Agricultural B2B Marketplace for 30,000+ Farms

The client is a B2B marketplace platform focused on the agricultural sector. The platform connects farmers, suppliers, and buyers who trade certified agricultural products.

They wanted to extend their ecosystem with a marketplace infrastructure where producers can list certified products and transact with verified buyers to support agricultural trade across 30,000+ farms.

The core objective of the project was to build a trusted digital ecosystem enabling agricultural producers to sell certified products while ensuring transactional security, product authenticity, and organizational governance.

Escrow Payments in a Multi-Vendor Marketplace

The marketplace required an escrow-based payment model.

Unlike standard payment gateways, escrow-based systems require extended transaction lifecycles and strict state management, making the engine more complex than typical eCommerce payments.

The system also needed to support:

• Three-party transaction flows (buyer–seller–escrow provider).
• Managing fund holding logic and conditional release mechanisms.
• Handling edge cases, such as disputes, partial fulfillment, or transaction cancellation.
• Ensuring compliance with financial and KYC requirements.

Organizational Governance for Farming Businesses

The platform was designed for farming organizations that needed to operate as structured entities where multiple employees could manage procurement, sales, and operational workflows.

This went beyond standard marketplace account models and required enterprise-grade access management logic.

Key complexity areas:

• Designing granular role and access control (RBAC).
• Preventing cross-organization data leakage secured by sales channels.
• Supporting internal workflows (procurement, sales, approval flows).
• Maintaining flexibility while preserving system security.

We designed and developed the client's B2B marketplace using Mercur, our complete marketplace platform. The solution covered: design, frontend development, backend architecture, and integration of external services.

It was built to support agricultural trade between farmers, suppliers, and buyers operating as organizations. Several core systems were implemented to support escrow-secured transactions, organization-level governance, and quotation-based negotiation workflows.

The client's organizations will ultimately operate across multiple interconnected marketplaces integrated within the broader infrastructure, enabling cross-platform transactions and expanding commercial reach.

Mercur-Based Marketplace Architecture

The backend was engineered on Mercur – our multi-vendor marketplace platform. The system acts as the operational core of the marketplace, coordinating vendor management, commissions, and sales channel separation across the platform.

Mercur acts as a flexible foundation for different marketplace models. The core platform remains stable while industry and client requirements are implemented as extensions on top of it. This approach reduces development time and allows new marketplace capabilities to be introduced without rebuilding the underlying system.

The client selected Mercur as the marketplace core to maintain full ownership of the platform, avoid vendor lock-in, and operate without licensing or transaction fees.

The goal was to build an agricultural B2B marketplace that could evolve with industry requirements, such as escrow-secured payments, product certification standards, and organization-based accounts – functionalities that would be difficult to implement within SaaS marketplace platforms, where workflows are limited to predefined patterns.

Decision criteria included:

• Full ownership and fast workflow iteration.
• Built-in support for multi-vendor settlement models.
• Extensibility for industry-specific requirements (escrow payments, certification verification, and RFQ negotiations).
• The ability to expand the platform to additional agricultural marketplaces without rebuilding the core system.

Advanced Escrow Transaction Engine

The marketplace required escrow-secured transactions powered by TradeSafe.

Beyond a standard payment integration, we designed and implemented a fully custom escrow transaction management system. It operates as a financial transaction orchestration layer inside the marketplace, providing fund holding and release mechanisms.

Unlike traditional payment gateways, the escrow model required building a multi-stage transaction lifecycle aligned with operational events inside the platform.

We built an event-driven status architecture where marketplace actions trigger corresponding escrow state transitions.

Example transaction flow:

• Order paid → funds transferred to TradeSafe escrow
• Order shipped → order becomes eligible for conditional release
• Order confirmed or fulfilled → escrow release triggered
• Dispute initiated → escrow hold and dispute resolution process

This also required:

• Bi-directional state synchronization between the client and TradeSafe.
• Custom webhook handling and retry mechanisms.
• Extended order state modeling beyond standard eCommerce flows.
• Safeguards against inconsistent financial states.

All listed products are protected through: GS1 traceability standards, Geographical Indication (GI) status, and full product origin verification. This ensures authenticity, supply chain transparency, and compliance with agricultural certification frameworks.

Multi-Organization Governance & Sales Channel Architecture

The platform allows farming businesses to operate as structured organizations rather than individual marketplace users.

We developed a custom Organization Management System enabling farming businesses to operate as structured entities within the ecosystem.

Key capabilities included:

• Role-based access control (RBAC) within organizations.
• Permission-scoped operational roles (e.g., procurement, sales, admin).
• Secure separation of organizational data.
• Membership invitations and joining workflows.

Organizations were also connected to dedicated Sales Channels, enabling:

• Controlled product visibility.
• Marketplace segmentation.
• Targeted commercial operations.

This architecture allows organizations to operate across multiple connected marketplaces while maintaining enterprise-grade governance and operational flexibility.

RFQ and Negotiation Engine (User Quotation System)

Agricultural trade often involves negotiated pricing instead of fixed product prices. To support this workflow, we implemented a Request for Quotation (RFQ) and Negotiation System.

Instead of fixed-price transactions only, the platform allows:

• Buyers to submit quotation requests.
• Vendors to respond with custom pricing.
• Structured negotiation via built-in messaging.
• Dynamic adjustment of order value based on agreed terms.

The system includes:

• Vendor ↔ Customer direct communication threads.
• Custom price proposal workflows.
• Negotiation history tracking.
• Conversion of accepted quotations into finalized orders.

Odoo ERP Integration

The platform connects with the Odoo ERP (enterprise resource planning) system. This integration supports vendor onboarding and synchronization of organizational data between systems.

Railway + Vercel Hosting Infrastructure

Railway hosts the backend services powering the marketplace. The infrastructure supports deployment, scaling, and service management for the platform.

The frontend application is deployed on Vercel, providing high performance, edge delivery, and CI/CD workflows.

Transactional Emails via Resend

Resend handles transactional communication across the platform, including order notifications, escrow status updates, and system messages.

The platform established a stable foundation for expanding agricultural trade across the network of farms and organizations participating in the ecosystem, while maintaining centralized control over transactions, listings, and organizational operations.

The underlying architecture was prepared to support future marketplace capabilities, such as new agricultural categories, expanded certification standards, and new regional marketplaces, without changes to the core platform.

Faster Time to Market with Mercur Marketplace

The marketplace MVP was delivered in only 6 weeks by using Mercur as the marketplace engine. Mercur provides the core marketplace infrastructure out of the box, so the team could focus on extending the platform with industry-specific functionalities required for agricultural trade.

This architecture reduced development time and allows the team to quickly extend the platform with new marketplace capabilities as the business grows.

Reduced Counterparty Risk in Agricultural Transactions

The escrow-based payment model supports agricultural deals where delivery, logistics, or product verification may occur before final payment release. By holding funds in a deposit until contractual conditions between buyers and sellers are fulfilled, the platform reduces counterparty risk and increases trust within the marketplace.