AsyncForge for Marketplaces

Marketplaces are two products in one — supply and demand — and they need to scale together. The chicken-and-egg problem makes early growth painful, but the engineering is what compounds the difficulty. Listings need rich search and filtering. Matching needs ranking signals. Payments need split flows (buyer pays platform, platform pays seller, fees split correctly). Reviews need fraud detection. Disputes need a resolution workflow. Each of these is a project on its own.

Most early marketplaces ship with a too-simple version of every component, accumulate debt fast, and rebuild within 18 months. The classic mistakes: search is "match the title" instead of multi-signal ranked retrieval; payments use a single Stripe account instead of Connect (which means the platform legally owns every transaction); reviews are unsignal-bounded (so a single competitor can tank a seller); disputes have no audit trail.

The platform choice matters too. Stripe Connect (Standard, Express, or Custom) is the standard for marketplaces in the West, with significant differences in onboarding UX and KYC handling between the three account types. PayPal has marketplace-specific products but rarely fits a modern SaaS-style marketplace. Adyen handles enterprise-scale marketplaces but is overkill for early stage. We pick correctly per stage.

AsyncForge has engineers who have shipped marketplace stacks. Submit listings infrastructure, search ranking, Stripe Connect onboarding, payout logic, review systems, dispute workflows. Light delivers in 4 days, Standard in 48 hours, Pro in 1 day. We avoid the classic mistakes because we have seen them.

For a marketplace startup, this means you ship the supply-side and demand-side product surfaces in parallel without the founders becoming the bottleneck. The infrastructure compounds as the marketplace grows.