Marketplaces

A central feature to this platform is the concept of marketplaces. A marketplace is an external, 3^rd party platform that acts as a source of information.

In the context of resources such as Customers, Products and Orders, a marketplace is usually the external platform that order information is originally entered into. For example, the marketplace shopify is referred to throughout the documentation, often accompanied by an ID, which is the ID of the corresponding resource on the Shopify platform.

By linking resources such as products to marketplaces, it becomes possible to accept orders from many marketplaces without needing to use the marketplace's interface specifically - instead the orders, customers and products are imported to this platform, and presented in a unified interface.

By allowing a product to be linked to multiple marketplaces, problems commonly faced when selling on multiple platforms can be avoided. Some examples of such problems are as follows:

• Creating multiple copies of the same product (one for each marketplace) is unnecessary, as each product on each given marketplace can be linked back to the single product on this platform.
• Tracking separate inventory levels for each marketplace is no longer necessary, as the inventory for a product on the platform can be shared amongst the marketplaces, and updated on all marketplaces when one marketplace causes stock to decrease.
• Customer order history is simplified: whether a customer places an order on Shopify, Amazon or eBay, all customer orders from all marketplaces are visible in a unified interface.

When linking a resource to a marketplace, the marketplace identifier (sometimes referred to as the 'marketplace handle' if it would be linguistically confusing to refer to it as formerly mentioned) must be one of the allowed marketplace identifiers (eg. shopify). Attempting to link an unrecognised marketplace will result in an error.