A marketplace has a crowd on the front end and a second crowd in the back office. Most hosting is sized for the first and forgets the second entirely.
The unusual thing about a marketplace is how many people are logged into wp-admin at the same time.
Every seller editing a product, uploading an image or answering an order is an uncacheable admin request. Capacity for that is allocated separately from the front end, so vendors are not competing with shoppers.
Splitting an order across vendors and settling balances is a long batch, not a page load. Those runs get execution limits a web request never gets.
A marketplace catalogue grows without anyone planning it, because each new vendor brings inventory. Product search is indexed so growth does not gradually make browsing worse.
Sellers upload whatever their phone produced. Images are resized and re-encoded on upload, so one vendor's habits do not slow every shopper's page.
Bulk product edits go wrong regularly when dozens of people have access. Daily backups make that recoverable without unwinding everyone else's day.
On a normal store one person manages the catalogue. On a marketplace it is everybody, all day, and none of that traffic can be cached.
The measure for a marketplace is not page load. It is whether a vendor can save a product while shoppers are buying and a payout run is going.
Every row here exists because a marketplace has an unusual number of simultaneous authenticated writers, none of whom can be served from a cache.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Admin capacity | Allocated separately from front-end workers | Dozens of vendors working in wp-admin generate uncacheable load that would otherwise take capacity from shoppers. |
| Payout batches | Own execution and memory ceilings | Settling commission across many vendors is a single long task that a web request's limits would cut short. |
| Product indexing | Search indexed and rebuilt incrementally | The catalogue grows every time a vendor joins, and a full reindex on every change would never finish. |
| Vendor uploads | Resized and re-encoded on write | Sellers upload originals from phones, and the marketplace cannot ask hundreds of people to optimise images first. |
| Order tables | Indexed on vendor as well as customer | A marketplace queries orders by seller constantly, which a single-merchant store never does. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Bring the marketplace across — migration is free, vendors and catalogue included.