Design and Development of a MERN Stack-Based Multi-Vendor Group Buying Platform with Dynamic Bulk Discount Mechanism

GroupBuy proposes an integrated collective-purchasing marketplace that connects merchant catalog management, tiered pricing configurations, decoupled checkout routing, atomic inventory reservations, automated lifecycle scheduling, and final order fulfillment. Its core design contribution is a single traceable workflow with explicit concurrency guards, database-level atomic decrements, and consolidated deal settlement ledgers. The accompanying prototypes illustrate how merchants and consumers could review tier progression, active pool metrics, and transaction outcomes in a centralized workspace.

[1] R. J. Kauffman, L. Lai, and H. Wang, “Social commerce and group buying: Research trends, business models, and consumer dynamics,” Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 85–92, 2012, doi: 10.1016/j.elerap.2011.12.005.   [2] D. Jing and F. Xie, “Group buying on the web: A tool for price discrimination and demand aggregation,” Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 244–258, 2011, doi: 10.1057/rpm.2010.5.   [3] X. Liu, J. He, and Y. Tan, “Mitigating inventory overselling under high concurrency in online flash sales,” in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on E-Business Engineering (ICEBE), 2018, pp. 112–119, doi: 10.1109/ICEBE.2018.00025. [4] B. Borisov and S. Rashkov, “Concurrency control mechanisms and transaction anomalies in document-oriented NoSQL databases,” in Proc. Int. Conf. on Computer Systems and Technologies (CompSysTech), 2020, pp. 45–52, doi: 10.1145/3414592.3414601.   [5] J. Zhang, Y. Zhao, and G. Huang, “Architecture design and state synchronization for distributed collective-purchasing platforms,” Journal of Systems Architecture, vol. 115, p. 102012, 2021, doi: 10.1016/j.sysarc.2021.102012.   [6] H. Garcia-Molina and K. Salem, “Sagas,” in Proc. ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data, 1987, pp. 249–259, doi: 10.1145/38713.38742.   [7] ISO/IEC/IEEE, Systems and software engineering — Life cycle management — Risk management, ISO/IEC/IEEE Standard 16085:2021, 2021, doi: 10.1109/IEEESTD.2021.9429712.   [8] OWASP Foundation, OWASP Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS), Version 5.0.0, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://asvs.owasp.org.