Building an online marketplace from scratch — introduction

Originally published by Mike Sedzielewski on August 28th 2017 1,289 reads

@msedzielewskiMike Sedzielewski

This series of articles describes one of the modern approaches to designing and building e-commerce applications. It focuses on showing how to ship CRM-related features fast, so the business gets decent time to market. If you want to get along with business people or you’re thinking of becoming a CTO, then this series might well be worth reading.

This is the first installment of a series of posts, here you can quickly jump to other parts:

• Order processing
• API integration
• Fewer unit tests more logs
• Programmatic emails with API-first providers

The recent Gartner’s study on digital commerce trends highlights Marketplace Integration and API-Based Commerce Platforms. The paper brackets these concepts with “strategies intended to help them [digital commerce companies] nimbly provide an outstanding experience without significant upfront investment.” Sounds serious, right? If you run an ecommerce business and you’re curious about how these strategies can be translated into technology and operations, you’ve come to the right place.

“Provide an outstanding customer experience without significant upfront investment”

With this series of posts, we’d like to focus on the tech point of view and show you how to map the high-level concepts into working software architecture. We’ll try to do this by way of designing an online marketplace architecture from scratch.

THE FIRST POST

The first post won’t be about preparing a developer environment. No Jenkins, no Docker, no AWS, no DB schema design at this time. There’s no time for those things at the moment. The Excel orders sheet is becoming worse and worse in maintenance and is delaying Manufaktura’s bid process. Let’s replace it with a proper ordering system!

Originally published at www.voucherify.io.