Overview
The Challenge
Services
- Marketplace Platform Development
- Custom Ecommerce & Checkout
- Stripe Payments & Seller Payouts
- ShipEngine Shipping Integration
- Transactional Email & Notifications
- Administrative Dashboard
- Responsive Design & UX
- Azure Hosting
- Ongoing Support
- Design by Bluebird
- Design direction came from our partners at Bluebird Creative Co. We built the platform and the commerce systems behind it.
- Full Commerce Lifecycle
- Listings, checkout, payments, shipping, tracking, receipts, and payouts were all built for this platform rather than assembled from a hosted cart.
- Ongoing Since 2020
- Six years of continuous development, from the original marketplace through the Exclusive EC product line.
Seller Closets
Every member is a storefront.
Riders create an account and manage their own closet: post an item with photos, brand, size, condition, discipline, and price, then edit, relist, or pull it down as their tack room changes. The entire marketplace catalog is user-generated, which means listing has to be quick enough for someone photographing a show coat on their phone at the barn, while still capturing the structured attributes buyers filter on. A My Sales dashboard carries the other half of the job: what sold, what needs to ship, and what has been paid out.
Marketplace Discovery
Faceted browsing over one-of-a-kind inventory.
Nothing restocks and nothing has a second size in the back, so discovery has to do more work than a normal catalog. We built dependent faceting where type (womens, mens, children, horses) drives which categories apply, and category in turn drives the size vocabulary, since a saddle, a show coat, and a pair of boots are not measured the same way. On top of that sit style, discipline (English or Western), color, condition, brand, and price banding, so a buyer can move from casually browsing to a 17-inch close contact saddle under $3,000 in a few clicks.
Payments & Payouts
Stripe on the front, a payout ledger behind it.
Checkout runs on Stripe with order records, email receipts, and sales history written on both sides of the transaction. Because the seller is not the platform, the money does not stop at the sale: each order carries a commission split, and seller earnings accumulate against a scheduled payout run on the 1st and 15th of the month, released once the buyer has actually received the item. That sequencing is the part that protects both sides of a peer-to-peer sale, and it is the part an off-the-shelf cart does not model.
Integrated Shipping
Real rates, printable labels, tracked to the door.
We integrated the ShipEngine API so shipping is quoted with live carrier rates at checkout rather than guessed at with a flat fee, which matters when the catalog spans a $30 pair of gloves and a saddle that ships in its own case. Once an item sells, the seller prints a prepaid label straight from their dashboard, and the shipment is tracked from acceptance through delivery. Buyers and sellers both get email at each stage, so neither has to ask the other where the package is.
Admin Platform
The operations layer that makes a marketplace runnable.
A two-sided marketplace generates work that no customer ever sees. The internal dashboard gives the Equestrian Closet team a view of user activity and account history, product management and moderation across the full listing catalog, complete sales history, and order and shipment tracking with the ability to step in when something goes wrong. It is what allows a very small team to operate a marketplace with thousands of listings and members in every part of the country.
Exclusive EC
A house brand running alongside the resale floor.
As the community grew, Equestrian Closet began releasing its own limited-run pieces, starting with the EC riding shirt and continuing through the Mockneck. These are conventional first-party products with finite runs and no restock, sold through the same checkout, shipping, and notification pipeline as peer listings but sourced and fulfilled by the brand itself. Supporting both models in one platform, without splitting the site or the cart in two, has been a large share of the ongoing work.
Built With
A Node.js and Firebase stack chosen in 2020 for fast iteration on a young marketplace, still in active development six years later.
- Azure hosting
- Firebase
- Handlebars templating
- Node.js
- Sass compiled to CSS
- SendGrid
- ShipEngine API
- Stripe
- Vanilla JavaScript
Insights
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