Shopify Marketplace Development?

[mattylight]

Hi there, I am planning on building a Marketplace on either Shopify or an external standalone e-commerce app where other vendors can submit their products onto my marketplace for sale. I would like to have the store and Checkout UI handled on my marketplace, but then once a sale is completed I would like the app to submit the orders to the Shopify vendors store/admin dashboard for processing and fulfillment and take commission on each sale. I do not want to hold any inventory, and want this process to be as automated as possible. I think the best practice would be creating a sales channel app but I am unsure? Seems like I cannot host my marketplace on Shopify itself as it is listed in the Prohibited app configurations here and says

Apps that host marketplaces on Shopify - Apps that connect merchants to marketplaces can't host those marketplaces on Shopify. Apps also can't let merchants turn their stores into marketplaces. To learn more about best practices for marketplace apps, see Build a sales channel.

Given all of the Shopify options and APIs/SDK's what is my best bet here for achieving this?

[Busfox]

Hi @mattylight,

You are absolutely correct, the Sales Channel SDK is what you need to build your marketplace. This allows you to build a channel app that is installed on stores, and allows those stores to publish products to your sales channel. You can build your own checkout experience using our checkout API. The orders created through the Checkout API would be created on the associated merchant's shop, and any inventory/fulfillment/etc concerns would be handled by the shop.

Shopify wouldn't host your marketplace app. You would have to host it on your end, and use our APIs and SDKs to interact with shops that have installed your channel app. In order to be published, your channel app must not turn a shop into a marketplace, instead it would need to be its own standalone marketplace Shopify merchants can publish their products too.

I hope that clears things up a bit! Let me know if you have any further questions or points of confusion.

Cheers

[shycat]

@Busfox, can you clarify this “ You can build your own checkout experience using our checkout API. The orders created through the Checkout API would be created on the associated merchant's shop”

With a marketplace, the goal would be to create a unified checkout for the consumer for all products (like amazon or any other marketplace) on the marketplaces domain and then submit the order as individual checkout via the api to each associated merchants store. Is that what you mean by creating the checkout api on each associated merchants shop?

[francominds]

@Busfox I would also want to know what's the output on this. I have similar requirements and I'm not quite sure how to achieve them.

@mattylight, @shycat have you guys solved it somehow?

Thanks!