A marketplace your operators can run, your vendors can list on, and your buyers can transact through with the trust layer that makes it usable on day two. Vendor onboarding with KYC, listing flows that resist spam and duplicates, transactions that route money to the right account via Stripe Connect, a review system that survives manipulation attempts, and a dispute workflow that does not require an operator in every conversation. The platform-level decisions (commission model, payout cadence, dispute policy) are scoped early so engineering does not have to relitigate them at week 10.
Review system with verification (transaction-gated) and abuse handling
Operator console for vendor management, transaction overrides, and disputes
Trust and safety primitives: reporting, suspension, audit log
Email + in-app notification pipeline for both sides of the marketplace
Documentation of the commission, payout, and dispute policies in code
Foundations
Every marketplaces and platforms engagement inherits the four UX Studio foundations.
Schema graph wired at every URL. Core Web Vitals budget agreed at scope. Crawler-access policy across 18 named AI crawlers. Schema-per-page rather than templated copies. The full foundations grid lives on the UX Studio overview.
Percentage, flat fee, or tiered (lower commission above a threshold). all three ship as native options. Payouts run on a configurable cadence (weekly is the default for UK marketplaces; faster cadences sit on top of Stripe Connect's instant payouts). The split between platform commission and vendor net is computed at transaction time, not at payout time, so reconciliation is auditable per order rather than per period.
Layered. KYC at onboarding (Stripe Identity or Persona), listing moderation queue with operator approval before first listing goes live, abuse reporting on every public surface, and an audit log of every vendor action. The trust layer is designed in early. bolting it on late tends to add 3 to 6 weeks of remediation work because policies have to be rebuilt against existing user behaviour.
Yes. Stripe Subscriptions runs alongside Stripe Connect; the data model treats subscription products as a separate listing type with their own billing cycle, but the same vendor onboarding, payout, and dispute primitives apply. Useful for hybrid models (a marketplace where vendors also sell access plans) and for SaaS-style platforms where buyers are paying for ongoing access.
Work with valUX
Start where it hurts.
If your organic traffic is sliding, start with a Pulse audit. If you want a programme rather than a one-off, ask about a retainer. Either way, every enquiry is read by a senior architect, and you hear back within one working day.