Assobay

The problem, in their own words

"We want to sell together, but I cannot collect my neighbour's money." That sentence defined the whole project. A group of food producers — real food, short supply chains, certifications to respect — wanted a single shop with a single basket. But the moment a customer buys from three different companies in one order, someone has to decide where the money goes, who issues the invoices, who ships and who answers when a parcel is lost.

The wrong answer, the one you find online, is: the platform collects everything and redistributes later. It is wrong for two reasons. First, regulation: holding other people's money, even for a few days, is not something you improvise. Second, practice: at the first cash-flow problem, the consortium falls apart.

What I built

A marketplace where money never rests in the platform's account. The customer's payment splits at the moment of collection and lands in separate accounts, one per seller, held by a payment institution. The platform keeps only its own commission, and keeps it as a commission, not as someone else's money.

Everything else follows from that decision:

• E-invoicing: each seller issues their own invoice, generated by the system and transmitted to the Italian exchange system. Rejections come back with a readable message, not a numeric code.
• Shipping: labels and tracking wired directly to the couriers, with an order splitting into several shipments when products leave from different warehouses.
• AI: product copy generated from the producer's own data, with mandatory human review before publishing. AI writes the first version, not the last one.
• Seller verification: nobody sells before being identified. It is a requirement, not a courtesy.

How it ended

The consortium sells online from a single catalogue and every company receives its own money without anyone acting as a bank for the others. Sellers are paid automatically every month, and orders go through without manual work.

The part nobody sees is the one that took the most work: the edge cases. A partial return on an order with three sellers. A lost parcel two people are liable for. An invoice rejected on 31 December. The code that handles those cases is why the platform is still standing.