spreadsheet job.
The solution
I built the marketplace core from first principles: checkout atomically splits carts into per-vendor sub-orders, each with its own fulfilment lifecycle; a double-entry ledger tracks every rupee across sales, commissions, refunds, and payouts; and vendors get a self-serve dashboard with product management, order queues, and earnings. Search runs on Meilisearch with faceting across a six-figure SKU catalog.
Architecture
Laravel modular monolith — deliberately not microservices at this stage — with clear bounded contexts (catalog, orders, ledger, vendors) that could be extracted later. Redis handles carts and cache; Meilisearch owns discovery.
Challenges
A multi-vendor checkout must either fully succeed or fully fail. I wrapped the split in a saga with compensating actions, so partial failures roll back cleanly.
Percentages-in-a-column doesn't survive refunds and disputes. A double-entry ledger made every balance explainable and payout reports trivial.
MySQL LIKE queries collapsed early. Meilisearch with incremental sync gave faceted, typo-tolerant search in under 40ms.
Lessons learned
A modular monolith beats premature microservices — bounded contexts give you the seams for later.
Money paths deserve double-entry bookkeeping from day one, not as a refactor.
Vendor experience is the growth engine of a marketplace; invest in the dashboard early.