Artist royalty model, Redbubble / Society6 / TeePublic style with dashboard?

I’ve shipped this pattern twice on Magento. The architecture:

• Artist account type, separate customer group with artist-specific fields (PayPal/Stripe payout email, tax ID, country, agreement signed timestamp).
• Design upload + product templating, artist uploads design once → system auto-lists across 20-60 product types (t-shirt, hoodie, mug, sticker, poster, phone case…) with auto-generated mockups. Artist sets markup per product type (e.g. +20% on t-shirts, +35% on stickers).
• Royalty calculation, per-order line: (sell price − POD cost − payment fee) × artist markup % = artist royalty. Stored at order placement (locked in even if costs change later).
• Artist dashboard, sales by product, royalty earned, top-selling designs, payout history, traffic to artist’s storefront page. Real-time, not delayed.
• Payout, monthly batch via Stripe Connect (preferred, handles 1099-K reporting for US artists automatically) or PayPal Mass Payout. Minimum payout threshold $20 (under threshold rolls forward).
• DMCA + takedown queue, complaints route to a moderation queue; takedown action disables the design across all products + holds artist payout pending review.

Same architecture scales from 10 artists (your friends) to 50,000 (Redbubble-class). The hard parts at scale: search/discovery (Elasticsearch for design-by-tag), abuse moderation (auto-screening for copyrighted text/logos), and payout reconciliation (matching POD fulfillment with order line items 30 days later).

Build cost: $25k, $80k depending on artist-discovery + moderation scope. Redbubble-class build: $150k+.