The stack behind ForbiddenShelf, in service of the buyer.
Laravel 13, Livewire 4, Flux UI, Tailwind v4, Pest 4, Dusk, MySQL 8, and PayPal-split payouts. Every engineering choice tied to the buyer experience.
ForbiddenShelf is a curated wholesale marketplace built on tools picked for the buying floor, not the demo reel. Every tool earns its mention with one consequence the buyer can feel.
The buyer experience is the spec
Every engineering choice answers a buyer-side question. Will the catalog stay fast on a phone in a stockroom. Will inventory stay honest under concurrent orders. Will the payout reach the wholesaler without a phone call. The stack is the answer to those questions, in that order. Anything that did not answer one of them was cut from the build.
A Laravel 13 backbone
Marketplaces live or die on background work — payouts, webhooks, sitemaps, scheduled jobs. Laravel 13 ships that infrastructure mature, with queues, scheduling, and signed URLs already wired in. The operator team spends time on the buying floor, not on glue code. PHP 8.4 carries the language-level guardrails that keep the data model honest under refactor.
Livewire 4 and Flux UI for real-time inventory
Livewire 4 keeps state on the server, which means a retailer adjusting variants on a product card sees the same stock count the wholesaler does, in the same second. Flux UI gives the dashboards a single editorial vocabulary so a wholesaler new to the floor can find the submit button on the first try. The marketplace stays honest about stock because the server is the source of truth, not the browser.
Tailwind v4 and the editorial palette
Tailwind v4 carries the typography and palette that make the marketplace feel like a buying floor instead of a dropship template. The editorial standard — heavy serif headings, restrained accent colour, generous whitespace — is the difference between a curated catalogue and a search-result wall. The Quill editor adds rich storefront copy without inviting a script-injection problem; everything passes through a sanitiser before it lands in the database.
Pest 4, Dusk, and the audit floor
Pest 4 covers every order, payout, and copy-doctrine rule with feature tests that run on every commit. Dusk exercises the browser flows a buyer actually walks — checkout, role assignment, storefront publish. The copy audit is a CI gate that fails the build on any regression toward forbidden words. A green build is a real assertion: the floor is intact, the doctrine holds, and the payouts go through.
PayPal-split payouts and the boring parts
MySQL 8, queues, signed URLs, sanitised rich text, and PayPal Marketplace splits at completion. The unglamorous infrastructure is the part that makes a marketplace trustworthy. The platform earns ten percent across the order on completion, split between the wholesaler and retailer sides, with no held payouts and no monthly reconciliations. Wholesalers can see the floor itself at the wholesale clothing marketplace.