Aeion Commerce for Marketplaces
Multi-vendor marketplaces require operating-system-level primitives — vendor onboarding flows, per-vendor catalogs, split payments at checkout (vendor gets proceeds minus marketplace commission), order routing per vendor, vendor payout scheduling, vendor analytics. Aeion Commerce doesn't ship a native multi-vendor marketplace/split-payment system today — this page describes what building one on top of Aeion + Stripe Connect would take, and what's not there yet.
Marketplace Operating Model
A marketplace is fundamentally different from a single-vendor commerce platform:
The Core Primitives
Aeion's marketplace foundation is built from three ideas working together:
Split Payments via Stripe Connect — What You'd Build
Stripe Connect's destination-charge pattern is the right shape for this: the full order amount is charged to the customer, and once the charge succeeds, a transfer moves each vendor's net proceeds to their connected Stripe account. Stripe itself handles, once you build the integration:
Vendor Onboarding — What Stripe Connect Express Would Handle
None of this flow exists in Aeion today; it's the standard shape a Stripe Connect Express integration provides once built:
Order Routing per Vendor — Not a Built-In Feature
When an order spans multiple vendors, fulfillment needs to split per vendor — generating a vendor-specific fulfillment record, notifying that vendor, and tracking a separate shipment/tracking number per vendor, with the buyer seeing one order across multiple shipments. This is the standard Etsy/eBay-style UX pattern, but Aeion Commerce doesn't have a vendor concept for orders to route against, so none of this splitting/notification/per-vendor-status logic exists today. It would need to be built alongside the vendor/store data model described above.
FAQ
Aeion's flat $79/mo price applies to you (the platform tenant), regardless of vendor count. Aeion doesn't take a percentage cut of transactions. But there's no built-in "marketplace commission" configuration either — since there's no vendor/commission data model today, commission math would be part of the custom build.
Aeion's multi-site storefront feature (the real `stores` collection) does let one tenant map different domains/subdomains to different storefront themes — but that's same-tenant multi-site branding, not per-vendor subdomains in a marketplace sense. Giving each of many third-party vendors their own subdomain would need custom work.
Neither is integrated today. Both are reasonable technical choices for a custom marketplace build — Stripe Connect is generally considered more mature for marketplace use cases with better developer tooling; PayPal Multi-Party fits better if your vendor base is PayPal-native.
If you build on Stripe Connect, Stripe does generate 1099-K forms for connected accounts meeting the threshold — that's a real Stripe capability you'd inherit, not something Aeion adds on top.
There's no built-in dispute-routing logic for a vendor/marketplace split today — this would be part of the custom build, decided by your marketplace's policy.
Aeion Commerce doesn't have a per-vendor review/rating concept today (no vendor entity for reviews to attach to) — reviews would need to be built alongside the vendor data model.
Aeion's Search indexes products; without a vendor field on products, there's nothing to facet or rank by vendor today — that comes after the vendor/product-ownership model is built.