We define as marketplace the store where a purchase is performed. It's the environment where the customer pays for an order.
In a shopping experience, a user browses a website by selecting products to include in their shopping cart. After selecting the desired products, they arrive at the checkout step. At this stage of the purchase journey, the user fills in their personal data and the information about the delivery and then makes the payment.
A marketplace can also be understood as a showcase store, displaying its own products and also products from other stores (the sellers). Usually, a marketplace is a store with good users traffic. This encourages other stores to display their products in the marketplace for greater conversion. In such scenario, the marketplace is the shop responsible for closing the purchase, and the seller is the store responsible for delivering the order.
Following this logic, we can conclude that a VTEX store that sells its own products in its own store acts as a marketplace and a seller simultaneously. In this context, payment is made within the store environment (marketplace) and the delivery of the order is a responsibility of that same store (seller). See more details on this subject at our article on the origin of the orders.