Marketplace rescue with a dedicated seller panel and courier integration

The challenge

An Indian business owner had a multi-vendor marketplace that was partly built but not ready to launch. He had spreadsheets of unresolved issues across the seller, buyer and admin cycles, wanted an early launch, and asked us to take the lead on the project.

Many of the problems sat in the seller tools, which were mixed into the main storefront. Sellers needed a cleaner workspace of their own, marketplace fees and commission had to show correctly on invoices, and loading products one at a time was too slow for sellers with large catalogues. Once orders started flowing, the marketplace also needed a practical way for many independent sellers to hand parcels to a courier without booking each shipment by hand.

What we did

• Issue list clean-up. We worked through the client's issue spreadsheets for the seller, buyer and admin cycles, including the new-website issue lists raised during testing.
• Seller panel on a sub-domain. We moved seller functions into a separate seller panel on its own sub-domain, with its own home page and a "view your images" page.
• Commission, fees and invoices. We implemented the commission and fee calculation and a new invoice structure, and later added payment collection charges to the marketplace fee and split-line and reverse slips.
• Bulk product upload. Sellers can upload products from an Excel template, for which we supplied the file format.
• Courier integration. We integrated the courier's API so the store creates orders and waybills, sellers raise pickup requests by marking items ready to ship, shipments can be tracked, and the AWB barcode prints on the invoice alongside a generated manifest.
• Demo and handover. We hosted a working demo on our test domain for review and arranged a session to finalise testing with the client.

Tech stack

PHP, MySQL, OpenCart, Delhivery API, Excel upload