Buylio

Buylio is a multi vendor marketplace built for the tech world, and it works two ways at once. On one side it is a normal online store: buyers browse gadgets, accessories, components, software licences and digital tools, add them to a cart, pay by card and get them shipped with tracking. On the other side it is a freelance platform: buyers hire people for development, design, consulting and mentoring.

What makes it different is how the services are sold. A seller builds up to three packages for a listing, and each package can be one of five things: a piece of work to be delivered, a video call, an audio call, a live chat session, or a set number of questions answered. So a seller is not limited to selling deliverables. They can sell an hour of their time, and the call itself happens inside Buylio with a countdown running.

A buyer can search and filter listings, read reviews, save things to a wishlist, bookmark sellers they like, and message any seller directly. If they cannot find what they need, they post a requirement and wait for sellers to send offers back. Once they have ordered, they track the shipment on product orders, or submit their requirements, review what gets delivered and ask for revisions on service orders. They can accept or reject a delivery, ask to cancel, and raise a dispute if it goes wrong.

A seller upgrades from their buyer account, sets up a profile, and lists products with stock, discounts, shipping fees and up to five photos, or services with their package structure. While they set a price, a live calculator shows what they will actually take home after commission. They ship orders with tracking numbers, deliver work, answer revision and extension requests, and run their live sessions. Their earnings dashboard shows available balance, pending withdrawals and history, with the payout fee previewed before they withdraw to Stripe Connect, Wise or PayPal. A paid membership lowers their commission and unlocks buyer requirements, and they can pay to boost individual listings higher in search. If they need time off, they mark themselves unavailable and their listings hide automatically.

The live session engine is the hardest part of the build. When a call package is bought, the purchased duration becomes a countdown in seconds held on the server. Both people join a Socket.IO room, a server side timer ticks down once a second and broadcasts the time left, and the video and audio travel directly between the two people over WebRTC, with only the connection setup relayed through the socket, so the server never carries the media itself. Either side can ask to finish early or to reschedule, which pauses the clock and freezes the remaining time until the new slot. At zero the session closes itself, records the earnings, updates the sold counters and emails both parties. If the server restarts mid session, it re-arms the timers for every session that was still running, so a deploy never costs anyone the time they paid for.

Payments run on Stripe Payment Intents, with every price, fee, discount and tax figure resolved from the database rather than trusted from the browser, and stock held the moment an order is created and released if the payment fails. Webhooks are signature verified and handle failed payments and chargebacks, seller transfers carry an idempotency key so a retry cannot pay someone twice, and a database level partial unique index stops a duplicate withdrawal request from being created at all. Fees are set separately for buyers, free sellers and paid sellers, and again for products and for services, with tax covering all 13 Canadian provinces plus an international default.

Eight scheduled jobs handle the parts nobody should have to chase: overdue order sweeps, three day auto approval of deliveries the buyer never answered, discount, membership and boost expiry, seller availability windows, and cleanup of orders left unpaid after 30 minutes. Around all of it sits real time chat with file attachments, read receipts and presence, roughly 60 branded email templates, and an admin panel of more than 20 pages covering six analytics modules, revenue, orders, disputes, payout queues, fee configuration, coupons, categories, email campaigns and employee accounts with per page permissions.