Building a Multi-Vendor Marketplace with Spree Commerce Open Source
Maisonette built a children’s marketplace with over 1,000 brands and raised nearly $50 million — without holding a single unit of inventory. Garmentory gave independent fashion boutiques a national audience and saw 3,000% traffic growth. Reverb became the world’s largest music gear marketplace. Chairish turned vintage furniture into a thriving online category.
The multi-vendor marketplace model is behind some of the most successful eCommerce businesses of the last decade — and you don’t need to build the technology from scratch to join them. Spree Commerce opens-source marketplace platform gives you the complete infrastructure to launch one for free and the Enterprise automations to scale it.
The marketplace model works because everyone wins
The idea is simple.
You bring together independent sellers and give customers a single, curated place to shop. Vendors get access to an audience they couldn’t build alone.
Customers get the convenience of browsing multiple brands with one cart and one checkout.
And you — the marketplace operator — earn a commission on every sale without managing a warehouse, packing a box, or holding inventory risk.
That flywheel is what makes marketplaces so powerful.
More vendors bring more products, which attract more customers, which attract more vendors. Once it spins, it compounds.
The economics are unlike any other eCommerce model
The unit economics of a marketplace are fundamentally different from running a traditional store. You don’t buy inventory, so there’s no cost of goods. You don’t pack or ship, so there’s no fulfillment overhead.
Your revenue is the commission you take on each sale — typically 10–20% for physical goods, higher for digital — and your gross margin is essentially that take rate minus your platform costs.
That means you can grow revenue by adding vendors without proportionally growing expenses. A marketplace with 50 vendors and a marketplace with 500 vendors can run on the same team, the same infrastructure, the same operations — if the platform handles the automation. That’s the leverage that makes this model so attractive to founders and investors alike.
Niche marketplaces are where the real opportunity lives
The biggest mistake aspiring marketplace operators make is trying to be Amazon.
The real opportunity is going narrow — picking a niche you understand deeply and curating it better than anyone else.
Consider what Maisonette did for children’s products. Founded by two former Vogue editors, Maisonette set out to be the Net-a-Porter for kids — a curated destination where busy parents could find the best clothing, toys, gear, and décor from hundreds of independent brands around the world. Built on Spree Commerce, Maisonette grew to over 1,000 brands and attracted nearly $50 million in venture funding. They don’t hold inventory. They don’t manage warehouses. They focus entirely on curation and the customer experience, and vendors handle the rest.
Or look at Garmentory, a marketplace connecting shoppers with independent fashion boutiques and emerging designers. Also built on Spree, Garmentory saw 3,000% traffic growth after launch, with their customer base growing 300% year over year. The platform works because it gives small boutiques a national audience they’d never reach on their own — while customers discover brands they can’t find on mainstream platforms.
The same model is working across every vertical you can think of. Reverb became the world’s largest marketplace for musical instruments — over 600,000 active listings of new, used, and vintage gear. Chairish turned vintage and high-end home décor into a destination for interior designers and collectors, with white-glove delivery for large items. StockX brought stock-market-style bidding to sneakers and streetwear, processing over 10 million transactions. Poshmark built a social-commerce community around secondhand fashion with over 80 million registered users. Ruby Lane carved out a niche in premium antiques and fine art.
The pattern is the same: deep curation, a passionate audience, and a technology platform that handles the complexity behind the scenes.
Every one of these marketplaces proves that going narrow beats going broad.
The cold start problem is real — but solvable
Every marketplace founder hits the same chicken-and-egg moment: you need vendors to attract buyers, and you need buyers to attract vendors. The platforms that solve this fastest win.
The key is lowering the barrier for vendors to say yes.
If joining your marketplace means abandoning their existing store and learning a new system, most will pass. But if they can connect their Shopify or WooCommerce store and be live on your marketplace in minutes — with their products already synced and orders flowing back to the dashboard they already use — the answer is almost always yes.
That’s exactly what Spree’s Enterprise automations enable, and it’s how marketplaces like Maisonette scaled to hundreds of vendors without a massive vendor operations team.
Spree handles marketplace and B2B natively — not as plugins
Here’s where Spree Commerce is different from most open-source eCommerce tools. The multi-vendor marketplace module isn’t an afterthought or a third-party extension bolted on after the fact. It’s a core part of the platform, alongside B2B eCommerce.
That matters because real businesses rarely stay in one lane. You might launch a curated marketplace and discover your best vendors want wholesale pricing for bulk orders. On most platforms, that’s a migration.
With Spree, you turn it on — your marketplace vendors see their retail flow, your wholesale buyers see their negotiated prices, and it all runs on the same catalog, the same orders engine, the same infrastructure.
The Community Edition gives you a complete marketplace for free
The free, open-source Community Edition includes everything you need to launch a multi-vendor marketplace. Not a demo. Not a starter template. A working marketplace you can put in front of real customers. Teams typically go from zero to a live marketplace in a matter of weeks — not months, not quarters.
And unlike SaaS marketplace platforms that take a cut of your GMV or charge per vendor, Spree has no transaction fees, no revenue share, and no per-vendor charges.
Your costs scale with infrastructure, not revenue. That’s a structural advantage that compounds as your marketplace grows.
Vendors show up with their own dashboard. They manage their own products, prices, and inventory. They process their own orders and shipments. They don’t need to call you every time they want to update a product description. The vendor panel is self-service by design — because the less you need to touch, the better your marketplace scales.
Customers check out once, even when buying from five vendors. The multi-vendor checkout automatically splits the order by vendor, routes each piece to the right seller, and handles the payment split behind the scenes. Your customer never needs to think about it. They add things to one cart and pay once — Apple Pay, Google Pay, buy-now-pay-later, whatever you offer.
You set the commission and Spree does the math. Commission rates can be set per vendor, per product, or both — with tax handled correctly. That’s the financial engine of your marketplace, and it works from day one.
Vendors can import their catalogs in bulk. CSV upload for products means a vendor with 500 SKUs doesn’t need to spend a week entering data by hand. They upload a file, you review and approve, and they’re live.
Full API coverage for custom builds. If you’re building a headless storefront or integrating with external systems, the Vendors API gives you programmatic access to everything — no workarounds needed.
The Enterprise Edition automates the parts that don’t scale manually
Launching is one thing. Scaling is another.
When your marketplace has ten vendors, you can onboard them manually. When you have a hundred — or when you’re adding ten new vendors a week — manual onboarding becomes a full-time job. That’s where the Enterprise Edition comes in.
Vendors connect their existing Shopify store and everything syncs. Through a white-labeled Shopify sales channel app, Shopify merchants join your marketplace the way they’d install any other Shopify app. Products sync automatically. Orders placed on your marketplace show up in their Shopify dashboard. Shipment updates and cancellations flow back in real time. Vendors don’t need to learn a new system — they keep using what they already know.
WooCommerce vendors get the same treatment. Product import, order routing, shipment sync — all automated through a direct API integration. No manual data entry, no CSV wrangling.
Stripe Connect handles the money. Automated payment splitting divides each order between you and the vendor at checkout. Vendor KYC onboarding happens through Stripe’s compliance flow. Vendor payouts run on a schedule you set — automatic or manual. The financial dashboards give both you and your vendors clear visibility into what’s been earned, what’s been paid, and what’s pending.
Category mapping happens automatically. When you’re importing products from external platforms, they need to fit into your marketplace’s taxonomy. The Enterprise Edition maps categories for you — saving hours of manual merchandising work for every vendor you onboard.
These aren’t nice-to-haves at scale. They’re the automations that let a lean team operate a marketplace with hundreds of vendors without hiring a back-office army.
You get full control, vendors get self-service, nobody gets in each other’s way
The marketplace admin panel gives you the operator-level view you actually need: all vendors, all products, all orders, all performance data in one place. You approve vendors, moderate listings, handle returns and refunds per vendor, and see exactly where the money is — what’s been collected, split, and paid out. It’s built for marketplace operations, not adapted from a single-store dashboard.
The vendor dashboard is the other side of that coin. Vendors manage their own products, process their own orders, track shipments, and see their own analytics — all scoped to their business. No clutter, no dependencies on you for routine tasks. If they hate using your platform, they’ll leave or list their best inventory elsewhere. Spree’s vendor experience is designed to make sure that doesn’t happen.
For vendors migrating from Shopify or WooCommerce, the Enterprise automations mean they keep their existing workflow. Their products are already synced. Their orders appear automatically. The transition is so smooth they barely notice the new sales channel.
Customers get a seamless shopping experience across every vendor
The entire point of a marketplace is that the customer doesn’t have to think about vendor logistics. They shop. They find things they love. They check out.
Spree makes this work at every touchpoint. One cart across all vendors. One checkout with Apple Pay, Google Pay, and buy-now-pay-later options. Per-vendor confirmation emails and shipping updates so customers always know what’s coming from where. And a customer dashboard with the full order history across every vendor in one view.
The result is a shopping experience that feels as polished as a single-brand store — but with the depth and variety that only a marketplace can offer.
Your success is backed by the team that builds Spree
Whether you’re a two-person founding team launching your first marketplace or a 50-person engineering org running a mission-critical platform, Enterprise support gives you direct access to the engineers who know the platform inside out. Guaranteed response times, proactive monitoring, and expert guidance — from go-live through daily operations and beyond.
That includes a dedicated success manager, SLA-backed response times, group chat and email support, long-term support releases, priority fixes and change requests, 24/7 monitoring, and professional services on demand.
For founders, this means you’re not figuring it out alone — the team that builds Spree is invested in your marketplace’s success. For agencies delivering client projects, it means you can scope and ship with confidence knowing the platform team has your back.
Build the next Maisonette, Garmentory, or Reverb — on your terms
The niche marketplace opportunity has never been bigger. Reverb proved it for music gear. Chairish proved it for vintage décor. StockX proved it for sneakers. Maisonette and Garmentory proved it on Spree. The model works — and the technology to build one is free.
Spree’s Community Edition gives you vendor dashboards, multi-vendor checkout with order splitting, commissions, and full API coverage at zero cost. The Enterprise Edition adds the automations — Stripe Connect payouts, Shopify and WooCommerce vendor onboarding, category mapping — that let a lean team scale to hundreds of vendors without drowning in manual work. And when you need hands-on guidance, the team that builds Spree has your back.
Pick your niche. Curate it better than anyone else. Let Spree handle the infrastructure.
Get started for free or explore what the Enterprise automations can do for your marketplace.
