_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**](https://medium.com/voucherify/building-an-online-marketplace-from-scratch-order-processing-a65c7bfab490)
*   [**API integration**](https://hackernoon.com/building-an-online-marketplace-from-scratch-the-dark-side-of-salesforce-limits-6834c2d5d71e)
*   [**Fewer unit tests more logs**](https://hackernoon.com/less-unit-tests-more-logs-8acbfedc24a0)
*   [**Programmatic emails with API-first providers**](https://medium.com/@msedzielewski/programmatic-emails-with-api-first-providers-c8671c91fd72)

The [recent Gartner’s study](https://www.voucherify.io/blog/2017/5/12/building-an-online-marketplace-from-scratch-introduction#) 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_](https://www.voucherify.io/blog/2017/5/12/building-an-online-marketplace-from-scratch-introduction)_._

Building an online marketplace from scratch — introduction

Too Long; Didn't Read

Company Mentioned

@msedzielewski

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