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Products in Mercur are master products: a single shared catalog of product records that the whole marketplace draws from. A product is not owned by the seller who created it — creating a product adds a candidate to the shared catalog, and sellers sell against that catalog through offers. This is the model used by large marketplaces: one canonical product record (“iPhone 15 Pro, 256 GB, Black”), many sellers listing against it.

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No product ownership

There is no owner column on a product. What looks like ownership in other platforms is split into three independent mechanisms:

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Selling eligibility

The product_seller link is an allowlist, analogous to Medusa’s product_sales_channel link:
  • Restricted — a product assigned to one or more sellers is visible and sellable only for those sellers.
  • Unrestricted — a product with no seller assignments is available to every seller on the marketplace (subject to its status).
Assignments are managed by the operator; creating a product does not assign it to the creator.

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Creator attribution

When a product is created, the platform records who created it as part of the product’s change history. This attribution has exactly one purpose: scoping vendor lists so a seller sees their own not-yet-published submissions without seeing other sellers’ pending work.

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Status lifecycle

Vendor-created products default to proposed. The operator reviews the submission and publishes or rejects it — see Product Requests & Approvals.

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Visibility rules

The vendor rule in practice: a seller’s product list is their own submissions or the shared published catalog, minus products allowlisted exclusively to other sellers.

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Editing shared products

Because the catalog is shared, edits are collaborative: any seller may request a change to any product — updating details, adding or removing variants, changing attributes. Edits flow through the change-request pipeline rather than mutating the product directly, so the operator stays in control of the shared record. Eligibility restrictions limit who may sell a product; they do not limit who may propose changes to it.

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What sellers actually sell

A master product defines what the item is. It carries no seller price and no seller stock. To sell it, a seller creates an offer — their own SKU, price, inventory, and shipping profile bound to the product. This separation is what allows many sellers to compete on the same catalog entry.

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Next steps

Offers

How sellers list, price, and stock products from the shared catalog.

Product Requests & Approvals

How new products and edits are reviewed by the operator.