Building scalable multivendor marketplaces in Laravel
Lessons from shipping a marketplace with 2.5M items integrated across 20+ external channels. Catalog modeling, sync queues, vendor-side webhooks, and the patterns that didn't survive contact with reality.
When we set out to build a marketplace that could handle 2.5M items spread across 20 external channels, we made every architectural mistake in the book. We're glad we did — the lessons reshaped how we model catalogs.
The first big surprise: trying to keep stock levels strictly consistent across all channels through a single source of truth doesn't scale. Eventual consistency with idempotent reconciliation jobs proved much more robust.