Case study · E-commerce · Multi-seller marketplace
A marketplace that lets family shops in India's hills and Himalayas sell to all of India
Basket of Pahad is the marketplace for authentic products from India's hills and Himalayas — live with shops in Kumaon, Uttarakhand, and now opening across the hill states. We designed it, built it, and run it day to day — the storefront, the seller console, the operator console, the server and the courier integration.
The problem
A single producer in the hills cannot justify a website, a payment gateway, a GST setup and a courier account of their own. Marketplaces that already exist take a large cut, bury small sellers, and say nothing about where the food comes from — which is the whole reason somebody buys it.
So the job was a marketplace where many small sellers share one storefront, one checkout and one courier account, while each keeps their own shop, prices and stock, and every listing shows its origin and FSSAI licence.
Who it is for
- Hill shopkeepers and producers
- Family shops in Kumaon first, with Garhwal opening and shops from Himachal Pradesh to the North-East applying — people who make what others want but are too small to run a store, a payment gateway and national shipping each.
- Customers across India
- People who grew up with buransh juice, pahadi dal and bal mithai and cannot buy them where they now live.
- Gift and bulk buyers
- Hampers, festival gifting and corporate orders, which need a quote rather than a cart.
What we built
The storefront
- Search, categories, collections and shopping by region
- Product pages in English and Hindi
- Guest basket and checkout — no login wall
- One all-inclusive price — taxes and delivery inside it, nothing added at checkout
- UPI and cards through Razorpay, or cash on delivery
- "Ask the hills", a shopping helper on every page, in Hindi and English
- Wishlists, order tracking, reviews with photos
- Buying guides and category pages written for search
The seller console
- Free registration from a selling page for each hill state
- Onboarding, a shop page and per-seller catalogue
- Products one at a time or in bulk, and gift hampers
- Orders, shipments and payouts per seller
- Customer questions, discounts and promotion
- Sales reports
The operator console
- Listing moderation before anything goes live
- Orders, shipments and a Delhivery console
- Commission on both sides, computed at order time
- GST invoices, credit notes and a sales register download
- Coupons, collections, categories, guides and newsletter
- First-party traffic and attribution reports
Growth plumbing
- Google and Meta product feeds
- XML sitemaps and structured data
- Newsletter with double opt-in
- QR codes that record which campaign brought a visitor
- First-touch attribution on every order
Integrations
- DelhiveryPickup from the shop's door, courier booking, tracking by webhook and a scheduled sweep, and COD remittance recordsLive
- RazorpayUPI, cards and net banking at checkout, with payment verification and webhooksLive
- Anthropic Claude API"Ask the hills", a shopping helper that searches the real catalogue, and a listing-writing assistant for sellersBuilt — the helper is on every page and answers with links from the catalogue; the model behind it is switched on by the operator
- EmailOrder, review and newsletter email through an SMTP relayLive
Decisions worth knowing
- Commission at order time
- The platform's cut is worked out and stored on each order when it is placed, so a payout never depends on a later reconciliation.
- One front door
- CloudFront serves the React app from S3 and forwards /api to the server, so the browser stays on one origin and no CORS rules are needed.
- Every schema change versioned
- The database is changed only by numbered Flyway migrations that run at startup, never by hand.
Speed and quality, measured 10 Oct 2026
Google Lighthouse scores for basketofpahad.com/, run against the live site. Lab scores move a few points between runs.
Phone
- Performance
- 76
- Accessibility
- 100
- Best practices
- 100
- SEO
- 100
Largest paint 3.9 s · Layout shift 0 · Blocking time 150 ms
Desktop
- Performance
- 98
- Accessibility
- 100
- Best practices
- 100
- SEO
- 100
Largest paint 0.9 s · Layout shift 0.045 · Blocking time 0 ms
Want something like Basket of Pahad?
Two lines are enough. We reply with an honest range and next steps — and a free design if you want one.
We reply within one working day