I am building a multi vendor e-Commerce system in Laravel and am wondering what would be the best approach or way to handle different application stakeholders for authentication and panel separation . There are 2 types of stakeholders:
Sellers: A Seller can be buyer and seller at same time so, they will share same user area like buyers have but, additionally they will have a dedicated seller Dashboard(hosted on a subdomain like seller.abc.com) where they have options like Product management, Order management etc. A seller can also create sub-users with roles like product lister, order manager etc. Each user created by seller with assigned role will have it's own permissions.
Similarities in User schema: Buyers & Sellers will have similar columns.
So, should I split them in different tables and authenticate using guards and providers? or should I keep them in one table "users" and restrict them via middleware only?
There won't be any all in one "Admin panel" to manage everything but in future I will create separate panels for different teams for example a panel for support team where they can approve seller listings disable/enable accounts etc.
I hope I cleared everything in detail if not please do let me know I'm really confused as it is going to be large project for me
I would suggest checking GitHub and see if there are any packages available where you can study the code of how they did things.
Since a user can be a seller or a buyer, I would probably use one table but have a boolean differentiate whether at the time they are buying or selling.
Maybe look into having user groups? Buyer group and seller group, and assign a user to both groups if they are indeed both? Set group permissions.
Suggestion package: https://github.com/mateusjunges/laravel-acl And: https://github.com/spatie/laravel-permission
May be overkill for your needs. But give you a start.
Please or to participate in this conversation.