No supply, no marketplace
Customers will not return to a platform with ten restaurants, and merchants will not join one with no customers. Onboarding for both has to be effortless from day one.
Web · TwalaMeals, Canada
Three products pretending to be one
A delivery marketplace looks like one app to a customer. It is really three: the storefront they order from, the dispatch system a driver works in, and the dashboard a merchant runs their business on. We built all three, and the operations layer that keeps them in step.
- Customer, driver and merchant
- Live across Canada
- Food, groceries and retail
- Client
- TwalaMeals
- Sector
- On-demand delivery · Marketplace
- Delivered
- 2026 — in production
- Services
- Web, Mobile apps, Cloud
Project at a glance
The situation
Why most delivery platforms stall after launch
The customer app is the easy half. What decides whether a marketplace survives is everything the customer never sees — and a build that treats those as phase two rarely recovers.
01 02 Dispatch decides the economics
Assigning the wrong driver to the wrong order is not an inconvenience, it is the margin. Distance, current load and delivery window all have to be weighed automatically.
03 Merchants need a real back office
A restaurant will not manage its menu, prices, hours and order flow by telephone. Without tooling of their own, partners churn within weeks.
04 One address, three systems
The address a customer types, the route a driver follows and the zone a merchant delivers to must be the same geography, or every order becomes an exception.
What we built
One platform, three front doors
Each side has its own product; all three share one catalogue, one order and one map.
Customer storefront
Address capture and current-location detection, nearby stores on a live map, browsing by category — food, groceries, pharmacy, electronics, fashion — with checkout and live order tracking.
Driver experience
Applications and document checks, availability and shift control, assigned orders with routing, and delivery confirmation that closes the order and the payout.
Merchant dashboard
Menu and catalogue management, prices and hours, live incoming orders, revenue and rating for the day, and the performance figures a partner uses to decide what to sell.
Multi-category catalogue
One catalogue structure serving restaurants and retail alike, so groceries, pharmacy and electronics sell through the same flow as a meal.
Subscription tier
A premium membership with free delivery, member pricing and early access to offers, billed and enforced across the platform.
Operations & support
Help centre, careers, partner and driver onboarding journeys, legal pages and account-deletion flows — the parts an app store and a regulator both ask for.
What changed
A marketplace running on its own
The platform is live in Canada with all three sides self-serving: merchants onboard and manage their own storefront, drivers apply and pick up work, and customers order without anyone in the middle.
- Merchants join and publish their menu without manual setup
- Drivers are approved, assigned and paid through the same flow
- Customers track an order from checkout to the door
- Groceries, pharmacy and retail sell through the same catalogue
- 3
Products sharing one codebase and API
- 5+
Categories beyond restaurant food
- 24/7
Ordering, dispatch and support
Built with
A marketplace front end has to be fast on a phone on mobile data, and correct about location.
- Frontend
- Next.js
- React
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- Location
- Interactive maps
- Geolocation
- Address search
- Delivery zones
- Commerce
- Catalogue & categories
- Checkout
- Payments
- Subscriptions
- Platform
- Role-based access
- Notifications
- Analytics
- Cloud hosting
Building a marketplace, not just an app?
The customer side is the part everyone scopes. Tell us about the other two and we will tell you what it really takes.