Flipkart Marketplace Platform  ·  View 03 of 25  ·  2 · People and journeys

Actors and Their Core Journeys

Who this is for, and what each of them actually gets to do with it — including the machines that act without being asked.

Editable source SVG draw.io All views
The people who buy Returning shopper 180M monthly active Goal — Buy the thing I already decided on, in under a minute, without losing my basket to a bank page. Core journeys Buy during a sale event 1.5M orders/hour peak Track a delivery Return and get refunded 6-8% of units First-time buyer tier-2 and tier-3, 3G Goal — Work out whether this seller is real before I pay anything, and pay cash if I am not sure. Core journeys Search and compare offers Place a COD order The people who sell Small seller 1.4M total, 90% long tail Goal — Get listed and paid without hiring anyone to operate a dashboard for me. Core journeys Onboard and pass KYC List, price and stock a SKU Get settled and reconciled T+7 cycle Brand or large seller top 2% by GMV Goal — Push a 200k-SKU catalog and a price change through an API and see it live everywhere within minutes. Core journeys Bulk catalog and price feed Run a sale campaign The people who run it Care agent one console, 11 languages Goal — Answer where is my order and issue the refund on one screen, without asking the customer twice. Core journeys Resolve an order query Issue a goodwill refund Trust and safety analyst marketplace governance Goal — Take a fraudulent seller off the platform before the orders they cannot fulfil are paid for. Core journeys Work a seller risk case Adjudicate a dispute On-call engineer follow the sun, 2 regions Goal — Know which of 400 services broke checkout before the conversion graph does. Core journeys Triage a peak-hour incident Shed load deliberately Partners and machines Delivery partner hub scan to doorstep Goal — Get a route I can finish before dark and a way to take cash that reconciles itself. Core journeys Run a last-mile route Remit COD collections 3PL carrier API 8 integrated Goal — Receive a manifest that loads without a human touching it, and post scans back at my own cadence. Core journeys Collect a despatch manifest Post a tracking scan Settlement run nightly, T+1 close Goal — Close the day so that every rupee taken, refunded and commissioned reconciles to the paisa. Core journeys Reconcile PSP and ledger Ranking retrain hourly features, daily model Goal — Refresh ranking and fraud models before the evening peak without touching the serving path. Core journeys Retrain and canary a model Actors and Their Core Journeys Person or role Journey / task External / third party Security / platform Volumes are the stated public scale plus a 10x sale-event multiplier. Machines with an SLA are actors here because otherwise they end up with no owner and no failure path. v 1.0 · owner Product + Enterprise Architecture · date 2026-09

Why this view is first

  • Every view in acts 3 to 7 exists to serve one of these journeys; a view that serves none was cut
  • A settlement run and a retraining job are actors here because a machine left off the cast list ends up with no owner and no failure path
  • Goals are written in the actor's own voice, because a job title cannot be argued with and a goal can

The awkward actors

  • The long-tail seller has no back office — anything requiring a dashboard operator will not be used
  • The first-time tier-3 buyer arrives on a slow connection and does not trust the seller yet, which is why COD survives
  • The delivery partner is measured on a route they must finish before dark, and carries cash that has to reconcile

Assumptions

  • 180M monthly actives of the 500M registered, a ratio typical for Indian marketplaces
  • 90% of sellers are long tail by SKU count, 2% of sellers carry the majority of GMV
  • Care headcount is fixed, so any journey fix that adds contacts is a cost, not a feature
◀  High-Level Architecture All views Journey — Buying in a Sale Hour  ▶
Solution Architecture v1.0 · Open source on Microsoft Azure · Enterprise Architecture · 2026-0903-actors-and-journeys