Scaling a Multi-Vendor Marketplace to 500+ Vendors Without a Storefront Rewrite
Client: Product Build — Onest Tech LLC · Industry: Retail & E-commerce · Role: System Architect & Lead · Duration: 5 months
The Challenge
As vendor count grew past a few dozen, the original server-rendered storefront's search and category pages started timing out under load, and vendors were complaining about slow payout visibility. A full rewrite was on the table but would have paused vendor onboarding for months.
The Solution
Migrated the customer-facing storefront to Next.js with SSR/ISR for product and category pages — improving both load time and SEO — while leaving the Laravel admin panel and vendor portal untouched; the two communicate over a REST API rather than sharing a monolith. Moved the product catalog to MongoDB for flexible per-category schemas and kept MySQL for orders, payments, and payouts, giving vendors a near-real-time payout dashboard backed by the transactional store.
Results & Impact
- Marketplace scaled to 500+ vendors and 10,000+ products without pausing onboarding
- Storefront load times improved materially after moving to Next.js SSR/ISR
- Vendor payout visibility moved from batch/delayed to near real-time
- Payment processing and vendor payouts stable at scale in production