How We Built a Three-Sided Marketplace: Sellers, Creators, and Buyers in One Platform

Most marketplaces are two-sided: buyers and sellers. Stripe powers the money, the platform takes a cut, everyone's happy. A three-sided marketplace is a different beast. We needed sellers to list products, creators to promote them, and buyers to purchase — with money, attribution, and incentives flowing correctly between all three on every single transaction. This is how we built Peddlum, the architecture decisions we made, and the things that almost broke us. The Core Problem In a two-sided mar