In-depth review of Magento Marketplace Extension from vnecoms.com. Find building multi vendor marketplace using vnecoms.com solution. Demo and Download links for plugin also included.

Vnecoms Magento Marketplace Extension Website

Features List (Quick View)
Different checkout modes
Vendor Grouping and Group based Pricing
Most of all Payment Gateways support
Multiple Product Types support
Front end vendor registration and login
Product Listing Moderation
Exclusion of Particular Product from Moderation
Sales statistics
Advanced order management feature
Complete Product Management
Vendor Credits(Commission) Processing
Vendors withdraw requests management
Vendor membership fees
Product Listing Fees
Paypal Adaptive Payments
Paypal chained payments
Multiple Flatrate Shipping
Vendors Messaging system
Advanced store branding
CMS Pages
Banner Management
Reviews and rating system
Featured Products
Products search feature
Price Comparison
Store locator
News
Vendor on Vacation
Custom Order Number Generation

Introduction

Using vnecoms.com magento marketplace extension you can create your own marketplace on Magento system. By creating a marketplace,the website owner will accepts seller (vendor/merchant) registration with your site which lets them to sell their good with your marketplace. Sellers will have complete access on their products,orders,invoices,shipments and credit memos. Each seller will have their own control panel on the marketplace to list their products and services. They also can modify the look and feel (layout/template) of their vendor panel.The plugin allows the website owner to collect payment from the sellers for selling the products with the marketplace.

You can also read the complete review of this Magento extension in the following sections.

Different Checkout Modes
Vnecoms.com magento marketplace extension offers three different checkout modes for your marketplace and you have the flexibility to choose between these choices according to your preferences.

General Checkout Mode
In this mode, all the products in the one order are processed through single checkout system. In this mode,vendors only see the order details of their products not the order details of the products from other vendors (Its kind of privacy mode for vendors). The order details consists of few important details of the particular order.But the site owner(administrator) can view the complete details of the order (Complete order history of all the vendors and product details). This method has the advantage of offering privacy for vendors about their orders shared between other vendors.

Advanced Checkout Mode

In the advanced checkout mode,the order of the products from the different vendors are processed through different checkout systems. That means, the during checkout,if they order two or more product from different vendors, they will see different checkout buttons for each vendors. By clicking/selecting between the available checkout options,buyers can make payment for the particular orders.

The greatest advantage of this method is,buyers have the flexibility to choose (enable/disable) their preferred checkout methods (credit card, bank payments, check, cash on deposit…) rather than the globally (site owner) configured payment options.

For example, Vendor “A” would like to accept payments only through “Cash on Deposit” rather than accepting payments through online to avoid transaction fees or tax issues.

Advanced “X” Mode
The advanced “X” checkout mode is much like “General checkout mode” (single checkout system for all vendor products) but the only difference is ,this mode offers more details information about the orders placed where the “General checkout mode” offers only few details about the particular order.

Vendor Grouping
Vnecoms magento marketplace extension offers advanced vendor grouping feature using this one can segment the users and collect payment with more collective fashion. This extension lets you to segment the users in to different groups and let them pay different pricing according to their assigned group.

For instance:
Free Vendors (merchants with free membership) has to to pay 10% transaction fees for every order.
But Premium vendors (Vendors who pay certain membership fees e.g $50/Month) doesn’t has to pay any transaction fees for their orders.
Really cool features???

Supported Payment Methods
This extension supports all the payment methods offered by Magento ecommerce software E.g credit card, Paypal, Google checkout, Sagepay, worldpay, Bank Deposit,telephone order…

Supported Product Types
The magento marketplace plugin supports the following product types

Simple products: Simple physical products
Configurable products: Products pricing varies with configurable options
Grouped products: Products grouped to one another to offer combo/bulk purchase pricing.
Virtual products: The products listed to offer certain service (course fees, reservation, appointment, booking fees…)
Downloadable products: Products can be downloadable (software, MP3, videos, music, audio files, photos, ebooks, white papers, credentials, reports, guides…)

Vendors Registration Form

Visitors can apply to become the vendors using the vendors registration form available the menu. Any time the site owner can disable the signup by turning off this options from their admin panel.

Separate Login for Vendors
The add on offers separate login page for vendors where they can login to their dashboard and manage their available options.

Vendor Account Approval
All the filled vendor application forms are forwarded to the administrator for approval. The administrator will review the apply requests and approve/disapprove the requests from their dashboard. The best part of the vnecoms magento marketplace extension is its offers variety of configuration options for vendors while approving their vendor requests.

The admin controls also comes with the filter options to find the particular vendors. E.g Filter vendors with “Pending” status and “Approve” “Disapprove” their requests at once.

Vendor Control Panel
Vendor Control Panel is the place where sellers can manage their available controls (Managing the products, orders, checkout options, shipping…)

Vendor Dashboard
Vendor Dashboard provides quick stats about the total sales amount in the particular time period (month, year, weekly, daily) or total number of orders, recent 5 orders, recent 5 transactions, and latest 5 reviews.

All these information are presented with nice looking graphics with chart presentation which helps the administrator will get the quick look about the sales

Vendor Order Management
Vendor Dashboard provides the merchants with lot of tools to manage their orders.
Using the order menu, sellers can have quick look at the orders info (order number, date, bill name, shipping name, currency, order status).

Vendors can also perform quick search the particular order by order number, particular time period (monthly, weekly, daily), particular date, email …And can export the order details to CSV format.

Complete Order Details and Processing
By selecting order number,administrator can view more details about the particular order and process the same.

The order details includes order history (total number of products), total order numbers, total order amount, payment date, payment method, shipment details, address of the buyer…

Vendors can also change shipment status (pending to processing/completed), assign tracking number, add comments to the particular orders.

Vendor Product Management
Vendors can manage their products (create/edit) from their dashboard. They can create the product with all the necessary details and add taxes, shipping payments, choose payment options and finally list the products in the marketplace.
Note:
Once the products are created from the vendor dashboard, it will be forwarded to the administrator for moderation before publishing in the marketplace.

Product Approval
Administrator will review all the product list requests comes from the vendors and enable/disable their requests using their available options.

Administrator can either manually verify the every individual products in detail or bulk select the products and perform the certain option.

Disable the Product Moderation
When the market place grows with time, the product listing moderation process became more tedious process. At this time, it was wise to reduce the work load by removing the this restrictions on certain conditions. At this time, the plugin works as handy and this will lets you to auto approval of products comes from the particular vendor (Trusted vendor), or products from certain product groups (Physical products rather than digital goods…)

Vendor Credits
After the successful completion of buyer order (successful payment completion and order delivery), the vendor sales amount will be credited to their account as “Vendor Credits”. Vendors can view their available credits from their dashboard

With Draw Funds
Vendors can withdraw their funds (vendors credits) as soon as they reached their withdraw criteria (minimum withdraw funds) set by the site administrator.

Vendors can request payment has to be transferred to their preferred payment methods (Paypal, bank account…)

Processing withdraw Requests by Admin
Once the vendors have made the withdraw request,the requests are brought back to the administrator for the approval from there the administrator can approve or decline the requests.

Advanced Vendor Grouping
Using Advanced vendor grouping Add-on, you can assign more advanced privileges or employ restrictions on the membership.

For instance:
Bronze member can create 20 products and can not access certain categories and can not brand their store page.
Gold member can create 60 products and can access more categories and can brand (customize) their store page.

This will helps the site owner for convincing their sellers to upgrade their membership and help the administrator to make more money.

Vendor Membership
Using vendor membership plugin, you can create membership that auto expire after some period of time (months) and you can also charge your vendors for membership fees.

PayPal Adaptive Payments
Using Paypal adaptive payments system integration, the payments for the particular order contains various good to the multiple vendors can be divided accordingly and sent it to the merchants.

Chained Payments
The chained payments works as same as Adaptive payments (Parallel payment processing and dividing the particular vendor commission) but the difference is, in the chained payment method, the sender (buyer) pays to the primary receiver and from the Primary receiver the payment will be send it to the secondary receiver. So the buyer won’t knows any thing about the secondary receiver details (Its about privacy module for adaptive payment system)

You can configure this details from the admin panel payment settings options.

Multiple Flat Rate Shipping
Vendors can create multiple flat rate shipping configurations. Using this vendors can assign different pricing upon the delivery time priority and shipping service selection.

using this the buyers can have the choice of choosing between the shipping delivery priority (Quicker delivery costs more,normal delivery costs standard price) for every products from different vendors.

Contact Vendors
Using Messaging plugin, the customers can send messages to the vendors and the vendors will receive the e-mail notification of such message when it arrives.

Vendors also notified about the unread mails when they login to their dashboard

After reading the mails, the merchants can reply back the messages send by their customers.

Store Page
Vendor Store page is the exclusive page for the particular vendor. In this store, only the products from the particular vendor are listed.

The vendor store page contains the vendor profile (Company logo, Address, contact phone numbers, reviews, vendor products, banner).

CMS
Vendor CMS plugin allows the merchants to add/modify the required pages which are present in their store page.

Using this one can add required static pages (privacy policy, terms of service, refund policy, contact info…), all of this page content can be managed through powerful WYSIWYG  editor. After adding this page content, the pages will be added to the top navigation menu automatically.

Category Level Listing
Vendor Category plug-in lets you to create multiple level categories and let them display products in the store using category level.

Review Rating
Customers who bought the products previously from the particular vendors can review the product and as well as the vendor who supplied the product. The reviews rating will helps to make better buying decisions over the products.

Vendors can view the ratings from the buyers but only the admin proceed with edit/delete options.

Banner Manager
Banner manager plug-in lets the merchants upload banners from their dashboard which will be displayed in the vendor store pages.

You can also upload multiple images (dynamic sliders) to the banner slider and let them display as auto scrolling sliders.

Featured Products
Featured Products plug-in lets the sellers to feature their products on home page.B y making a product as a featured one, the particular product may receive more views and helps to increase the sales.

You may simply enable the product as featured one it will be automatically displayed on home page.

Alternatively you can create a page for featured products and add the featured product code on that page.

Search Vendor Specific Products
Vendor Catalog Search enables the visitors to search for the given query with the products from vendor database.

Create Products By other Product Attributes
Select And Sell is a plug-in of vnecoms magento multiple vendors extension lets the buyers to create products quickly by copying the other product attributes.

By simply selecting the product to copy,you can easily duplicate the particular product property and create a new product quick.

Price Comparison
Price comparison feature lets the buyers to compare the products to one another. This will be very important feature when people tend to compare the products with different models (features and price comparison.

But not just models comparison, the buyers can also compare the price for same product that comes from different vendors. By using this option, buyers can choose between the better pricing, vendors with high rating.

Store Locator
Store locator add-on helps the merchants to add physical location of the retailers of their products (if they have). Vendors just to provide their address in the configuration options and the map will be updated automatically.

News
Using news plugin,sellers can publish the latest announcements such as (discounts, newly added products, certifications, awards) any other information which helps to increase the trust with the buyers.

Vendor on Vacation
Vendor on Vacation plugin helps the sellers to display the notification message when they are in vacation. This message will be displayed on the vendor store page.This will helps the buyers to understand the support service may not available during vacation.

By turning on the vacation configuration option,the notification messages are simply posted on the store pages,and when it requires the message can be easily turned off from the control panel options.

Custom Order Number Generation
Custom order number add-on offers custom order number creation feature,using this vendors can create their own custom order numbers which helps more branding for their store.

They can configure the combination of alphabets and numbers,starting number,increment ratio between orders,invoices,shipment and credit memos. This is kind of unique marketplace feature that we ever come across.

Pros
Advanced checkout options (Unique Feature)
Vendor Grouping and Group based Pricing
Vendor membership fees
Product Listing Fees
Paypal Adaptive Payments
Paypal chained payments
Multiple Flatrate Shipping
Reviews and rating system
Featured Products
Advanced store branding
Custom Order Number Generation (Unique Feature)

Cons
Nothing so far!

Conclusion
As it comes with most advanced features we have reviewed so far, definitely vnecoms magento marketplace is the perfect choice for anyone who looking to build multi vendor solutions with Magento.

You can use the below link to find the live demo and download link to this software.

Vnecoms Magento Marketplace Extension Website

Please do provide your valuable opinion and feedback using the comment box below.