Scaling a LeafLink Marketplace Through Platform Refactoring

As LeafLink grew into one of the largest multi-vendor marketplace environments in its category, the original architecture began to show clear limits. The fast expansion of users, orders, and inventory activity led to scalability issues.

At the same time, the platform needed to keep up with customer expectations. Users requested features they knew from other marketplace app ecosystems: clearer communication tools, transparent messaging, or email tracking.

LeafLink wanted to introduce improvements without destabilizing the already complex system. Since the technical complexity exceeded the internal team's capacity, the client sought an external partner experienced in long-term marketplace development at scale.

Our collaboration with LeafLink spanned over five years. During this time, we supported both feature development and technical improvements across the platform.

UX and communication improvements

We implemented a series of buyer-seller communication enhancements:

• Redesign of the order creation process for better customer experience: e.g., discounts and final prices are clearly explained, even when multiple pricing mechanisms apply.
• A new way of presenting seller price plans as discount plans with "before/after" pricing, making negotiated terms easier for customers to understand at a glance.
• Design and implementation of an internal notification system based on an event bus architecture, aggregating messages from across the entire application ecosystem.

Product inventory modernization

One of the most transformative efforts involved restructuring the platform's inventory model. This included a full overhaul of how product attributes and parameters are presented, ensuring that important details are visible upfront rather than hidden in legacy fields or mixed across variant structures.

In practical terms, we introduced a coherent interface for handling product variants and the logic behind creating and editing them: new data fields that support analytics, integrations, and product-specific information such as cannabinoid composition and varieties.

Platform reliability

A significant part of our work focused on stabilizing the core platform. We resolved critical backend and frontend issues raised by enterprise customers and refreshed legacy UI components to create a more consistent, reliable experience as the marketplace continued to scale.

Workshops and product discovery sessions

Together with LeafLink stakeholders, we did recurring workshop-style sessions to review workflows, identify friction points, and suggest further improvements to the marketplace platform and app experience. The sessions helped refine the roadmap and keep development aligned with strategic goals.