Commerce · India · 2021
Made By Bharat: 100+ vendors and 1,800+ products, live in seven months
A marketplace for things made in India had to feel trustworthy to buyers and simple for small makers. We designed and built all three products hiding inside it, the storefront, the seller tools and the control room, and kept it running once the doors opened.
- Client
- Made By Bharat
- Market
- India
- Engagement
- Product build, then care plan
- Timeline
- 7 months
- In care since
- 2021
- Platforms
- Web, Android, iOS
100+
vendors onboarded
1,800+
products at launch
60+
products with AR previews
7 months
from first workshop to launch
The context
A marketplace with a point of view
Made By Bharat began with a proposition that is easy to say and hard to build: one place to buy products made in India, trusted by buyers and practical for the independent makers who sell there. The founders came to us before the product had a fixed shape. They had the idea, a list of early vendors and a launch window. They did not yet have a logo, a catalogue or a single line of code.
We joined as product and technology partner. Research, strategy, identity, design, engineering and infrastructure sat with one team, so the logo, the checkout and the cloud account were all ours to get right, and all ours to answer for.
The challenge
Three products hiding inside one
A multi vendor marketplace is never one product. Buyers need to find things and trust them. Sellers need a clear way to join, list, fulfil and get paid. The operating team needs enough control to keep hundreds of moving parts honest. Get any one of the three wrong and the other two stop working.
Made By Bharat added a fourth requirement: an editorial promise. Every product had to belong to the made in India story, and the site had to tell that story without turning each purchase into a lecture. Many vendors were small workshops that had never sold online, so the seller side had to work for someone listing products from a phone between orders.
Our approach
How we worked
We ran the project through the Ampersand Method, with designers and engineers in the same Friday demo from the first sprint.
- 01
Listen & Learn
Workshops with the founders and conversations with early vendors about how they sold today. We studied how established marketplaces handle catalogues, onboarding, payments, shipping and administration. Not to copy their screens, but to understand the operational promises behind them.
- 02
Map & Measure
Every feature went into one of three columns: launch, soon or later. Version one had to support real orders, real payouts and real returns, and nothing more. That list became a signed scope and a seven month plan.
- 03
Sketch & Shape
Identity first, then the buyer path from category page to checkout, then the seller panel, tested with vendors on mid range Android phones. The engineers drew the data model beside the wireframes, so the catalogue structure would hold at 1,800 products and beyond.
- 04
Build & Break
Two week sprints with working software every Friday. For three weeks a shelf in the studio held vendor samples, a copper bottle, a block printed cushion, a brass lamp, so the 3D team could check every model against the real thing. QA tried to break payouts with every awkward refund we could imagine.
- 05
Launch & Land
Vendors were onboarded in waves before go-live, so the marketplace opened full rather than empty. Launch day was rehearsed twice and felt, as it should, like a non-event.
What we built
What we built
Everything a marketplace needs to take its first real order, and its thousandth.
Identity and storefront
The logo, the visual language and the buyer experience: catalogue structure, search and browse, product pages that tell the maker's story in two lines, and a checkout that asks for as little as possible.
Vendor onboarding
A guided route from application to first listing, with document checks, product templates and a review queue for the operating team. Designed for a small workshop listing from a phone.
Seller panel and app
Orders, inventory, payouts and returns in one place, on the web and in the app, so vendors could run their shop without calling anyone.
Admin and operations
The control room: vendor approval, catalogue moderation, commission rules, order oversight and the reports the founders read with their morning chai.
Payments and shipping
Payment gateway and shipping partner integrations that turned a prototype into real transactions, with settlements split automatically between the marketplace and each vendor.
AR product previews
Selected products can be placed in the buyer's own room through the phone camera, straight from the product page. We used it where size and finish matter, lamps, planters and textiles, not as a homepage trick. More on this in our AR and VR work.
Cloud infrastructure
The platform ran on AWS, set up, monitored and looked after by our own engineers from the first day of development.
The outcome
What changed
Made By Bharat opened with more than 100 vendors and over 1,800 products, seven months after the first workshop. AR previews went live on more than 60 of them. Orders flowed, vendors were paid on time, and the operating team ran the marketplace from the admin panel instead of a spreadsheet.
It reached the point many marketplace ideas never reach: a working product and a working operation. That is the part software can deliver, and it is the part we promise on every ecommerce development project.
They built a marketplace that worked from the first order. What came after was ours to solve, and they were straight with us about that from the very first workshop.
Care & Grow
After launch
In our care since 2021
We ran hosting, monitoring and security on AWS through launch and the first year of trading, on a care plan that covered releases, vendor support for the seller panel and an engineer on call during sale weeks. Uptime stayed above 99.9% through the festive season, the busiest stretch of the year for gifts.
The honest part: the platform worked, but the business did not reach the commercial scale its founders hoped for. A sustainable marketplace needs demand generation and operating scale beyond the software. We learned that here, and every marketplace conversation we have now starts with the demand plan, not the feature list.
Who worked on it
- Product strategist
- Brand and UI designer
- UX designer
- Two full stack engineers
- Mobile engineer
- 3D and AR developer
- Cloud engineer
- QA engineer
Credits
D&C Studios owned the product, design and engineering scope described on this page: research, strategy, identity, the buyer, seller and admin systems, payment and shipping integrations, AR previews and the AWS infrastructure. Commercial operations, vendor relationships after launch and the marketplace’s growth were led by Made By Bharat’s founders. The figures on this page describe the launch period.
Stack and tools
- React
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
- React Native
- WebXR with glTF and USDZ models
- AWS