Multi-vendor marketplaces are large scale eCommerce stores where multiple vendors can sell their products and services. Vendors take care of day-to-day sales operations like inventory and shipping. You, the merchant, can focus on drawing in customers and increasing marketplace brand recognition.
- Multiple vendors sell goods, services, rentals, or downloads through one online store.
- Instantly increase your product offering when vendors add new goods.
- You control the marketplace and vendors through a single dashboard.
- Vendors have their own dashboard for handling orders and products.
If you are looking to expand your eCommerce business, building a Multi-Vendor Marketplace is the next venture to include in your strategic plan.
Marketplaces represent a staggering opportunity for businesses across a variety of sectors. The new research results from iBe, the pan-European financial services advisory firm, said that currently half (50%) of online retail sales come through marketplace channels worldwide. iBe also predicts that sales driven from marketplaces are likely to exceed $7 trillion in the next five years (compared to today’s $1.7 trillion) which hails a new era in eCommerce.
This rise is driven by more and more companies embracing marketplaces to increase product range, expedite cross border expansion, and improve logistics, costs, and operations.
However, to effectively run a marketplace you need a multi-vendor eCommerce platform that is designed grounds up to have full control over the administration vendor relationship as it is the key to successful marketplace project completion.
In this post, we will go over the most essential features a marketplace script should have and give a brief review of top popular marketplace platforms.
Must-Have Features of an Online Marketplace Script
Selecting the right multi-vendor platform starts with determining the key features your business model requires from the script. And though there can be a ton of different business needs and platform functionality to serve them, one thing to remember is the script features should be able to accommodate the various scenarios of an admin-vendor and vendor-customer relationship system. So, below we are listing non-negotiable features to look for while choosing a multi-seller eCommerce platform.
Multi-Vendor Website Features from Vendors’ Perspective
- Easy registration/listing for vendors. Third-party vendors need to be able to easily register and create their own product listings. If it’s difficult for vendors to list products, they’ll go somewhere else. They also need their own profile page to showcase these listings.
- Separate Mini Store for Every Vendor and Individual Admin Panel. Each seller should have a micro store right inside your marketplace. Micro stores contain vendor company description, logo, products, product filter for vendor items. The micro store URL contains the vendor company name which vendors can promote as a separate store and attract customers to your marketplace.
Each vendor should also be provided with a separate admin panel. It will allow your vendors to manage their own store settings, products, and add vendor administrators with different access levels to the admin panel.
- Language translations. The platform should include translations into other languages to attract international vendors.
- Vendor locations. The feature allows your vendors to set their locations so that they could receive more orders from local customers.
- Real-time and Manual Shipping Calculations. The multi-vendor cms default functionality should allow vendors to use world-famous shipping methods ( including DHL, UPS, USPS, FedEx) for real-time shipping calculations, as well as to set their own manual shipping methods.
- Different Vendor’s Products in One Cart. When a customer places all chosen products from several vendors in one shopping cart, the order should be automatically divided into several orders with each vendor supplying the purchased items separately, while the customer gets to pay only once as a single order.
- Comments and reviews. Multi-vendor script should offer the feedback and review system with an interactive star rating. Customers can comment and rate vendors, products, categories, and orders.
- Loyalty program. Customers will be encouraged to buy more and shop regularly with a built-in “Reward points” system which lets customers earn and spend points for purchases.
- Vendor account balance, sales reports & statistics. Sellers should be able to view detailed statistics on their sales in your marketplace. Besides, vendors need to see their account balance to track all payouts and commissions taken by the store administrator. Sellers can also review the income and expenditure statistics: total and per period.
Multi-Vendor Website Features from Admins’ Perspective
- Multiple Levels of Administrative Access. Apart from having the root administrator access you need to be able to register employees and set different levels of access to the admin panel.
- Configurable Vendor Plans. You need functionality to create subscription plans for vendors with different conditions and limitations.
First of all, apart from commissions, it should allow you to take a monthly fee from vendors for selling in your marketplace.
Secondly, with vendor plans, commissions are pre-set for each plan, and a new vendor just picks the most suitable option. The vendor plans functionality will save you from troubles with setting commissions for vendors manually.
- Flexible product approval system. Product management should be simple and efficient. Product approval has to be flexible and handy at the same time. You will have 3 options: you can let your vendors showcase products without moderation, check every product added by vendors, allow certain vendors to add products without moderation.
Besides, you can choose either to approve product updates or let vendors update product details without moderation.
- Advanced Vendor Restrictions for enabling and disabling menus and set privileges. This way you can hide unnecessary menus and interface elements in the vendor panel and leave only those that are frequently used by a vendor.
- Advanced Vendor Payout System. They can be automatic or manual. Automatic payouts are usually carried out via a built-in “PayPal for Marketplaces” payment method. It distributes the payment between vendors and sends commissions to your account. If you need to make a manual payment, you need to use the vendor accounting feature to record each payout.
- Vendor debt payout. In order to motivate your vendors to pay you in time, the vendor debt payout function pairs with Vendor plans and allows you to block the admin panels of those vendors whose debt has reached the limit or who didn’t pay for their plan in time.
- Detailed statistics and reports. The multi-vendor script should have integrated Google Analytics to generate detailed statistics about your website visitors. It will give you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness.
WCFM Marketplace
WCFM Marketplace (or WooCommerce Multivendor Marketplace) is a multi vendor WordPress plugin by WC Lovers.
The core version of WCFM Marketplace is available for free on WordPress Plugins and offers quite a lot in terms of features.
The plugin core offers both the basic vendor management you usually expect as well as more advanced features like reverse withdrawals, seller verification and multiple sellers offering a single product.
Among the WCFM Marketplace customized features like Flexible Commission, Refund Request, Withdrawal & Reverse Withdrawal, Single Product Multi-vendor, Ledger Book, Zone & Country Wise Vendor Shipping, Store Inquiry & Review and Stripe Split Pay.
There is no official list of supported WCFM Marketplace themes, but the developers claim it does support all WooCommerce themes.
Contact Us for More information…