Operator-Hosted
The marketplace is a standalone product running on the operator’s own domain. The operator builds the full shopping UI — homepage, search, product detail, cart, checkout, order history — using Firmly’s APIs for the underlying commerce work.
When this fits
This pattern fits when:
- The marketplace is the primary product
- The operator wants full brand control
- Buyers search across many merchants in one surface — discovery spans the operator’s merchant set
- The operator wants to own the full checkout UX
If the marketplace is instead one feature inside a larger product, use Embedded Marketplace.
What the operator owns
| Layer | Owner |
|---|---|
| Marketplace domain and infrastructure | Operator |
| Full UI — homepage, search, PDP, cart, checkout, account, order history | Operator |
| Merchant catalog presentation (filters, sort, listings) | Operator |
| Cart and checkout UI | Operator |
| Checkout flow design | Operator (typically; can use Firmly’s hosted checkout instead) |
| Auth and session management | Operator (using Firmly browser-session or S2S underneath) |
| Cart / order orchestration | Firmly APIs |
| Payment + order placement | Firmly APIs |
Discovery spans merchants; checkout is single-merchant
Marketplace search returns products across the operator’s whole merchant set, so the operator’s UI typically shows merchant identity alongside each listing. Each cart, however, is scoped to one source merchant — build the cart and checkout UI around a single-merchant cart per the Single Product and Multi-Product flows.
Related
- Branded Marketplace use case
- Single Product Purchase Flow
- Multi-Product Purchase Flow
- Embedded Marketplace — the alternative pattern