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Build a Marketplace

This document guides you through the different documentation resources that will help you build a marketplace with Medusa.

Overview

A marketplace is an online commerce store that allows different vendors to sell their products within the same commerce system. Customers can purchase products from any of these vendors, and vendors can manage their orders separately.

Build a marketplaceCustomize the backend and handle events to build a marketplace.
Extend entities
Access logged-in user
Extend services
Handle events
Add Payment Provider
Customize Admin
Implement Role-Based Access Control
Create a storefront
Deploy the backend

Associate Entities with Stores

Tip

Entities represent tables in the database.

By default, entities like users, products, or orders aren't associated with a store, as it's assumed there's one store in Medusa. For a marketplace, each of these entities should be associated with their respective stores.

To associate these entities with the Store entity, you need to extend and customize entities created in the Medusa core package @medusajs/medusa, such as the User entity, to add a relation to the Store entity.

Example: Associate User with Store

Accessing Logged-in User

Throughout your development, you'll likely need access to the logged-in user. For example, you'll need to know which user is logged in to know which store to associate a new product with.


Customize Data Management Functionalities

After associating entities with stores, you'll need to customize how certain data management functionalities are implemented in the Medusa core package.

For example, when a new user is created, you need to ensure that it's associated either with a new store or with the store of the logged-in user. Another example is associating a new product with the logged-in user's store.

You can customize these functionalities by extending services. Services are classes that contain helper methods specific to an entity. For example, the UserService is used to manage functionalities related to the User entity, such as creating a user.

You can also extend services if you need to customize a functionality implemented in a service for other reasons.

Example: Extend User Service

Listening to Events

While implementing your marketplace, you'll typically need to listen to certain events then perform actions asynchronously. For example, you can listen to the order.placed event and, when triggered, create child orders of the order, separating ordered items by their associated store.

To listen to events, you need to create Subscribers that subscribe a handler function to an event. In that handler function, you can implement the desired functionality.

Example: Listen to Order Created Event

Add Payment and Fulfillment Providers

Payment and fulfillment providers can be added through plugins or directly in your project. You can either create your own provider, use one of Medusa's official plugins, or use community plugins.

Note

Payment and fulfillment providers are associated with regions, which are not associated with a store, by default. If you want to allow each store to specify its own payment and fulfillment providers, you'll need to associate the region with a store.

Option 1: Create your own providers

Option 2: Install a Plugin


Customize Admin

As you add marketplace features to your store, you'll most likely need to customize the admin to provide an interface to manage these features.

Medusa's admin plugin can be extended to add widgets or new blocks to existing pages, add UI routes to add new pages, or add setting pages.


Implement Role-Based Access Control

In your marketplace, you may need to implement role-based access control (RBAC) within stores. This will restrict some users' permissions to specified functionalities or API Routes.

If you want to implement this functionality, you can follow the RBAC recipe.


Build a Storefront

Medusa provides a Next.js Starter Template that you can use with Medusa. Since you've customized your Medusa project, you'll need to either customize the existing Next.js Starter Template, or create a custom storefront.


Deploy Marketplace

Our documentation includes deployment guides for a basic Medusa backend. You should be able to follow it to deploy your customized marketplace, as well.


Additional Development

You can find other resources for your marketplace development in the Medusa Development section of this documentation.

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