Magento multi-vendor marketplace

Are you a startup and want to build a multi vendor marketplace for your customers? There are many options to create ecommerce marketplace where buyers can come and shop from multiple vendors at your website. The most easiest option is to use Magento, Woocommerce, Joomla, OpenCart plugins to create your marketplace. In this article we will focus our thoughts on Magento extensions or plugins. There are many Magento plugins and extensions available to build multi vendor marketplace. Many of these Magento plugins / extensions are very big & complex. However, few of them are simple and easy to implement yet gives you more flexibility and control. Read the article to understand the important points which you should consider while deciding the Magento extension to buy.

1. Simple or Complex?

You need to ask this question - whether the multi-vendor marketplace script which you are considering for your webstore is simple to understand & implement? Probably, the script is difficult to understand if it has many pages of manual, video demos and lengthy knowledge base articles. So, large number of pages for describing one marketplace extension surely means a lot of confusion and can take considerable amount of time to actually use it.

2. Flexible or Fixed?

It is very important to know if the solution you are considering to buy is flexible or not? Remember, heavy customization and building lot of custom work-flow can slow down the performance and can greatly reduce the flexibility. Magento has its own workflow and building something based on such work-flow will provide you much flexibility. When you are unsure check if many work-flows are provided for doing different things?

3. Costly or Affordable?

If you are a startup and want to build multi vendor marketplace to test your idea then it is very important to know how much it will cost. Being startup means two things - you have very limited budget and there are chances to fail. It is always good to invest as low as possible to create minimum viable product and validate your startup idea. There are many costly options available in the market with lot of features but you should start with option which is affordable but still has all the required features.

4. Long list of Addons or all-inclusive features?

It is an important question to ask yourself - do you want maximum features in your marketplace or you want all the required features only? There are extensions like Webkul, which provides you hundreds of addons to use in your Magento marketplace module. But do you think you will ever require all of them? Why to buy & pay for features which you will never use? But there are multi-vendor marketplace extension, which has all the necessary features and affordable too.

5. Supports offline or Online?

Do you require support for handling offline operations like paying commissions manually or verifying vendor documents manually? If yes then you need Medma Multi Vendor Marketplace module for Magento. If your Marketplace requires some offline transactions and things to be done in a routine basis then you need to correctly select the Magento module which helps you to achieve this easily.

6. Vendor is Admin or Customer?

As per the default architecture of the Magento, only Admin has the right to setup stores, add products, view orders and process deliveries. Whereas Customers can only order from the frontend. It is very important to know how the module has been developed and whether this architecture is maintained or not? Some of the marketplace extension have converted Customers into Vendors and so changed the role of Customers to Admin. The question is - is this correct? Many times it is believed that this is not a very secure and scalable way of building extensions because it is against the default Magento architecture.

Thats all!
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