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Multi-Vendor Marketplace Development: Buyer, Vendor and Admin on One Backend

Written by DevoraXReviewed by Sameem Amjad, Founder & Lead Architect EngineerLast updated Based on project records and public sources (service page)

DevoraX is a two-person software studio, founded in 2022, that builds multi-vendor marketplaces: a buyer storefront or app, a vendor portal, an admin console, payments, search and order tracking over one backend. The marketplace work behind this page is its founder Sameem Amjad's, most of it done as an employee of other companies: Afriva as an engineer at Webrange Solutions, Pastel's iOS app as a software engineer at Pastel, and the shared NestJS backend of Dooz Inspected Cars, which hired him directly. DevoraX now takes the same work directly: custom builds for operators a template will not fit, and custom features plus the native iOS and Android app for marketplaces already running on Sharetribe, which ships no native app.

The work behind this page

Afriva E-Commerce Platform

A four-role multi-vendor marketplace on Next.js 15 and Supabase, with separate admin, manager, seller and buyer dashboards and real-time order tracking. Sameem worked on it as an engineer at Webrange Solutions.

What it shows: Role-separated dashboards from one deployment, vendor ownership expressed in the Postgres schema rather than the interface, and order tracking streamed from database changes instead of polled. The closest reference for a conventional catalogue marketplace with sellers, stock and delivery.

What you can check

  • Demo build of the buyer storefront at afriva-buyer.vercel.app

Read the 1,544-word engineering case study

Pastel Marketplace

A US-based marketplace for antiques, vintage decor and collectible art, built on Sharetribe and live on the web, iOS and Android. Sameem has worked on its iOS app as a software engineer at Pastel since April 2026.

What it shows: A live catalogue of one-of-one pieces that retire on sale rather than decrementing stock, with marketplace money movement handled by Sharetribe's transaction process rather than custom checkout code, and web and app clients reading one marketplace. Sameem's part is the iOS app.

What you can check

  • Live at mypastel.com
  • On the App Store as Pastel - Antique Marketplace (id6753628917), first released November 2025

Read the 1,521-word engineering case study

Dooz Inspected Cars

A used-car marketplace in Jordan: an Angular web client and iOS and Android apps over one NestJS and PostgreSQL backend. Dooz hired Sameem directly for that shared backend.

What it shows: A catalogue where every listing is a unique unit, inspection reports published as part of the listing, a financing calculator and insurance in the buying flow, and valuation and availability resolved behind one API so three clients cannot disagree on a price.

What you can check

  • Live at dooz.com
  • On Google Play as com.dooz.app, where the listing shows 100K+ downloads (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dooz.app)
  • On the App Store as Dooz Cars (id1627030530)

Read the 1,617-word engineering case study

Food Magnet

A food truck discovery and vendor platform: a Flutter mobile app and a React admin dashboard on an AWS Lambda serverless backend. Sameem worked on this existing product as an engineer at Zencloud.

What it shows: Two clients, one mobile and one admin web, over a single serverless backend, with four user roles: admin, manager, vendor and customer. Live vendor location tracking, Stripe payments, and Firebase plus OneSignal for realtime updates and push. It is not a marketplace build: it covers discovery, menus and vendor profiles rather than a multi-vendor checkout.

What you can check

  • Live at foodmagnet.app
  • On Google Play as com.foodmagnet.foodTruck
  • On the App Store as Food Magnet Vendor (id6444549450)

Read the 2,556-word engineering case study

What a build includes

In base scope

  • Buyer-facing storefront or app: catalogue browse, search, filtering and checkout
  • Vendor portal: listing creation, stock and inventory, and an order queue
  • Admin console: catalogue oversight, order oversight and user management
  • Role-separated authentication, with authorisation enforced on the server rather than in the interface
  • A relational schema in which vendor ownership of listings, stock and orders is a database constraint
  • One payment provider integration for checkout
  • Order records with status visible to the buyer, the vendor and the admin
  • Server-rendered catalogue and listing pages, so the marketplace is indexable rather than an empty shell
  • Deployment to a live environment you can open and inspect
  • A written fixed-price scope agreed before any code is written

Scoped and quoted separately

  • Native iOS and Android clients added on top of a web build
  • Multi-carrier and insured shipping integrations
  • Live location tracking of vendors or couriers, as on Food Magnet
  • Third-party quote integrations such as financing or insurance, as on Dooz
  • Ongoing support, maintenance and feature work after handover
  • Vendor recruitment, catalogue data entry and content production

What does a multi-vendor marketplace build include, and what is quoted separately?

A marketplace is four products sharing one database. A buyer surface for browse, search and checkout. A vendor portal for listings, stock and an order queue. An admin console for oversight of the catalogue and the order queue. A backend that owns the rules all three read.

Base scope covers those four, plus one payment provider integration, order records with status visible to buyer and vendor, server-rendered catalogue pages so the listings are indexable, and deployment to a live environment you can open and inspect.

What sits outside base scope is listed too, because agencies leave it ambiguous. Native iOS and Android clients on top of a web build are separate work. So are multi-carrier shipping, live location tracking, and third-party quote integrations such as financing or insurance. Each is a real integration with its own failure modes. Pretending one is a line item inside a fixed price is how fixed prices stop being fixed.

Who is this for, and which marketplace model is closest to mine?

This is for someone who has decided that independent sellers, rather than a single inventory, is the model, and that a template will not carry it. If a Shopify multi-vendor app covers what you need, use it. A custom build starts to pay when the vendor relationship is itself the product: verification states, inspection data, per-vendor terms, or a catalogue where every item is a single unit that retires on sale.

Three of the four products named below have their own page, because the models differ more than the word marketplace suggests. Collectibles and one-of-one resale is covered at /solutions/antiques-marketplace-app-development. High-ticket assets with published condition reports is at /solutions/used-car-marketplace-app-development. Mobile vendor discovery, where the vendor moves and the customer is trying to find it, is at /solutions/food-truck-ordering-app-development. Afriva, a general-goods marketplace, is the closest reference for a conventional catalogue with sellers, stock levels and delivery.

Which marketplaces has DevoraX's founder worked on?

Three: Afriva, built at Webrange Solutions; Pastel, the company's own antiques marketplace; and Dooz Inspected Cars, Dooz's own used-car marketplace in Jordan, which hired Sameem directly.

Afriva is a four-role marketplace on Next.js 15 and Supabase: admin, manager, seller and buyer dashboards with real-time order tracking. Sameem worked on it as an engineer at Webrange Solutions, on the Next.js 15 front end, the seller dashboard for inventory, pricing and order status, and the Supabase data layer. Its public link is a demo build of the buyer storefront, at afriva-buyer.vercel.app.

Pastel is a US-based marketplace for antiques, vintage decor and collectible art, built on Sharetribe and live at mypastel.com and on the App Store. Sameem has been a software engineer at Pastel since April 2026, working on its iOS app, which first launched in November 2025, before he joined. Dooz Inspected Cars runs an Angular web client and iOS and Android apps over one backend, and Dooz hired Sameem directly to work on that shared NestJS backend. Dooz's Google Play listing shows 100K+ downloads.

Food Magnet, also named on this page, is not a marketplace. It is a food truck discovery platform: a Flutter app and a React admin console on AWS Lambda, with live location tracking and Stripe. Sameem worked on it as an engineer at Zencloud, on a product that already existed. It is adjacent work, not a fourth marketplace.

How do you keep one vendor from reading another vendor's data?

A vendor boundary is a database property, not an interface one. A client-side check hides a button; it does not stop a request, because the request can be issued without the interface. Ownership is expressed in the schema, and the check runs where every client has to pass.

On Afriva that meant managed Postgres rather than a document store. Vendors own products, products appear in orders, orders split into shipments, and foreign keys and constraints give one authoritative place to state that a seller cannot mutate another seller's stock. Supabase also bundles authentication with the database, so the identity that signed a user in is the identity Postgres sees on the query, which removes the drift between what the interface believes and what the database permits.

Dooz's backend reaches the same place differently: valuation, inspection status and listing availability resolve server-side, so NestJS owns the rules and the three clients render state.

What happens when one basket spans several vendors?

This is where the complexity concentrates. It is the difference between a marketplace and a shop. One buyer checkout becomes several vendor orders with separate dispatch timelines, so the data model has to represent a parent purchase and its child shipments, then reassemble them into one legible screen.

Stock is the concurrency problem underneath it. With vendors listing independently, the same item can enter several baskets at once, so inventory decrements have to be atomic in the database rather than read-modify-write in application code. On a catalogue of single units, as with Pastel and Dooz, it is sharper still: a sold item has to disappear from search, saved lists and every client immediately, because stale availability destroys the trust the platform exists to create.

Status is the third piece. On Afriva, Supabase Realtime streams Postgres changes over a websocket, so a buyer's tracking view updates from the same row operations just edited. No polling interval, no reconciliation step.

How does the build run, and what do you need from me?

It starts with a free 30-minute discovery call. The output is a written fixed-price proposal setting out scope, what is included, what is excluded, and the price. Nothing is built before that document is agreed.

What we need from you is decisions, not documents. Who the roles are and what each is allowed to do. What states a vendor account can be in, and what each state permits. What a completed order means, and who is owed money at that point. Whether the catalogue holds stock-keeping items with quantities or single units that retire when sold. Those four answers determine the schema, and the schema is the expensive thing to change later.

We also need access to whatever the integrations require: a payment provider, hosting, and any third-party service the scope names. Who holds each of those accounts is settled in the proposal, per project, rather than promised as a policy here. The one ownership commitment we do make is in the section below.

How is it priced?

Fixed price, agreed in writing before work starts. No hourly billing and no retainer required to reach launch. The published starting points are $2,900 for MVP Starter and $7,500 for Growth, with Enterprise custom-scoped. Those are indicative starting points, not quotes. A four-role marketplace with split fulfilment and a payment integration is not an MVP Starter build, and we would rather say so here than on the call.

Fixed price is only honest if scope is honest, which is why the exclusions are stated on this page rather than discovered in month two. Add a requirement mid-build and it is quoted as a change, and you decide whether to take it. The alternative, absorbing it silently, is how an agency ends up shipping the cheapest possible version of something it promised.

Two people do the work: Sameem Amjad and Usman. You are not handed to an account manager after signing.

What happens after launch, and who owns the code?

You own all code and IP on final payment. That is the ownership commitment, stated at its edges. Owning the code is not owning every account the platform runs on: where hosting, payment and third-party accounts sit is a per-project decision recorded in the proposal, not a guarantee this page makes.

Support after launch is quoted separately rather than assumed. A support arrangement priced into a build fee is either padding, if you do not need it, or inadequate, if you do. Decide it once you can see the traffic.

Vendor onboarding is the part marketplace buyers ask about most. Afriva has admin and manager surfaces for catalogue and order oversight, and Pastel lets sellers open shops and list their own pieces. How a new vendor is reviewed and approved is your policy to set, and recruiting and vetting sellers stays yours.

When should you not hire DevoraX for this?

If a Shopify multi-vendor app, Sharetribe's hosted product or a marketplace template covers your model, buy it. It is cheaper than anything here and it will be running next week. Pastel itself is built on Sharetribe rather than on custom payment code, and the case for that generalises: marketplace money movement is a state machine with commissions, held funds, refunds, disputes and cross-border payouts, and reimplementing it is a poor trade without a reason.

Do not hire us if you need a committed launch date before anyone has seen the scope. We do not publish delivery timelines and will not invent one on a call.

Do not hire us if you need a certified compliance posture. DevoraX holds no certifications and has run no compliance audits, and a marketplace carrying regulated financial products should hire a firm that can evidence one. And if you have not yet decided what a vendor is allowed to do, that decision comes before a supplier does.

When not to hire us for this

If a Shopify multi-vendor app, Sharetribe's hosted product or an off-the-shelf template covers your model, buy it. It is cheaper and faster than a custom build, and Pastel itself is built on Sharetribe rather than on custom payment code. Do not hire us if you need a committed launch date before anyone has seen the scope; dates come after the audit, not before. Do not hire us if you need a certified compliance posture. DevoraX holds no certifications and has run no compliance audits, and a marketplace carrying regulated financial products should hire a firm that can evidence one.

Questions buyers ask

Should I use Sharetribe or a Shopify multi-vendor app instead of a custom build?

If your model fits one, yes. They are cheaper and they run immediately. A custom build pays off when the vendor relationship is the product: verification states, inspection data, per-vendor terms, or a catalogue of single units that retire when sold. The two are not exclusive either. A hosted marketplace engine can carry the transactions while custom clients carry the browsing. Pastel, where Sameem works on the iOS app, is built on Sharetribe; marketplace money movement is rarely worth rewriting without a reason.

How long does a marketplace build take?

We do not publish a timeline and will not give you one on a first call. Marketplace scope varies too much. A two-role catalogue and a four-role platform with split fulfilment, live tracking and third-party quote integrations are different projects. The written proposal after the discovery call fixes the scope, the exclusions and the price. If you need a committed date before anyone has seen the scope, we are the wrong supplier.

Can you build mobile apps as well as the web marketplace?

Yes. Three of the four products named here are on the app stores, and Sameem's part in them touches mobile directly: he works on Pastel's iOS app as an engineer at Pastel, and Dooz hired him directly for the NestJS backend that its iOS and Android apps share with its Angular web client. Food Magnet is a Flutter app with a React admin console. Mobile clients are quoted separately from a web build, because they are separate work with their own release process.

Do you handle marketplace payments and vendor payouts?

Payments through a provider, yes. Food Magnet takes payments through Stripe. Payouts, held funds, commissions and disputes are a much larger surface than checkout, and Pastel uses Sharetribe's transaction process for that rather than its own state machine. Which approach suits you depends on your commission model and where your sellers are, and that is one of the things the discovery call decides.

What happens if the scope changes after we start?

It is quoted as a change and you decide. The fixed price covers the scope in the signed proposal. A new requirement gets its own price before any work goes into it, so you are never handed an invoice you did not agree to, and we are never quietly cutting quality elsewhere to absorb it. Changes are handled in writing and priced before the work, not after it.

Who actually writes the code?

Two people: Sameem Amjad and Usman. DevoraX has been running since 2022. The marketplaces named on this page are Sameem's work, most of it done as an employee of other companies, and each write-up on this site says whose project it was. You will not be handed to an account manager, and you will not discover at kickoff that the people on the call are not the people building it.

Who were these marketplaces built for?

Afriva was built at Webrange Solutions, where Sameem worked on it as an engineer. Pastel is the company's own antiques marketplace, and Sameem works on its iOS app as a software engineer at Pastel. Dooz is Dooz's own used-car marketplace in Jordan, and Dooz hired Sameem directly for its shared NestJS backend. DevoraX is the studio through which he and Usman now take this kind of work directly. Pastel and Dooz are live on the web and the app stores.

What is the first step?

A free 30-minute discovery call. Bring your role model, your commission model, and your view on whether the catalogue holds stock-keeping items or single units. The output is a written fixed-price proposal covering scope, exclusions and price. If the honest answer is that a template would serve you better, that is what the proposal will say.

Related work

Start with a scoping call

A free 30-minute call to work out what you are building and what is actually hard about it. If there is a fit you get a written fixed-price proposal. If there is not, we will say so on the call.

Book a call