Top 5 Best WooCommerce Multi Vendor marketplace plugins

In current years, along with online store development, there is a new eCommerce platform called multi vendor marketplace. It appears and has many positive aspects for both sellers and buyers.

Affluent companies such as Amazon or Flipkart are successful with that.

There is a question like how to operate such a beneficial multi-vendor marketplace? The answer to it is explained below. This article today is about the background knowledge of multi vendor marketplace and presents the Top 5+ best WooCommerce multi vendor plugins.

What is multi vendor marketplace?

To be simpler, a marketplace is defined as a kind of eCommerce having a connection between the most potential suppliers and purchasers to exchange goods with each other.

A multi vendor marketplace is a platform where sellers can sell goods directly to customers. Obviously, buyers have a variety of choices to opt for.

In general, this is a beneficial platform for both sellers and buyers to directly interact with others.

When it comes to the reason for going to a multi-vendor marketplace, the first prerequisite is that it brings a lot of benefits to the vendors, customers, and marketplace owners. For more detail, you can take a look at this article.

Besides, multi-vendor is an inevitable trend and significantly dominating over any other common business such as the traditional stores, or single-seller ones.

Thanks to the eCommerce platform, any of us have more opportunities to achieve financial benefit from the online growing market with a value of $3.46 trillion in 2019, according to Internet Retailer, a Digital Commerce 360 brand. 

Why we should consider converting your eCommerce website to a multi-vendor marketplace?

There are a lot of benefits that sellers and buyers can receive when a multi-vendor marketplace platform is applied.

Benefits toward business owners

Firstly, earning profits will be gained highly thanks to that kind of eCommerce where business owners can have a chance to collect a commission on the products sold by many vendors.

Secondly, the atmosphere between the goods exchange processing will be open, sellers and buyers will have a good relationship together. It declines the conflict between them and the stock might not be stopped

Thirdly, sellers stand a good chance of operating around the clock, it has no time limitation for both sellers and buyers. It means that sellers can sell products at all times and buyers are able to access every website all the time, too.

Advantages toward vendors

First and foremost, old and new vendors can exchange prices together to help smaller vendors to be better. It seems to be a supporting environment. One of the most special things is when vendors use Product Vendors, top five WordPress WooCommerce Multi vendor Marketplace Plugins, they totally can sell their products and other vendors also are able to sell goods through their store with the global base commission rate. Apparently, vendors can double their profits.

Next, multi-vendors are likely to receive investment from affluent companies over the sea to broaden their commercial network and gain more benefits. As a result, vendors can join an international online marketplace to create more networks and have more customers.

Last but not least, the effort of suppliers can be reduced considerably and their work is simplified. To be more specific, instead of selling goods under the boiling sun-day in the summer as the conventional way, sellers just need to post a ton of products, qualified goods on a website, and wait for customers to buy without any time or weather-related burden.

Positive aspects toward consumers

In such a marketplace, customers can purchase products at competitive prices. To illustrate, there are a lot of goods sold by vendors in a marketplace, so they can compare goods and prices among vendors to have the most benefits for them.

Top 5 Best Free WooCommerce Multi vendor Plugins

Dokan

Rating: 4.9/5 (324 reviews)

Dokan is considered the best multi vendor plugin for WooCommerce that help you save hours of your time creating a marketplace.

It offers a dedicated frontend dashboard and a user-friendly interface for both the vendors and customers. From this dashboard, customers and vendors can manage product inventory, orders, sales, discounts, coupons, and more.

The installation and configuration process of the plugin is extremely easy so that you can set up all the required aspects of your marketplace and customize it easily with almost no time and no programming knowledge.

Moreover, this WordPress multi-vendor plugin works well with most of the popular WooCommerce themes with almost no compatibility issues. Especially, Dokan offers its users a list of WooCommerce themes that have seamless integration with Dokan such as Woostify. Furthermore, Dokan gives users various options for payment methods and compatibility with multiple languages.

To get access to advanced features such as Ajax Live Search feature, Geolocation for customer searches, Live Chat, Seller Verification, Stripe Connect, Vendor Review, etc., you need to upgrade to the pro version of Dokan starting at $149 per year. However, they are still limited. To unlock all premium functionalities, you’ll have to purchase the pro plan which costs $249 for a single-site license with more updates and support.

Multi Vendor Marketplace Plugin for WooCommerce by Webkul

WordPress WooCommerce Multi-Vendor Marketplace Plugin explicitly developed to switch your WooCommerce website into a multivendor platform that having multiple sellers with a separate profile.

Moreover, it gives sellers the functionality of adding products and order management from the seller panel.

Also, using this plugin the seller can view and edit his profile information. He can view his product list and search, edit or delete products from it.

Additionally, the seller can view a record of his transactions and sales charts on his dashboard. He can view his order history for all the orders, change his password, and even ask questions to the admin.

Consequently, the admin can also manage the product list, seller list, commissions, and settings as well.

Furthermore, the admin can edit or delete products, approve, disapprove, or assign sellers to products, set separate commission rates for different sellers. Even can change settings like product auto-publish and seller auto-approval permissions.

Note- Now you can convert the store in a much accessible mode, by introducing- Multi-Vendor Mobile App for WooCommerce

This plugin has a wide range of add-ons to enhance the features of the marketplace as per the requirements and with the flexibility to customize the plugin. Webkul Multi-Vendor Marketplace plugin is fully compatible with any third-party themes as long as it is working fine with the default WooCommerce platform. Surprisingly this is a one-time purchase only there are no subscription/ recurring charges.

WCFM Marketplace by WC Lover

Rating: 4.9/5 (207 reviews)

Standing in the second position is the WCFM Marketplace by WC Lover. It offers a modular approach that puts together a variety of different add-ons to help you create your multi-vendor marketplace.

With this plugin, you can stipulate all the policies of the store and products from the frontend. With the user-friendly frontend interface, vendors can set the opening and closing hours, and store vacation periods, so that you and your vendors can take vacations.

Besides, the store review feature allows you to manage the reviews created for your store. With WCFM marketplace, you can set flexible commission rates for vendors such as percentage, fixed, by price, by product quantity, by vendor’s sales.

WCFM marketplace plugin for WooCommerce offers various options to manage the store. For example, the vendor can configure their store for ranking purposes, and generate coupons for their products easily. Moreover, they can also verify sellers and even create custom badges for sellers.

In addition to that, the plugin provides its users with a shipping management system. With such a system, the vendors are able to manage the shipping of the products for their store and track the WooCommerce shipping by adding a tracking code to ensure the product is delivered to the customer.

This WooCommerce multi vendor plugin comes with both free and paid plans. You can extend your marketplace with premium add-on by upgrading the original version to the advanced packages that cost from $11 to $299 depending on the license.

MultiVendorX

Rating: 4.8/5 (286 reviews)

Lying on the third position of the list isMultiVendorX – MultiVendor Marketplace Solution For WooCommerce (the former name is WC marketplace) that enables you to add multiple vendors for a single product quite efficiently. With this WooCommerce marketplace plugin, vendors can duplicate, customize, and sell the same product in your marketplace, which may result in a more lucrative and transparent marketplace.

WC marketplace plugin also lets you manage reviews and control over those users who have purchased the product and leave reviews on it.

The WordPress plugin provides different dashboards to each vendor where they can manage their entire stores such as tracking orders, managing products, commissions, coupons, payments, reports, sales, and more. With WC Marketplace, you can communicate with your vendors by delivering a message to the universal board or even sending notifications and quick announcements to your vendors.

This is a free WooCommerce multi vendor plugin offering lots of features that enable a simple registration process for vendors. However, to unlock some advanced features such as the frontend manager, advanced shipping, seller verification, and more, you’ll have to purchase individual add-ons whose prices vary from $20-$200.

YITH WooCommerce Multi vendor

Rating: 4.5/5 (82 reviews)

The next solution to a WooCommerce marketplace is YITH WooCommerce Multi Vendor that helps you create your own marketplace with maximum traffic and higher rank on search engine results.

With this plugin, the vendors can set global commission rates, assign different commission rates to each vendor shops and products, manage their products, product gallery, upsells, cross-sells, reviews, and create coupons.

Plus, this plugin enables vendors to add and edit their own products; thus, you can avoid the pending status until the Admin approval. Also, to enhance the shop’s functionality, the extension allows you to display a list of all vendors in your WooCommerce pages.

This WooCommerce multi vendor plugin is provided with free and pro versions. With the free package, you can create a basic marketplace for multi vendors and set a global commission rate for all of them. To get access to more advanced functionality like more detailed order, shipping, and refund management, you may need a paid plan which costs $99.99 for a single-site license with 1 year of updates and support.

WC Vendors Marketplace

Rating: 4.5/5 (126 reviews)

The last option we have on our list of best WooCommerce multi vendor plugins is WC Vendors Marketplace developed by WC vendor that helps you build a multi-vendor marketplace quickly with easy configuration options and no coding skills, saving your time and money.

This marketplace plugin for WooCommerce gives vendors an easy-to-use frontend dashboard and a highly customizable individual storefront. In detail, they are allowed to manage their products, track orders, set and manage discounts, coupon codes, process refunds, and so on.

Like other multi vendor marketplace plugins in the collection, WC Vendors also has a commission system that lets you charge vendors for their sales and a comprehensive shipping system that allows you to select the shipping type, national and international shipping fee, and more.

WC vendor plugin is available for free but also comes with a pro version. The free version is limited regarding features, but lets you set up a basic marketplace. The pro version including full features, free updates, and premium support, is priced at $199 / per year. Or you can also choose a more valuable plan which is a one-time payment of $599.

Creating A WooCommerce Multi Vendor Website Using Woostify & Dokan (Step-by-step Guide)

More people are stepping into online marketplaces in the view of building their own online eCommerce stores or marketplaces. Platforms like Amazon, AliExpress, Airbnb, and Etsy have brought inspiration to successfully doing businesses online in this technology area.

If you want to create a multi vendor marketplace website like Amazon, you’re in the right place. This article will give you an overview of Multi vendor Marketplace as well as how to create a WooCommerce Multi vendor Marketplace with Dokan.

What Is Dokan?

Dokan is a popular platform for creating a multi vendor website, powered by WordPress. This popular plugin allows you to show your Woocommerce store into a fully-fledged e-commerce hub.

Shop site with Dokan performs as a social networking site with features that allow users to line up their online store within minutes. Plus, Dokan works as an interface system with all activities being self-management and almost operating automatically.

There is a dashboard for every vendor, within which getting through this all-in-one dashboard allows admins to urge straight-forward to the management of sales, discounts, and promotion.

These are the main features of Dokan:

• Vendor management
• Management of product inventory
• Offer coupon and discount code
• Manage customer reviews
• Manage withdrawals from vendors
• Admins can overview detail sale report
• Compatible with almost any WooCommerce theme
• Serve many markets with multi-language option

Why Should We Consider Dokan to build Multi-vendor Marketplace?

The exclusive features of Dokan make its standout. They’re a large number of features that are regularly updated and offer an unparalleled level of detail.

One thing many sellers and vendors signifies is that they experience the clean computer program. Admins can view reports of every vendor’s activity and commission from the transaction at an identical time, employing a neatly organized admin dashboard.

Dokan also helps you solve your puzzle of reducing operating costs. Automatic capabilities are mainly answerable for saving lots of transportation costs.

How to create a multi vendor marketplace website on WooCommerce

Choosing an ideal WooCommerce Theme perfect with Dokan

Choosing a WooCommerce theme that fits your desire is not a simple duty. The most important factor is that you shouldn’t go for any theme that just looks good. Instead, you should only opt for the theme that seamlessly integrates with your WordPress and WooCommerce standards, and fit your requirements. WooCommerce integration is necessary for removing the possibility of conflicting themes and plugins. It is flexible enough to be compatible with the WooCommerce plugin despite any updates.

Because we are building a WooCommerce marketplace with Dokan, you need to choose a WooCommerce theme smoothly integrating with Dokan.

Woostify comes in great features such as fast loading, SEO friendly, 100% focusing on online shop, and perfectly meets the two requirements above: Seamlessly integration with WooCommerce and Dokan. So, today We will present the way to create a WooCommerce multi vendor marketplace by using Dokan and Woostify.

How to make a multi vendor website with Woostify and Dokan

Below is the step-by-step guide on how to create a multi vendor marketplace for WooCommerce. Let’s see now!

Step 1: Install Woocommerce & Woostify

• Install WooCommerce

Once you’ve already found your WordPress site, you’ll be able to add a WooCommerce plugin.

To download the plugin to your online store, you would like to log in to your WordPress Admin Dashboard. From there, you click to WP-Admin→Plugins→Add New

After having a click on the Add plugin button, seek for WooCommerce within the search option. Consequently, you discover the WooCommerce plugin, click Install then Activate.

WooCommerce has an incredible setup wizard that may facilitate you to line all the important settings after installation. Have a read of our complete guideline on how to start an online store to find out more about launching a retail shop site with WooCommerce.  

• Install Woostify theme

You can have a look at the instruction on installing and importing Woostify

After installing WooCommerce and Woostify theme on your WordPress site, you can move to the next part of the guide on how to build a multi vendor marketplace: Install and set up Dokan.

Step 2: Set Up Dokan multi vendor marketplace plugin on your WordPress site

Dokan offers a free plan that lets you build up a basic store for multi vendors. To download the free Dokan, in your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New > type “Dokan” in the search bar > enter (on your keyboard). Then you can see Dokan multi vendor plugin in here.

All you need in this phase is just clicking on the Install now button.  

This is the appearance of Dokan Dashboard 

• Store

Here, you’ll be able to have a general setting for the vendor store appearance such as Map API source, the header template, and more. by go to Dashboard→Dokan→Settings→Appearance.

• Selling

Navigate to Selling Option, you can set up Commission type (Percentage or Flat), the amount of commission you get from each sale, the person who in charge of the shipping, and tax fee (vendor or admin). You can also enable or disable new vendors to upload products, enable or disable product popup, allow or disallow vendors to update order status, and admin to switch any vendor account.

• Withdraw

By this setting, marketplace owners can decide the time and the way you process the payments. You can set certain payment option by going to WP-Admin→Dokan→Settings→Withdraw Options

There are 2 payment options for you to choose from: Paypal and Bank Transfer. You can set the minimum withdraw limit and exclude COD payment.

Step 3: Set Up Vendor Registration

The admin then needs to enable the registrations. To do that you directly go to Settings → General and check where it says, “Anyone Can Register”. Don’t forget to have a mark on this or nobody will have access to registration at your WooCommerce marketplace.

To enable vendor users, navigate WP-Admin > Users > Add New. Then, fill-up the blanks on the registration page with the required information and select Vendor in the Role section if you want to add a new vendor. Remember to press Add New User button to save all things you’ve done. 

• Register as a vendor

To make sure everything is working as expected, you should try registering as a vendor on your multi vendor marketplace and adding a new product to your store.

Let’s go to the registration page from your store’s front-end and fill in the blanks in the registration form with your information as below:

Then, you will see the first screen of the vendor account:

Click Let’s go to start to set up your store including email, location, payment as follow:

Now, you are driven to the dashboard of your store and ready to start selling in the marketplace:

You can navigate to the Store section to add your store’s information such as banner, profile, store name, address, payment, and more.

Now, you, as a vendor, can add products to your store in the marketplace by clicking on Add new product.

If there is a message popping up which informs the vendors are not enabled to upload their products to sell, then you, the vendors, need to contact the admin to allow you to submit products:

• Add A Product

After being approved by the admin, the vendors can upload products from their dashboard. This process is similar to the steps you do to upload a product to a normal online store.

In WordPress Dashboard → Products. Then click Add New if you want to add a new product:

Or navigate to an existing product if you want to Edit it. Finally, hit the Publish button to save everything.

Now, let’s look at the last step on how to create a WooCommerce multi vendor marketplace.

Step 4: Customize the Dokan Sidebar

If you use Woostify and Dokan, you can control and customize your WooCommerce multi vendor marketplace sidebar by navigating to Appearance > Widgets:

You will see a list of various widgets, find Dokan widget and drag and drop it to the next side “Dokan store sidebar” as follow:

Below are some options for you to customize the Dokan sidebar:

• Display the best selling products
• Display store’s location
• Show top rated products
• Show store opening and closing times
• Show vendor store menu
• Show vendor contact form

After setting, let’s take a look at the vendor’s page front end on your multivendor store:

That’s it. Just follow the steps above. Then, starting a multi vendor marketplace for WooCommerce will be at your fingertips.

Conclusion on the Best WooCommerce Multi Vendor Plugin

That’s it. Above is some background knowledge about multi vendor marketplace platform and top 5 best multi vendor plugins for WordPress.

All of them are available with no fee. So you can start a simple marketplace easily. To expand it, you may take the premium of these extensions that offer the advanced features for running a perfect multi-vendor marketplace. Then, you can build your marketplace for multiple vendors quite easily with almost no coding experiences.

Besides, the article provides the guide on how to create a WooCommerce multi vendor marketplace using Woostify and Dokan. These two are all you need to launch a powerful multi-vendor eCommerce website from start-to-finish.

Should you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to comment below.