This is a brand new review of the YITH Multi-vendor plugin.

YITH WooCommerce Multi-Vendor Plugin is another Great WordPress plugin that helps you to convert the general WordPress e-commerce site into a full-fledged marketplace like Amazon, Etsy, or Alibaba.com.

Before getting into details, let’s take a quick look at its pros and cons.

Pros: Affordable, receives commissions on sellers sold products, PayPal support, and is well integrated with WooCommerce.

Cons: Front-end product/order management is not available for vendors and fewer options to configure.

Now, let’s take a detailed look at the features of YITH Multi-vendor premium plugin.

YITH WooCommerce Multivendor Shopping Cart: Features for Administration

Add as many store administrators as you like

The best part of this extension is that it allows the store owner to add multiple administrators to the store with different privileges so that everyone takes and does their parts. For example Product management for one admin and rating reviews management by another admin and so on.

Commission payment

The site administrator can choose to operate manually the commission payment or let the vendor decide the payment method to apply choosing among:

• instantaneous payment
• payment when a certain amount of commissions has been reached

However, the admin can set the minimum requested amount for due commission payments. Below that amount vendor won’t receive any payment.

Skipping the Commission for the Discounted Amount

The site administrator can enable/disable to apply the commission percentage for the discounted amount for the products. That means, if the site administrator disables this option, the commission amount for the discounted amount will be excluded from the total product commission and only the commission for the product sold value will be calculated. This option will motivate the sellers.

Limiting the number of products

The marketplace owner can limit the number of products allowed per vendor in the marketplace. This will help when the marketplace is available with limited bandwidth or the marketplace has to be watched.

New vendor notification

After completing the registration, the vendor is added to vendors list of the site. If the admin hasn’t activated the “Auto enable vendor account” option, the vendor registration is notified in the dashboard and the administrator of the site can complete the registration approving the new vendor.

Detailed Report for the Admin

YITH WooCommerce Multi-Vendor gives you the possibility to report all moves connected to vendors in the specific report section within WooCommerce Report. It is filled with vital information and relevant details for the management of the site

The report is made of two main sections: a report of sales associated with vendors and one reporting vendors’ registrations. Sales reports can be filtered using the filters like Search Vendors, Top Sellers, and Top Earners.

Customization and Management

The “FrontPage” tab of the plugin settings dashboard includes a complete list of options to manage the visualization of the vendor’s name in single products of the shop and customize the page layout reserved on the site for each vendor. The vendor name can be shown on the pages shop, product detail, product category, cart, checkout, my account, and in the orders tab.

YITH WooCommerce Multivendor Shopping Cart: Features for Vendors

Each vendor can have access to WordPress reserved area to manage their products, reviews, payments, and information about their profile.

Vendor Profile Page

The software offers a dedicated vendor profile branding page where they can update their company logo, address, social media profile links, and much more details about the store.

Product Management

Vendors can create new products and change the current ones in the “Products” section. Based on the site administrator’s decision, products that have been created can be published by vendors themselves or notified to the site administrator to be approved before publishing. However, if the admin has given a privilege to a specific vendor’s profile, products will be published immediately with no need for admin permission.

Coupon Management

Vendors can create many coupons as they want about the product they own and offer them to users. They can customize the coupon by applying parameters from the dashboard like coupon duration, bulk products inclusion/exclusion, or particular product only. The “Coupons” tab will be available for the vendors only if the shop administrator activated the option from the options panel of the plugin

Review Management

The comments section is available for each vendor only if the administrator of the store activated this option. Reviews from the customers can be managed by the vendors from their control panel. Clicking on “Comments”, vendors can access all the reviews about the product they own and have the same freedom as the store administrator. They can approve/disapprove or even delete the negative reviews from their panel.

Order Management

Any order with one or more products related to a vendor is divided into as many suborders as involved vendors. If the vendor-side order management has been activated, vendors will be free to manage their orders regardless of the administrators. Each suborder will be available to vendors in their own reserved area. Both vendor and site administrator can change orders.

Sales reports

Sales reports allow vendors to view any time report concerning products associated with the theme. Reports available are:

• Order report
• Commissions report
• Stock management report

Advanced Reports

Generating advanced reports is also possible with YITH plugin. Various reports such as order reports, sales reports, and Inventory reports are possible. The reports can be viewed daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly At any time, the sellers can export the statistics and inventory details into CSV files so that they can be viewed further and processed in a better environment.

Vendor to Administrator Communication

Vendors can send messages to the Site administrators using the powerful internal messaging system. This helps a lot where there are times the questions need to be clarified from the site owner for the vendor. The administrator can also send messages to all vendors at once or to certain vendors.

Featured Products option

The YITH add-on also provides an option for the merchants to promote certain products from their whole inventory. By featuring a particular product, the vendor can easily highlight a certain product from the whole list of products base. This helps the sellers to sell a particular product more quickly than other products or to run quick promotions.

Seller vacation

With this feature, vendors will be free to set their shops as “closed” for a certain amount of time, showing to customers a customized message on the vendor page and on product detail pages. During this period, vendors can decide whether to continue selling their products or prevent from purchasing them. The latter will remove the “Add to Cart” button on every vendor’s product, even if they are available in catalog mode, but removed from the “Shop” page.

Role Based Prices

With YITH WooCommerce Role Based Prices, the site owner can allow the vendors to create price rules for a user role, which will be applied only to products they own. All general rules created by the site global administrator won’t cause any effect on products related to a vendor.

YITH WooCommerce Multivendor Shopping Cart: Features for Customers

Report Abuse

With the report abuse feature, the customers are able to report abuse concerning a specific product. The site owner can enable this feature either for all products in the store or for those associated with a specific vendor only. Once a customer reports a product, an email is generated and sent automatically to the shop administrator.

YITH Vendor List

The widget “YITH Vendor List” can be added to any sidebar of the website and shows the list with all enabled vendors in the shop. Users have the possibility to access the detail page of the vendor. They just have to click on the name of the store, they wish to see, in the widget list.

Vendor Store Location

YITH Vendor Store Location features add a box in the sidebar with a map (in Google Maps) showing the location of the vendor. You do not have to add any further information because the map will be automatically generated according to the address added by the vendor in the vendor’s admin panel.

Request a quote

This feature allows all users to request the quote for one or more products of the shop. The request is forwarded to the owner of the product. The global administrator will receive the request only for products not related to any vendor.

Request a Refund

If the vendor side refund management is enabled, it is possible for the customers to apply for a refund on selected orders.

YITH Live Chat

YITH Live Chat allows enabling a chat system for each vendor so that the customers can contact a vendor directly through the form on the vendor’s page. When the option is enabled, each vendor can have access to “YITH Live Chat” section in his/her reserved area and reply to messages sent by users.

Integration with Premium Add-ons

In “Add-Ons” section of the settings dashboard, the site owner can enable or disable additional features, resulting from the integration with premium version YITH plugins, for vendors

• Membership: When the field is enabled, each vendor can create and sell memberships containing his/her products.
• Subscriptions: By enabling this field, each vendor can create and organize subscription plans for his/her products.
• Badge management: By enabling this field, each shop vendor can create badges to apply to his/her products.
• Waiting list: When this option is enabled, vendors can organize their products’ waiting list and send emails to users who want to be updated when the product is available again.
• Survey: By enabling this option, vendors can create one or more surveys to display on their own product page.
• Catalog Mode: The integration allows vendors of the shop to configure catalog functionalities for their own products.

Integration with PDF Invoice and Shipping List Plugin

YITH WooCommerce Multi-Vendor is totally compatible with YITH WooCommerce PDF Invoice and Shipping List. With this feature, the site administrator can enable the separate management of invoices for vendors.  The administrator and/or vendor related to the order must generate the document to allow users to have access to it.

A different document is provided for each vendor in relation to the products they own.

Price of YITH WooCommerce Multivendor Shopping Cart

The YITH Multi-vendor Plugin is a very economical choice for creating a multi-vendor store as compared to other shopping cart software in the market.

It is available at the following Prices

• Single site license for $89
• Up to 6 sites for $179
• Up to 30 sites for $249

Each license entitles you to 1 year of updates and support. Each installation of the plugin requires a license key in order to receive updates and support.

An Alternative to YITH WooCommerce Multivendor Shopping Cart

Dokan is the top alternative to YITH WooCommerce Multivendor Shopping Cart plugin. With 70k+ active marketplaces, Dokan is the most popular yet powerful multivendor marketplace builder for WooCommerce and WordPress.

Previously, we have covered multiple review posts and tutorials on Dokan. Including YITH Multivendor vs Dokan, go have a look and decide which one to go for.

Basic features are almost same but Dokan is far ahead regarding 3rd party integration, support etc. As the first player on the multivendor marketplace field, we prefer Dokan for startups and SMBs.

YITH WooCommerce Multivendor Shopping Cart: Conclusion

YITH Multi-Vendor is a great plugin to create a multi-vendor store at the most reasonable price but it is still way behind other of its competitors in the market. One drawback is the lack of a front-end vendor dashboard where they can add/update their products or manage orders.

YITH Multi-Vendor also lacks Stripe integration, and Authorize.net integration, and only has PayPal as a way to pay the vendor. Despite these drawbacks, the plugin offers a great basic kind of multi-seller functionality for your WooCommerce-powered e-commerce website at an affordable price. So if you don’t want to spend a fortune to create an online store, YITH multi-vendor plugin would be a great choice.