The Painted Porch

Why your shop never shows another vendor's products

A plain-English explanation of the tenant isolation that keeps your storefront yours.

Why your shop never shows another vendor's products

Every shop on The Painted Porch runs inside one shared application. When a customer types handmadebyjane.com, our system recognizes Jane's domain and tells the rest of the app: "We're on Jane's shop right now. Show Jane's products, Jane's blog posts, Jane's pages, and nothing else."

Under the hood, this is called tenant isolation. You don't have to configure it, turn it on, or think about it — it's automatic.

How it works

When a customer visits your site, three things happen in about 7 milliseconds:

  1. We look at the web address. Is it paintedporch.market (the marketplace), yourshop.myporch.shop (your default subdomain), or your custom domain like handmadebyjane.com?
  2. We find your shop. We look up the domain in our database, find the row for your shop, and attach your unique store_id to the request.
  3. Every piece of data we load is filtered by that store_id. Products, pages, blog posts, promos, emails, orders — all of it, automatically.

The result: your customers see only your products, your branding, your story. There is no way for another vendor's data to leak onto your site.

What this means for you

  • Your customer list is yours. Orders placed on your shop are tagged with your store_id and no other vendor can read them. Even a platform admin operating from the main marketplace dashboard sees your orders in a "per-store" view, not mixed together.
  • Your pages, posts, and images are yours. If you publish a blog post, it shows up on your shop's blog and the marketplace — never on another vendor's site.
  • Your checkout goes to your Stripe account. When a customer buys from your custom domain, the payment goes straight to your Stripe account — not through The Painted Porch's account and then back to you. Your business name appears on the customer's card statement. (More on this in Your Stripe Account.)

What shows up on the marketplace

The marketplace at paintedporch.market is the one place where everyone's products appear together — that's the whole point of the marketplace. But even there:

  • Your products are clearly labeled with your shop name.
  • Clicking a product takes the buyer to your shop (not a generic marketplace listing).
  • Your "About" page, blog, and custom design carry through.

You can toggle whether your shop appears on the marketplace at all via Settings → Marketplace Visibility.

Troubleshooting

"I'm seeing another vendor's product on my shop." This should never happen. If you do see it, contact us immediately at hello@paintedporch.market with a screenshot and the URL — we'll treat it as a P0 incident.

"A customer is asking why the URL at checkout is different." On your custom domain, the cart and checkout live at your domain too (e.g. handmadebyjane.com/checkout). If a customer came from the marketplace, their cart might span multiple vendors — in that case checkout redirects to paintedporch.market/checkout so they can pay once for everything. Both flows are secure.

"Can I have two shops?" Yes, but each one is a separate store in our system. You'd go through onboarding again with a different shop name and get a second store_id. Your profile can own both, but the data stays isolated.

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