e-SwapMeet: My Own Online Marketplace for Sellers

boltA notable problem

Real swap meets draw people for variety and good prices, but on the web, small sellers tend to sit alone on separate websites, and a shopper has to visit each one to compare. I wanted something closer to the real thing: many booths, one place to wander through, aimed at everyday American shoppers who like a good find. A marketplace like that raises its own questions. Shoppers need to find a product quickly across many sellers, sellers need to be paid safely, and the whole site needs to be easy for search engines to understand.

buildWhat I did

• I run the project as product owner and developer, so every decision about the architecture, the search and the SEO is mine.
• I built the marketplace on WordPress and WooCommerce, with Dokan to give each seller a storefront and dashboard.
• I built a unified search that looks across every seller at once and shows live suggestions in a dropdown as the shopper types.
• I ran an SEO program that took four blog posts to Rank Math scores above 80, backed by a diagnostics script I wrote that reports exactly why a post loses points.
• I added a recommendation feature to category pages, so a shopper browsing one kind of product sees related things worth a look.
• I connected seller payouts through Stripe Connect with Standard accounts. Stripe checks each seller’s identity, and the money goes straight to the seller.
• I broke a very large theme class into small, focused, namespaced classes, and pulled the checkout gating out into its own piece, so the code is easier to change safely.
• I worked on the mobile header and on app-like behavior, so the site feels at home on a phone.
• I set up the supporting sections a marketplace needs: a shop, a list of stores, seller sign-up, a help center, shipping and returns policies, a seller code of conduct and a blog.

check_circleThe result

A live marketplace where shoppers can hunt for deals across many sellers at once, and where each seller gets a storefront and does not have to build a site themselves. The public site advertises a flat monthly fee for a booth with no sales commission.

widgetsTools I used, in plain words