Industry

Designing a multi-vendor marketplace for Syria's reconstruction

Lessons from Madad: building a building-materials marketplace around open communication and local trust.

Year
14 Jul 2026
min read
6

Reconstruction runs on building materials — and finding the right supplier, at the right price, for cement, steel, tiles or a finishing detail, is its own daily problem. Madad is a marketplace built for exactly that, and designing it meant respecting how this market actually works rather than copying a generic e-commerce template.

The first decision was to keep communication open. For materials that need negotiation and inspection — a sink, a door, a custom fitting — the buyer reaches the supplier directly with a call or a call-back request. The platform's job is discovery and ranking, not standing between two people who need to talk.

The second was to treat the app as a tool on the job site, not just a catalogue. It ships with practical instruments — a tape measure, a spirit level, an area calculator, colour mixing and an AR paint preview — so it earns a place on the contractor's phone beyond the moment of buying.

The third was logistics. Materials are heavy and delivery is part of the product, so an integrated logistics layer is built in rather than left to the buyer to solve.

Underneath it is a Laravel backend and a Flutter app. But the real design work was social, not technical: building trust in a market where digital trust is still being earned, and keeping the platform on the side of the people using it.

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