INTERTOP is the country's largest footwear retailer: over 200 offline stores across Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Our collaboration started back in 2014, when we turned a showcase website into a full-fledged sales channel. The next big step was a marketplace of their own — this case study is about it.
Why a retailer needs a marketplace
Ukrainian e-commerce was growing 40–50% a year, and niche sellers multiplied along with the market. INTERTOP could compete with each of them separately — or give them a platform and grow together. They chose the latter.
The small inevitably flows into the big. It is better to give partners a platform than to compete with each of them separately.Project Manager
How we built it
The project ran on SCRUM — short sprints with regular demos for the INTERTOP team. Five key goals were fixed before the start:
- a platform where partners publish products on their own;
- convenient upload of an assortment of any size;
- a simple, fast onboarding flow for new sellers;
- an access-rights system;
- seamless integration with the main intertop.ua website.
Seller dashboard
Each seller gets a full dashboard: users and products, orders and services, reference books, reports and settings. Onboarding takes three steps:
- Sign up on the site. The partner fills in a company profile.
- Partnership agreement. Legal formalities run in parallel with moderation.
- Product upload. Right after confirmation — via the personal account.
Three ways to upload products
- Manually — for a small assortment;
- bulk file upload — 7,000–8,000 items in about 10 minutes;
- via API — direct integration with the seller's inventory system.
Every product passes moderation: Draft → Confirmed → published. For similar items we built templates that noticeably speed up catalog filling.
Reports and seller rating
Sellers see order statuses at every stage, sales by category, charts for any period, commission amounts and the top most-demanded categories.
The seller rating is built on two metrics: reaction speed — how fast orders move to the In-progress status, and delivery speed — within 5 days of payment.
What comes next
- a single interface for all notifications — email, requests, statuses;
- a pre-pay model with automatic commission withholding;
- auto-publishing without moderation for sellers rated above 80%;
- integration with more delivery services — Ukrposhta, Justin.
The key takeaway
The more sellers and products we have, the more we grow ourselves.Head of Purchasing, INTERTOP
The marketplace has been running for over two years. It is an ecosystem where every participant — the platform, sellers and buyers — gains value through cooperation instead of competition.
