How to Setup a WordPress Marketplace with Multiple Vendors

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Last updated - July 8, 2021

Setting up a marketplace is one of the popular strategies to try while creating an online store. WordPress is one of the most popular options to set up a website at the moment. It has multiple solutions to help you achieve a wide range of business ideas that you may have. As you might have expected, there are several WordPress solutions that would help you set up a good online marketplace. When you couple it with a good quality marketplace theme, your online marketplace idea finds the right path of execution. This article attempts to compile a list of some of the best WordPress marketplace plugins and themes. After reading this article, you should have a clear idea on how to set up a WordPress marketplace.

WordPress Marketplace Plugins

Basically, if you have a WordPress WooCommerce store, and you want to make it a marketplace, these plugins can help. Most of them have intuitive features to make life easier for the owner of the marketplace and the multiple vendors who sell on the site.

WC Marketplace free plugin

This is a feature-rich free plugin that you can install on your WordPress WooCommerce site to convert it into a marketplace. Basically, you as the owner of the marketplace gets a choice to approve and manage a range of vendors on your site. Based on your convenience, you can choose to manually allow vendor registrations or auto approve them. More importantly, the marketplace owner gets the control to allow or not allow specific products featured by vendors.

You can set a commission rate too based on your business strategy. It can be set globally across the site, or specifically for a product or for a particular vendor. In addition, you will get detailed reports to view the performance of various vendors on your store. And, if you want some advanced features, you can opt for one of the several add-ons that they have. Take a look at the available add-ons here.

Download the plugin.

WordPress WooCommerce Multi Vendor Marketplace

This is a premium plugin that would help you convert your WordPress WooCommerce store into a marketplace with a variety of products from other sellers. The store admin will have the control to add and manage different aspects of vendors right from accepting the registration. On the other hand, vendors are relatively free to add and manage products on their own. They can view sales, transactions and order history, and change password and even communicate to the store admin.

This WordPress multi vendor marketplace plugin offers great features to set up a profitable online marketplace.

Similar to the above plugin, this one too offers features like setting varied commission rates, admin approval for vendor registration and product addition, etc. The plugin has good support and extensive documentation to help you manage the process. You can get hold of the regular license of this plugin at $99.

Visit the plugin page.

Dokan

Dokan is a comprehensive solution for an online marketplace. It integrates perfectly with your WooCommerce store and with its intuitive design makes store management quite easy for you. The main feature is that it provides a simple, easy to use interface for both vendors and store managers. Vendors can view all relevant information from the dashboard including their earnings, support requests, discount coupons, etc. Admins too get a great view of things and will be able to manage multiple aspects of the marketplace quite easily.

Dokan is a comprehensive solution to set up a WordPress marketplace.

In addition, Dokan, helps integrate multiple gateways, and is compatible with most popular themes. It supports multiple product types, multiple languages, custom shipping rates and even subscriptions. The Starter package of Dokan integration starts at $149, which includes vendor management, different commission types and detailed reports. Features like vendor review, seller verification and subscriptions are included in the Professional package that costs $249. For more advanced feature and marketplaces of bigger dimensions, you can checkout the Business and Enterprise versions.

Visit the plugin page.

YITH WooCommerce Multi Vendor

Setting up an online marketplace helps your eCommerce business in two ways. You can diversify the product range on your store by featuring products from a range of vendors. In addition, you can earn a commission for each sale a vendor makes on the marketplace. With unique features, YITH WooCommerce Multi Vendor plugin enables you to diversify your business in style. What sets apart this plugin from others is the unique set of features including the scope for a more detailed vendor integration. As the store owner has the choice to gather more information from vendors, there is more scope to integrate their social profiles too.

Apart from that, the plugin allows multiple store administrators, which is a sensible option owing to the predictable complications of a multi vendor marketplace. Vendors have relatively more scope to freely add their own products and even create their own discount coupons and such. Data export, detailed reports, bulk actions, and a lot more other features make this plugin one of the best WordPress marketplace plugins. The pricing options start from a single site license at $99.

Visit the plugin page.

TemplateMonster Marketplace

Have you ever dreamed of being a part of the club with its secret headquarters and enigmatic members? It seems to us that there are a bunch of people who might want to join such a gang. When it comes to TemplateMonster marketplace and its team of authors, we cannot promise that you will experience all the mentioned things. However, if you want to become a part of the marketplace where talent in web-design really values, it is your place to go. Let us learn about all the details here and now.

 

There is no need to be an elite to become an author. All you need is love. Love for web-design and creating original ready-made solutions. Then, you can go through the application process that will take you a few minutes.

  1. Create and verify your user account on TemplateMonster.
  2. Click on the “Become an Author” tab in your account.
  3. Then, choose the name that you want to be displayed on your Author’s Page.
  1. Upload a project archive. After this, you are going to see what details you need to fill out.
  2. Submit it for review and wait for the team to check it. If your product meets the requirements, you can start selling it.

WooCommerce Product Vendors

This WooCommerce extension helps you transform your site into a marketplace with a variety of products, vendors, and payment options. You can allow multiple vendors to sell their products in the marketplace and can earn a steady income through sales commissions. One major advantage is that you can sell any product type using this extension and even integrate seamlessly with WooCommerce Bookings. While featuring products of multiple vendors, you can continue displaying and selling your own products on the side.

With this extension, you can set commission rates specific to vendors and even take help from vendors in the store management process. It also offers detailed reports that will give you keen insights on the performance of your store with information about sales of specific vendors. Another advantage of using this extension is that it offers PayPal Mass Payments to handle delayed payment in case of return of vendor products. Overall, this is a great extension providing ample features for both marketplace owners and vendors.

The single site subscription of the extension would cost you $99.

Visit the extension page.

WordPress Marketplace Themes

There are several themes that help you design a good online marketplace. Here is a list of some of the best ones.

Marketify

Marketify is a great theme to set up an online marketplace on your WordPress site. It actually works together with Easy Digital Downloads to create a great environment to sell downloadable products. Using this responsive theme, you can create a marketplace that sells a variety of products such as photographs, audio/video files, fonts, plugins, etc. Some of the great features of this plugin includes social login, where users can login to the site using their social media accounts.

Also, it allows reviews and creative preview options for audio and video files. Features like wishlist and commission split make this theme a unique option to set up a WordPress marketplace. The popularity is evident from the large user base that this theme boasts. You can purchase a regular license of this theme for $59.

Visit theme page.

Marketica

This is another theme you can use to set up a WordPress marketplace. It integrates perfectly with the WooCommerce plugin and help you set up a user friendly online marketplace. Vendors will have separate pages to list their products, which will also show up in the WooCommerce shop page as well. In addition to WooCommerce, the plugin also offers a perfect integration with some of the solutions that we discussed above. These include WC Vendors, Dokan and WooCommerce Product Vendors. If you want to use this plugin without any of the marketplace solutions, you can do that too.

Marketica theme also supports Visual Composer, WPML, etc too that will add the scope of your site. You can purchase the regular license for $37.

Visit theme page for more details.

eMarket

This is another popular option that you can use to set up a WordPress marketplace. With its perfect compatibility with WooCommerce, and multi vendor solutions like WC Vendors and Dokan, you can be assured of its usefulness. The cool feature of this plugin include multiple homepages, various layout options, page builder, revolution slider, ajax quick search, etc.

It is fully compatible with multi vendor solutions like WC Vendors and Dokan. In addition, it is fully responsive to help users access your site from any device of their choice. Furthermore, options like Ajax Add to Cart, Wishlist, etc., helps you equip your site better to cope with the latest eCommerce challenges. With the regular license priced at $64, this is another useful theme that you can try out to set up a profitable online marketplace.

Visit theme page.

Rigid

This is a great theme that can opt for to set up an online marketplace. With its sales oriented approach, it enables you to feature a large range of products from different niches. It offers seamless compatibility with multi vendor solutions such as WC Vendors Pro, Dokan and WC Marketplace. One of the standout features of this theme is that it  offers a lot of features that otherwise might require third party integrations. It actually allows vendors to create their own stores that has individual inventory, coupon and shipping management.

The theme ensures the best performance on your site with features like Ajax infinite load. Moreover, the theme offers lifetime updates and round the clock support. A regular license of this theme would cost you $64.

Visit theme page for more details.

Pasar

This theme creates a perfect environment for you to create a WordPress marketplace that suits both store owners and vendors. It is compatible with WooCommerce and multi vendor solutions like WC Vendors. Vendors will have an individual view of all their products and transactions. All the vendor products will be visible on the WooCommerce shop page as well. In fact, the theme allows you to sell your own products along with vendor products on your site.

The regular license of this theme is available for purchase at $60.

Visit the theme page for details.

Why WordPress Marketplaces are popular?

There are several reasons for the popularity of marketplaces among eCommerce store owners. Let us take a detailed look at some of the reasons behind online marketplaces’ popularity.

The hassles of inventory management is spread between vendors

If you are running a WooCommerce store with your own set of products, you have to be responsible for every aspects related to your product range. This is kind of peaceful when you have only a small set of products. However, as your sales and traffic grow, you definitely need to scale and diversify your product range as well. This process is indirectly simplified if you are converting your online store into a marketplace. That way you have your products range increasing on the site, and processes like inventory management, shipping, etc., will be handled by the respective vendor. In addition, you will get a fixed amount as commission as well.

You can incorporate the latest technologies on your store

One of the difficulties of running a WooCommerce store, is that you need to focus on multiple aspects at the same time. The technological functionalities of your site too need to be enhanced along with the product range. If you have quite a number of vendors on your marketplace, you don’t need to worry about the product range. In fact, you can invest more time and effort on developing the technological aspects of your store.

Better profitability

Marketplaces definitely ensure better prospects to improve your sales and margins. For every sale that a vendor on your site makes, you will get a fixed amount as commission. This would definitely help in the revenue generation of your site. Moreover, the larger product range will contribute to the growth of site traffic and customer base too.

Conclusion

Online marketplaces are increasingly becoming popular as a profitable way to maintain an online business. The fact that it provides a lot of advantages of the online model without some of the hassles is what is attracting more people to it. This article has acquainted you with some of the efficient WordPress marketplace solutions. These include a range of plugins and themes designed to produce optimum results for a marketplace model. Let us know if you have a suggestion or query.

2 COMMENTS

  1. Wolfgang Tuppeck

    Hi there,
    We want to built your marketplace Plugin in german Language .
    Can you help uns?
    Lg Wolfgang

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