One Catalog for Products and Services: Why Local Marketplaces Shouldn't Need Two Systems

Most online marketplaces make you pick a lane. You sell physical products through one system, and if you also offer bookable services, you bolt on a second tool, a second calendar, and a second checkout. Kadaikodi is built the other way around: one catalog holds products and services side by side, and one order moves both through the same checkout, tracking, and fulfillment queue.

Kadaikodi is currently pre-launch, and everything below describes the product being built — not a live service you can sign up for today. You can see the details on the features and use cases pages, and join the waitlist to hear when access opens.

The problem: two systems, two headaches

Picture a small neighborhood business that sells both things and time — a salon that stocks hair products alongside haircuts, or a café that sells packaged filter coffee alongside catering bookings. On most platforms, the products go into a store builder and the bookings go into a separate scheduling app. The owner ends up juggling two dashboards, two customer lists, and two sets of order numbers, just to run one business.

That split isn't just annoying for the owner. It confuses the customer too. Someone browsing a merchant's page has to guess whether they're looking at a "shop" or a "booking calendar," and if they want both a product and a service, they often have to complete two separate transactions with two separate confirmations.

It also fragments the business itself. Revenue from products sits in one report, revenue from bookings sits in another, and nobody gets a single, honest picture of how the business is actually doing that week. Small operators end up running on gut feel because the tools they're given were never designed to talk to each other.

Kadaikodi starts from a different assumption: a local business is one business, not two. So the platform gives it one catalog, one cart, and one order history — no matter what mix of products and services it sells.

What one catalog actually looks like

On Kadaikodi, a merchant builds a single catalog that can mix physical products with bookable services. Each listing is tagged as a product or a service the moment it's created, so the catalog can be browsed and filtered by type, but it's still one list, one place to manage, and one place customers look.

Every listing carries what it actually needs to be sold: a price and an optional discount, stock levels for products, a duration for services, photos, and tags that power search and discovery. Owners can also flip an availability switch per item — so a sold-out product or a fully booked service simply disappears from ordering without anyone having to delete it and recreate it later.

That structure is what makes the rest of the platform possible. Discovery, cart, checkout, and analytics all read from the same catalog, instead of stitching together two data sources that were never designed to talk to each other.

One cart, one checkout — no matter what's inside

When a customer shops on Kadaikodi, they start from a single merchant's catalog and build a cart the normal way: browsing, filtering by category, and adding items. That cart is held as the customer browses, so the running subtotal updates instantly and survives moving between pages during the same visit.

Checkout is where the platform's "everything in one place" idea really shows. A customer picks a fulfillment type — pickup, delivery, or an on-demand "come to me" request — and adds a delivery address if one is needed. From there, the total is broken out clearly: subtotal, tax, delivery fee, and any discount, computed server-side so the number is trustworthy and consistent no matter which screen the customer is looking at.

Once an order is placed, it locks in a snapshot of every line item and its price at that moment, and then moves through a tracked, multi-stage lifecycle from placed to delivered or completed. It doesn't matter whether the order was a product, a service, or a mix of both — it's the same order type, moving through the same stages, visible on the same tracking page.

One honest caveat: today, the cart itself is single-merchant and lives within a browsing session. A fully durable cart that follows a shopper across every device and channel — phone, web, kiosk — is still being built on top of the underlying commerce platform Kadaikodi runs on. It's on the way, but it isn't finished yet.

A coffee and a haircut, same queue

The clearest way to see why a unified catalog matters is to follow what happens on the merchant's side of an order.

A customer might book a haircut for later this afternoon, or ask for one right now. Either way, that booking rides the exact same order system as a coffee order placed five minutes earlier. The merchant doesn't have two queues to check — one for products and one for appointments. They see one list of incoming work, confirm it, and move it through the same stages: confirmed, preparing or in progress, ready, and completed or delivered.

That matters more than it sounds like. A business that treats services as an afterthought usually ends up managing them by phone, text, or a separate paper calendar, disconnected from the rest of its order history and analytics. On Kadaikodi, a booked service shows up in the same revenue numbers, the same average-order-value calculation, and the same customer history as a product sale — because to the system, it's just another kind of order.

When a merchant has staff, that same unified order can be handed off to a worker as a task — a delivery, a service appointment, or a prep job — so the person doing the actual work sees exactly what needs to happen and when, whether it started as a product order or a booking.

One catalog means one set of numbers

The payoff of keeping products and services in one system shows up most clearly on the merchant's dashboard. Kadaikodi's design gives an owner a single operational picture — total revenue, total and pending orders, average order value, how many active customers they have, and their average rating — pulled from every order the business takes, whether it started as a haircut booking or a bag of filter coffee.

That's the opposite of the two-system problem. Instead of reconciling a store-builder's sales report against a scheduling app's booking log by hand at the end of the week, an owner opens one screen and sees the whole business. It turns "should I prep more for the evening rush?" from a guess into a question the numbers can actually answer. At scale, that same unified shape is designed to let an operator running several merchants under one organization compare them side by side, because every merchant's data lives in the same structure.

Why this matters as local commerce keeps growing

Service commerce isn't a side business anymore — it's growing fast in its own right. India's online on-demand home services market was valued at about $152 million in 2025 and is projected to reach roughly $587 million by 2034, a growth rate of nearly 16% a year, according to IMARC Group. That's real, accelerating demand for booking a haircut, a repair, or a cleaning online — the same way people already expect to order a product.

As that trend continues, local businesses that mix products and services — which is most of them — need a platform that treats both as first-class, not a product store with a booking plugin stapled on. That's the gap Kadaikodi is built to close.

Frequently asked questions

Is Kadaikodi live yet? No. Kadaikodi is pre-launch. Everything described here is the product being built, not a service you can use today. Join the waitlist to be notified when access opens.

Can a merchant sell only products, or only services, if they don't need both? Yes. When a merchant sets up their storefront, they choose whether they offer products, services, or both — the unified catalog supports any mix, including a single-type business.

Does order tracking work the same way for a booked service as it does for a product order? Yes. Bookings move through the same order lifecycle and tracking timeline as product orders, so customers get one consistent experience regardless of what they ordered.

Does my cart follow me across every device? Not yet, fully. Today the cart lives within your browsing session on a single merchant. A cart that durably follows a shopper across every surface is in progress, building on the shared commerce platform underneath Kadaikodi.

See it for yourself

The best way to understand how this works in practice is to walk through a couple of real scenarios: booking a service appointment and building a catalog of products and services on the use cases page. If a marketplace that treats products and services as equals sounds like what your business needs, join the Kadaikodi waitlist — we'll let you know the moment early access opens.