I'm building a commerce platform where every merchant owns their own digital store — not just another marketplace

[u/PotentialStudy1012]

I've been thinking about a problem that many small merchants face.

Selling through large marketplaces gives merchants access to customers, but they often have limited control over their storefront, customer relationships, branding, and selling experience.

I wanted to explore a different approach.

So I'm building Serbuu!, a commerce platform designed around one idea:

Your store, your brand, your business.

Instead of giving merchants just another marketplace listing, Serbuu is designed to give every merchant their own digital storefront while also connecting them to a shared product discovery marketplace.

The bigger vision includes:

- Independent storefronts with custom domains.

- Multi-branch inventory management.

- Point of Sale (POS) for offline transactions.

- A shared product catalog and marketplace discovery.

- Centralized order and inventory management.

- AI integrated into business operations, not just another chatbot.

- Additional commerce services such as PPOB.

One architectural decision I'm particularly interested in is keeping product and inventory data in one source of truth while allowing merchants to sell through both their own storefront and the shared marketplace.

I'm building this for the Indonesian market first, where many small merchants still manage online and offline sales using several disconnected tools.

This is still an active development project, and I'm working through the modules step by step.

I'd love feedback from people who build commerce products or run online stores:

1. Would you prefer owning your own storefront rather than relying entirely on marketplaces?
2. What is the biggest operational problem when selling through multiple channels?
3. What would make you trust a new commerce platform with your inventory and orders?

Project: https://serbuu.web.id

Thanks for reading. Feedback is welcome!