Laravel for Marketplaces

A marketplace is a three-sided platform: buyers, sellers, and the operator. This means three different interfaces, split payments (dividing payment between seller and platform), content moderation, commission management, and complex delivery logic from different sellers. Architecturally, it's an order of magnitude more complex than a store.

We use payment split solutions like Stripe Connect. The buyer pays once, and funds are automatically distributed: commission to the platform, remainder to the seller. Laravel handles commission calculations, document generation, and payouts. Escrow can be configured to hold funds until delivery confirmation.

An MVP with a catalog, seller dashboards, cart, and basic payments takes 3-4 months. This is the minimum to test the hypothesis: will sellers and buyers come? A full platform with ratings, moderation, analytics, and a mobile app takes 6-10 months.

With 1,000+ sellers, key optimizations include: Elasticsearch for searching the combined catalog, Redis for caching seller storefronts, queue workers for async order and notification processing. With 10,000+ sellers, we move to database sharding by seller and extract the catalog into a separate read-only service with its own replica.

Laravel supports any model: fixed commission per order, percentage of amount (standard 5-20%), combined (fixed + percentage), seller subscription (monthly listing fee), tiered pricing (commission decreases with volume). We recommend starting with a simple percentage and adding complex models as you grow — Laravel Cashier and custom calculation services simplify this evolution.

A three-tier system: automatic checks (AI for photos, rule-based for text — filtering 70% of violations), manual moderation queue for edge cases (Filament admin panel), post-moderation based on buyer complaints. Laravel Queue processes thousands of products per hour. At scale, we add ML content classification models and automatic duplicate detection.