Marketplace operations, every day

Every site is a full peer-to-peer marketplace: members, listings, messaging, reviews, orders, payouts. Each keeps its own identity, its own configuration and its own community, run by one team with one set of tools. Releases go out through a pipeline that swaps versions atomically, so a bad release is rolled back in seconds rather than repaired live.

• More than 45 production sites, seven languages
• Per-site configuration, identity and community
• Three traffic tiers, sized separately
• 25 scheduled jobs, nine dedicated queue workers
• Atomic releases with instant rollback
• Frameworks kept current through every major version since 2019

A marketplace lives or dies on whether sellers trust that they will be paid and buyers trust that they can pay. We run the full loop: multiple payment processors so no single provider can switch the lights off, an internal credit wallet so buyers are not charged a fee to spend, and payouts by bank transfer, card and e-wallet with the controls that stop a fraudster cashing out before a dispute lands.

• Card processing plus specialist gateways for hard-to-bank niches
• Crypto acceptance and an internal credit wallet
• Seven payout rails, with minimums and fee schedules published to sellers
• Automatic payout holds while an order is still in dispute
• Chargeback handling and refund reconciliation
• Membership tiers with renewal reminders

Dated marketplaces attract scammers because nobody rebuilt the defences. On our sites the defences are a product in their own right: identity and age verification with a manual review queue for the edge cases, eight separate spam-detection services including optical character recognition on uploaded images, VPN and proxy detection, silent visibility suppression for bad actors, and an admin dashboard that shows moderators what the machines caught and why.

• Identity and age verification with manual review queue
• Identity documents and delivery addresses encrypted at rest, separate keys
• Eight spam-detection services, including text recognition inside images
• Shadow-banning, pending-image and suspect-listing queues
• VPN and proxy detection, bot challenge, automatic attack mode
• Two-factor authentication, rate limits on sensitive routes

Speed is a feature members feel before they can name it. We run an HTTP cache in front of the application for anonymous traffic, memory caches behind it with deliberate invalidation rather than blanket timeouts, a slow-query monitor that moderators can see, and index changes that are written, reviewed and applied as SQL on a large legacy database. Each site ships a progressive web app manifest, so it installs on a phone like an app and can send push notifications.

• HTTP cache layer with logged-in bypass
• Memory caches with explicit invalidation at every write
• Index tuning shipped as reviewed SQL, slow-query monitor for admins
• Installable web app per site, push notifications
• Images converted to modern formats, video compressed in the background
• Hundreds of performance commits over seven years

Members upload from phones, so the pipeline accepts phone formats, converts them, resizes them and strips what should not be there. Search runs on database full-text indexes after a migration made specifically to get them, and messaging runs over websockets with spam detection on a dedicated queue so a flood of scam messages never slows down the honest ones.

• Full-text search on the database, no fragile external engine
• Phone image formats accepted and converted, modern output formats
• Chunked uploads, background video conversion
• Real-time messaging over websockets with connection telemetry
• Per-site sitemaps and structured metadata for search engines

Most dated marketplaces are one server failure away from disappearing, and the founder knows it. Our sites take a database backup every eight hours and copy it to two separate servers, expose a health check per release, collects application and browser errors into one dashboard, and gives support staff the tools to answer a member without opening a database client.

• Backups every eight hours, replicated off-site to two servers
• Release health checks, error dashboards, browser error collection
• Admin areas for moderation, finance, marketing and analytics
• Shipping-label integration with carrier tracking and refunds
• Annual statistics reports on orders, listings and cohorts