Multi-vendor retail with its own currency

The brief

Cashback schemes almost always disappoint, because the points are worth less than they look. vBuy needed a rewards currency where the exchange rate is not a trick: v£1 is worth exactly £1 at checkout, and every product page states plainly how much a shopper will earn.

That promise only works if the ledger behind it is exact.

What we built

• A bespoke rewards currency. Every product carries its own earn rate, between 8% and 15%. Rewards credit automatically after purchase and unlock after 30 days.
• A wallet with a real balance. Shoppers see what they have earned, what is still locked, and what they can spend today.
• Merchant onboarding and storefronts. Sellers register, get approved, upload catalogues in bulk from a spreadsheet template, and run their own shop pages.
• Live shopping. Merchants schedule and broadcast live selling sessions from their own dashboard, with shoppers watching, chatting and buying in real time. Going live is itself priced in the currency — v£5.00 a session, taken from the merchant’s acceptance wallet when the stream starts.
• Two payment rails. Trilo open banking alongside Stripe cards.
• Separate staging and production. Two virtual machines and two databases, with scripted deployment and a database sync so changes are tested against real-shaped data before going live.

Scale

The custom vbuy-core plugin runs to 84 PHP classes and 20 bespoke database tables, with 30 transactional email templates. All of the business logic — rewards, wallets, merchant permissions, payouts — lives in that plugin rather than in configuration, so it can be reasoned about, tested and moved.