Feature Suggestion: Customizable Smart Vendor Selection for Global Products

[mohdbk]

Hi Mercur team 👋

First off, thank you for creating such a developer-friendly and modular marketplace solution. I’ve been exploring Mercur as a potential foundation for an upcoming multi-vendor marketplace project, and I’m very impressed by its architecture and features so far.

While evaluating the platform, I came across a potential improvement that I believe would significantly enhance Mercur’s flexibility and appeal—especially for marketplaces where the same product is sold by multiple vendors.

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🧠 Feature Request: Smart Vendor Selection Engine

Currently, Mercur supports linking multiple vendors to the same global product and handles order splitting based on vendor inventory. However, in setups where several vendors offer the same item, there doesn’t seem to be a built-in mechanism to intelligently choose the best vendor to fulfill an order line.

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✅ Proposed Enhancement: Scoring Logic per Global Product

Introduce a smart vendor selection mechanism that evaluates eligible vendors for a product based on customizable scoring rules, such as:

Factor	Purpose
Geographic proximity	Reduce delivery times and environmental impact
Stock availability	Ensure full order quantity can be fulfilled
Fulfillment speed	Allow vendors to indicate average dispatch time
Customer rating	Reflect recent performance and feedback fairly
Vendor reliability	Based on cancellation/return rates, not volume
Return & support policy	Encourage customer-friendly service levels
Neutral pricing range	Avoid race-to-the-bottom while allowing fairness
Performance trend	Consider improving or declining behavior over time

This scoring logic could be:

• Defined at the global product level
• Use default marketplace rules if product-specific rules aren't configured
• Configurable through the admin dashboard or via plugin architecture

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💡 Why This Matters for Mercur

• Makes Mercur more adaptable to logistics-aware or SLA-driven marketplaces
• Attracts enterprise-grade use cases with smarter fulfillment requirements
• Adds a new layer of marketplace intelligence beyond inventory matching
• Keeps Mercur competitive with high-end marketplace frameworks

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🙏 Final Thought

This feature is something we’d need in order to adopt Mercur for our use case, and I imagine it could benefit many others looking to build efficient, scalable marketplaces. Would love to hear your thoughts on whether something like this is on the roadmap, or if plugin support exists that would allow us to build it ourselves.

Thanks again for the great work on Mercur!