CraftCart – Handmade Product Marketplace

Overview

CraftCart is an online marketplace that connects local artisans with a growing audience of customers who value handcrafted, ethically made products. The vision was to create a homegrown alternative to Etsy tailored for Indian makers and buyers—celebrating storytelling, culture, and community.

Our team at consoleIO took on the challenge to build a fully functional multi-vendor marketplace with unique features that promote artisan visibility and product discovery. Unlike generic eCommerce templates, we needed to build a platform that could both scale and showcase the essence of handmade craftsmanship.

The result was a visually rich, highly optimized platform that empowered over 200+ artisans to share their products—and stories—with the world.

The Challenge

While eCommerce development is fairly common, creating a handcrafted-goods-focused marketplace presented unique challenges. The platform needed to handle large catalogs, integrate multiple payment gateways, and support features like inventory control, order tracking, and payouts—for each vendor.

In addition to technical challenges, we also focused on narrative. Each artisan deserved their own digital space to tell their story, share product origins, and connect with buyers emotionally. This required an entirely custom approach to profile design, CMS flexibility, and blog-style product pages.

Speed and user experience were top priorities. A slow or clunky interface would kill conversions. With over 60% of traffic expected from mobile, performance and UI optimization had to be seamless across devices.

Our Approach

We used Next.js for a blazing-fast frontend and Sanity.io for flexible content management, allowing artisans and admins to easily update content without touching code. Stripe Connect was integrated to handle multi-vendor payments and settlements securely.

Our design emphasized storytelling, with rich artisan profiles, photo galleries, and cultural context for each listing. Personalized feeds, smart filters, and an AI-powered search system helped buyers find what they love faster. We also added a community review section and real-time order updates via WhatsApp.

Today, CraftCart is not just a shop—it’s a cultural movement. And consoleIO is proud to power the engine behind it.

Key Features

  • Multi-vendor onboarding & store dashboards

  • AI-powered product tagging & search

  • Stripe integration for vendor-specific payouts

  • Personalized feeds for users based on interest

  • Artisan storytelling modules on product pages

Results

  • Bounce rate dropped by 40%

  • 200+ artisans onboarded in the first phase

  • Sales increased by 3.5x during launch quarter

  • Page load speed improved by 60% with static generation