Manual availability
Vendors updating a calendar by hand means it is wrong within a week, and customers pay for it in cancelled orders.
MANY VENDORS, ONE STOREFRONT
Multi-vendor marketplaces on Shopify
Multi-vendor stores where each vendor brings their own catalogue, capacity and fulfilment window. Eat Cake Today connects customers to cake vendors across Malaysia, and the delivery options a customer sees are derived from each vendor’s capacity and lead times.
IN SHORT
- Shopify can run a multi-vendor marketplace, with custom logic around it — the platform handles catalogue, checkout and payments.
- What needs building is vendor onboarding, capacity, availability, order routing and payouts.
- Availability should be derived from real vendor constraints, so customers are never offered something a vendor cannot deliver.
- Payout logic and reconciliation are the parts most marketplace projects underestimate.
- Eat Cake Today connects customers to cake vendors across Malaysia, with delivery options calculated from each vendor’s capacity and lead times.
What Shopify gives you, and what it does not
Shopify is a good foundation for a marketplace. You get a storefront, a catalogue, a checkout that converts, payments, and a platform nobody has to keep patched. That is most of the hard infrastructure, solved.
What Shopify does not have is a concept of a vendor with constraints. It does not know that this supplier can only make forty units a day, that this product takes three days to prepare, or that an order placed at 4pm on Friday cannot be delivered Saturday morning by that particular vendor.
That logic is the marketplace. It is what gets built.
A worked example
How Eat Cake Today decides what to offer
Eat Cake Today connects customers to cake vendors across Malaysia. A customer picks a cake and a delivery date — and the dates they see are a calculation, not a setting.
Each vendor has a daily capacity. Each cake has its own lead time. Together they determine which delivery dates and time slots that customer can actually be offered for that cake from that vendor. Change any input and the available slots change with it.
The result is that a customer is never offered something a vendor cannot deliver — which is the difference between a marketplace and a list of products with a hopeful date picker.
How we build one
Six stages. The first is commercial, not technical, and it determines everything after it.
- 01
Model the vendor relationship
Who owns the customer, who sets price, who holds stock, who is liable for a late or wrong delivery. These are commercial decisions that determine the technical model, and they come first.
- 02
Design capacity and availability
What each vendor can produce or ship, over what time, with what lead time. Availability shown to customers is derived from this rather than set manually, so it cannot drift out of date.
- 03
Build vendor onboarding
How a vendor joins, uploads a catalogue, sets capacity and manages their own availability — because a marketplace where the operator does all the data entry does not scale past a handful of vendors.
- 04
Order routing
An order splits to the right vendors with the right information and the right deadlines, including what happens when one vendor in a multi-vendor basket cannot fulfil.
- 05
Payouts and reconciliation
Commission, fees, refunds and partial refunds calculated and reconciled. The part most underestimated, and the part vendors care about most.
- 06
Operate it
Admin tooling for the operator: vendor performance, exceptions, capacity overrides, and the ability to intervene when reality diverges from the rules.
What has to be built
- Vendor accounts, onboarding and self-service catalogue management
- Per-vendor capacity, lead times, cut-offs and holiday handling
- Availability derived from those constraints rather than set by hand
- Order splitting and routing to the right vendor with the right deadline
- Vendor-facing order management, so they work in one place
- Commission, fees, refunds and payout reconciliation
- Operator tooling for exceptions, overrides and vendor performance
Where marketplaces go wrong
Operator data entry
Works at five vendors, collapses at fifty. Vendor self-service is a requirement, not a phase two.
Payouts as an afterthought
The part vendors care about most, routinely scoped last and underestimated — especially refunds and partial refunds.
No exception handling
Reality diverges from the rules constantly. Without operator overrides, every exception becomes a phone call.
Marketplaces we have built
Eat Cake Today
A cake marketplace connecting customers to vendors across Malaysia. We built the back end that decides what can actually be delivered: each vendor has a daily capacity and each cake a lead time, and together they determine which dates and time slots a customer is offered at checkout.
Who we have done this for
Clients from the roster whose work this page describes. Each links to what we actually built.
Teabox
Teabox sells tea from India to the rest of the world. We launched the store on Shopify Markets so one storefront serves every market, alongside a dedicated Teabox India launch.
Moonglow
Moonglow sells jewellery set to the moon phase of a date that matters to you. We built Find Your Moon: the customer enters a date of birth or other significant date, the store renders that moon phase, and it drives the personalised product.
Eat Cake Today
A cake marketplace connecting customers to vendors across Malaysia. We built the back end that decides what can actually be delivered: each vendor has a daily capacity and each cake a lead time, and together they determine which dates and time slots a customer is offered at checkout.
Marketplace questions
Can Shopify run a multi-vendor marketplace?
Yes, with custom logic around it. Shopify handles catalogue, checkout and payments; vendor capacity, routing and payouts are the parts that need building.
How do you stop customers ordering something a vendor cannot make?
Availability is derived from vendor capacity and per-product lead time, so unavailable dates and slots are never offered in the first place.
Can Shopify run a multi-vendor marketplace?
Yes, with custom logic around it. Shopify handles the catalogue, storefront, checkout and payments well. Vendor onboarding, capacity management, order routing and payouts are what has to be built, which is why marketplaces are custom development projects rather than app installations.
How do vendors manage their own products and availability?
Through admin tooling built for them. A marketplace where the operator does all the data entry works for five vendors and collapses at fifty, so vendor self-service is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
How are marketplace payouts handled?
Commission and fee logic is calculated per order and reconciled against fulfilment, including refunds and partial refunds. The mechanics of moving money depend on your payment setup and jurisdiction, which we scope alongside your finance team rather than assuming.
Related
Shopify Markets
One storefront serving every market, with pricing, catalogue and content handled per region. Teabox runs this way.
Regional Rollouts
Launch one market, prove it, then repeat — the sequence Moonglow followed from the US into Australia and beyond.
Local Market Launches
A dedicated storefront when a market needs its own, as with Teabox India and Eat Cake Today in Malaysia.
The scheduling and capacity engine behind a marketplace is custom back-end work. Vendor stock that lives in another system needs integration.
NEXT STEP
Markets review
We look at how your regions, currencies and catalogue are split today and what Shopify Markets would collapse into one.