// the take
This is the companion repo for a Josh tried coding YouTube tutorial — a toy digital-goods marketplace (think Gumroad-lite) built on Next.js 14 App Router, tRPC, and Payload CMS, with Stripe for checkout. It's aimed at developers learning how to wire those three pieces together, not at anyone who wants a marketplace to actually run.
The tRPC + Payload combo is a genuinely useful reference — most tutorials pick one or the other, and seeing typed routers (auth-router, payment-router) sit next to Payload collections (Products, Orders, Media) as the data layer is the actual value here. The Stripe webhook flow (webhooks.ts) and the local-storage cart hook are both small enough to read end-to-end in one sitting, which is rare for 'full' e-commerce examples. shadcn-ui usage is clean and the component split (NavItems, ProductReel, ImageSlider) is a reasonable pattern to copy for a storefront.
'Marketplace' and 'admins can verify products' overstate what's here — there's no Stripe Connect, no seller payouts, no commission split; it's single-tenant checkout with a manual approval flag, not multi-vendor selling. No tests, no CI, and it's pinned to Payload CMS v2-era APIs (payload.config.ts, payload-types.ts) that don't carry over to Payload 3's Next.js-native rewrite, so cloning this in 2026 means fighting a stack two major versions behind on half its dependencies. Last push mid-2024 with zero activity since confirms it's a frozen tutorial snapshot, not a project anyone's iterating on — don't expect issues answered or PRs merged.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →