Launching a digital product marketplace
From catalog and search to payments and licensing — the moving parts of a storefront for templates and digital goods, and where the hard problems hide.
A digital marketplace looks simple from the outside — a grid of products and a buy button. The complexity lives in the parts customers never see: keeping the catalog fresh, making search useful, and handling money correctly.
The catalog is the product
Whether you author listings or sync them from an external source, the catalog needs a single source of truth and a predictable update path. We lean on a rolling sync that refreshes items incrementally rather than one risky full import.
Search and category that scale
Filtering in memory is fine for a dozen products and a liability at a few hundred. Push search, category, and sort into the database, paginate, and derive your category tabs from real counts.
Payments and delivery
Charge through a gateway, confirm via signed webhook, and only then grant access. Never mark an order paid on an optimistic redirect. Licensing and downloads hang off that confirmed state.
The catalog is the product
Whether you author listings or sync them from an external source, the catalog needs a single source of truth and a predictable update path. We lean on a rolling sync that refreshes items incrementally rather than one risky full import.
Search and category that scale
Filtering in memory is fine for a dozen products and a liability at a few hundred. Push search, category, and sort into the database, paginate, and derive your category tabs from real counts.
Payments and delivery
Charge through a gateway, confirm via signed webhook, and only then grant access. Never mark an order paid on an optimistic redirect. Licensing and downloads hang off that confirmed state.
