Etsy Clone Features: Built for the Seller Side
A thousand sellers listing five items each behaves nothing like fifty sellers listing a thousand. Onboarding cannot involve a phone call, commission cannot be one number, moderation is a daily shift rather than an occasional check, and support is a conversation rather than a form. Here is what ships, grouped by who touches it.
Request a Live Demo →See PricingFeature Set by Role
Six surfaces on one REST API. On a maker marketplace the seller and the operator are the two roles that decide whether the thing works, so both are listed in full.
Buyer
- Keyword search with autocomplete, filters and sorting
- Category tree of unlimited depth and a shop directory
- Product pages with galleries, video and photo reviews
- Chat directly with a seller, with attachments
- One basket spanning several independent shops
- Wishlist and save-for-later that persist between sessions
- Coupon, wallet credit and loyalty points applied together
- Return opened with a reason and evidence, tracked to settlement
Maker
- Registers themselves with KYC and document upload
- Waits on an approval queue, not on a sales call
- Picks a plan carrying a listing cap and a commission rate
- Product CRUD with variants, stock and multi-image galleries
- AI-assisted descriptions, SEO titles and image alt text
- Chat with buyers about custom and made-to-order work
- Order queue, refund responses and review replies
- Wallet with commission visible and a withdrawal request flow
Delivery Agent
- First-class identity with KYC, approval and zone assignment
- Assignment feed with accept and reject
- Navigation to the maker for pickup, then to the buyer
- Live location broadcast while in transit
- Status checkpoints from picked up through to delivered
- One-time code verified at the door before handover
- Earnings held separately from cash collected on COD
- Payout request flow from the app
Operator
- Seller approval queue with documents attached
- Listing moderation with approve, reject and bulk actions
- Full editing rights over anything on the platform
- Commission set globally, per category, per seller or per product
- Subscription plans with listing caps and reduced rates
- Withdrawal queue across many small, frequent payouts
- Every module behind its own permission
- Eight report types over any date range, to Excel, CSV or PDF
The maker column is deliberately short on things a marketplace usually asks a seller to do. At a thousand sellers, every step you add to onboarding is a step most of them will not finish, and the ones who do not finish are the long tail your catalog depends on.
Etsy vs Miracuves Clone vs Building From Scratch
The same capability, three different paths. Every row that separates them is a seller-side row, because that is where a maker marketplace actually breaks.
| Capability | Original Etsy | Miracuves Clone | Generic commerce script |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seller onboarding | Fully self-service at scale | Self-registration with KYC and document upload, then an operator approval step - no interview required | An admin creates each vendor by hand |
| Commission granularity | Category-level, published | Global, per category, per seller or per product - so you can sign one maker without repricing everyone | One platform rate |
| Listing limits and plans | Per-listing fees | Subscription tiers carrying product-count caps, reduced commission and featured placement | Usually absent |
| Moderation at volume | Automated and staffed | A queue with approve, reject and bulk actions, plus full editing rights over any listing | One row at a time, if at all |
| Buyer-to-seller conversation | Central to custom orders | Direct chat with attachments, alongside a threaded ticket queue | A contact form to the platform |
| Many small payouts | Yes, continuously | A withdrawal queue with approve, deny and mark-processed, against per-seller payout details | Manual bank transfers and a spreadsheet |
| Basket across shops | Yes | One basket spanning several independent sellers, shipping estimated per shop, delivery status per line | One seller per order |
| Source code | Not available | Complete Laravel 12 backend and all three Flutter projects, unobfuscated, no licence callback | Often encrypted files or a licence check |
| Time to live | Not applicable | Six working days | Weeks, then months on the seller-side gaps |
The first two rows are the ones to test. Ask any provider to onboard a seller without an administrator touching the database, then give that one seller a different commission rate from everybody else.
How It Works, End to End
A maker joining, listing, selling and getting paid - traced through every queue it passes and every balance it moves.
The maker onboards without you
Registration with KYC and document upload, then a wait in an operator approval queue. At a thousand sellers you cannot interview anyone, so the pipeline has to hold quality without holding people up. The documents are attached to the approval decision rather than emailed to somebody.
They choose a plan, and the plan sets the ceiling
Subscription tiers carry product-count limits, a reduced commission rate, featured placement and priority support, billed on a cycle with a trial and a grace period on failure. A small maker starts cheap with a low cap and upgrades to list more, which is the natural revenue curve on this model rather than a paywall bolted onto it.
Listings arrive faster than anyone can read them
Seller-submitted products land in a moderation queue with approve, reject and bulk actions, and the operator keeps full editing rights over anything on the platform. With many small sellers this is a daily shift, so bulk is not a convenience - it is the difference between a queue that clears and a queue that grows.
The buyer asks a question before they buy
Buyer-to-seller chat with attachments, alongside a threaded support ticket queue. On a maker marketplace this carries real commercial weight: custom requests, sizing questions and made-to-order arrangements all happen here, because there is no options-and-quote builder in the base platform.
One basket, several independent shops
A basket can hold items from several makers at once, each with shipping estimated per shop. Coupon, wallet credit and loyalty points stack on the same order, tax comes from the zone rules, and placement is guarded by an idempotency check.
Each maker is charged their own rate
Commission is taken from the seller wallet on completion at whatever rate applies to that seller - global, category, per-seller or per-product - and reversed automatically on refund. That granularity is what lets you sign a maker worth signing without repricing everybody else on the marketplace.
Many small payouts, on many different cycles
Withdrawal requests queue for approve, deny or mark-processed against each seller's saved payout details. On this model the payout queue is high-frequency and low-value rather than the reverse, and every movement pairs with an append-only history row so any balance can be re-derived rather than trusted.
Nine statuses carry the order from pending payment to delivered, with a delivery status per line so one maker shipping early does not misrepresent the rest of a multi-shop basket.
Every Feature Earns Its Place
Feature lists are cheap. These are the ones that exist because a specific thing goes wrong on a marketplace of many small sellers without them.
| Capability | Why it is not optional |
|---|---|
| Self-service registration with KYC | Because at a thousand sellers you cannot interview anyone, and a marketplace where an administrator creates each vendor by hand has a headcount ceiling on its own catalog growth. |
| Documents attached to the approval | Because approving a seller from an inbox means the evidence lives in someone's email. Attached to the decision, it is auditable a year later when it matters. |
| Commission set per seller | Because the maker you most want to sign is the one who will negotiate, and a single platform rate means every negotiation reprices your entire marketplace. |
| Listing caps on plans | Because on a maker model the natural upgrade trigger is wanting to list more, not wanting a better dashboard. Caps turn growth into revenue without adding a fee to anything that sells. |
| Bulk approve and reject | Because listings arrive faster than anyone reads them. A moderation queue you can only work one row at a time is not slow, it is a queue that never empties. |
| Full operator editing rights | Because a small seller's listing will be wrong in ways they cannot see, and asking them to fix it is slower and less reliable than fixing it. |
| Buyer-to-seller chat with attachments | Because custom and made-to-order work is negotiated, not configured, and without a channel for it those orders simply do not happen on your platform. |
| A basket across several shops | Because a buyer browsing makers will want two things from two sellers, and a one-seller-per-order model turns that into two checkouts and usually one sale. |
| A withdrawal queue built for frequency | Because small sellers withdraw often and in small amounts. A payout process designed for fifty monthly transfers breaks at a thousand weekly ones. |
| Append-only ledgers per actor | Because with many sellers on different rates and different cycles, a balance you can only read is a balance you cannot defend when one of them disputes it. |
None of these are exotic. They are the ten places where a marketplace built for fifty large sellers stops working when it has a thousand small ones instead.
The Technology Behind the Features
Deliberately ordinary choices, because the developers who maintain this after handover should already know all of it.
Why per-seller commission is a schema property, not a setting
Commission resolving at four levels - global, category, seller, product - means the rate applied to any given line is looked up rather than assumed, and that lookup has to exist in the data model from the beginning. Platforms that store one platform rate can add a per-seller override later, but every historical order, every reversed commission and every payout already computed used the old assumption. On a marketplace whose entire commercial strategy is signing individual makers on individual terms, that is not a feature you retrofit.
Everything above transfers into your repository. There are no encrypted files and no licence callback of any kind.
What Is Not Included in the Base Package
Everything above is in the base build and demonstrable in the live demo. These are not, and the hub names them rather than implying them away.
Scoped separately, or yours to own
- An options and quote builderNamed on the hub as scoped work, and it is the fashion-of-this-category caveat: on a maker marketplace, personalisation, made-to-order and custom pricing are common. The base build handles them through buyer-to-seller chat rather than through a configurator, which works and is not the same thing. If structured options are core to your model, scope this at the start.
- iOS applicationsThree Android builds ship. The Flutter projects compile for iOS, quoted as an add-on with signing and store submission.
- Gateway credentialsEleven gateways are integrated; each needs your own merchant account and its own approval.
- SMS and email providerIntegration-required - your accounts, your sender reputation, your deliverability. With many sellers this carries more notification volume than a conventional marketplace.
- Firebase projectPush notifications across all three Android apps run through your own Firebase project.
- OpenAI keyThe AI module generates descriptions, SEO copy and alt text against your key, with per-feature token quotas and a per-call cost log. On a maker marketplace this is often the difference between a listing that ranks and one that does not.
- Catalog data and seller recruitmentProducts, imagery and the makers themselves are the business, and they are yours. The onboarding pipeline ships; the people walking through it do not.
- Tax ratesTax classes bind per zone, but the rates for your jurisdictions are yours to set and yours to keep current.
- Seller tax handlingThe platform computes tax on the order. Whether individual makers are separately registered, and what that obliges you to collect or report, is a question for your accountant rather than a switch in the console.
- ISO 27001 and SOC 2Neither certificate is held and neither is claimed. The platform is ready for the evidence gathering; certification is a separate programme.
The options builder is the one to weigh honestly. Chat covers custom work well enough for most maker marketplaces, and badly for any model where the buyer is expected to configure and price a product themselves.
See how Miracuves compares to agencies and freelancers
The deployment process, two modelled reference deployments, and how to test self-service onboarding and per-seller commission before you hire anyone - on the Development Company page.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is this different from the Amazon Clone?
Can sellers onboard without us doing anything?
Can I give one seller a different commission rate?
Is there a product options or quote builder?
How do subscription plans work?
Can a buyer order from two sellers at once?
Onboard a seller in front of us, then reprice them alone
That is the demo worth asking for. Everything else on a maker marketplace follows from those two things working.
Explore the Etsy Clone
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