Multi-vendor eCommerce website is so popular nowadays and everybody who have interest about eCommerce business, are looking forward to build. Amazon and Alibaba, this two websites are dominating in the multi-vendor eCommerce business. By building multi-vendor eCommerce website, you could help many people sell their products and earn a good sum.
Creating a multi-vendor website for both vendors and the buyers is a big challenge. But if you choose the right tool, it will not be so difficult to build. It is article, we’ll show how to build a multi-vendor eCommerce website with Dokan and WP Page Builder.
Build a multi-vendor eCommerce website with Dokan & WP Page Builder
Without any further discussion, let’s go to the main discussion.
1. All about Domain Names
One of the first, most important and crucial decision you have to take while starting a new business is choosing a domain name.
A short, and memorable domain name always make difference between creating a successful presence online and getting lost in cyberspace, with more than half a billion of domain names in existence.
Whatever sector of your eCommerce business operates in, a strong domain name is always vital to your success.
2. Choose your System carefully
At the initial stage of a new business, you may be feeling a mixture of emotions such as excitement, confusion, apprehension, and impatience.
Coping with this circumstances, another crucial decision you have to take after choosing your domain name is the eCommerce platform which you should use to power your store.
Dokan
Dokan is a multi-vendor WordPress plugin that gripping the power of WooCommerce.
With Dokan you can easily build a multi-vendor marketplace website like Amazon or eBay.
Every seller of your website will get a unique URL for their store that will be useful for their branding issue. They can manage their products and orders from the front-end, so they don’t need to visit the WordPress admin dashboard.
As a site owner, you will get a percentage or commission from each sale. This way the site owner and the seller both will earn money.
Dokan has downloaded more than 170,000 times and made more than 20000+ marketplaces worldwide. It has support for PayPal, PayPal Adaptive, Stripe, Bank Cheque, Cash on delivery and many more.
Features of Dokan
- Marketplace with independent store.
- Multiple Product Types
- WooCommerce Compatible Themes
- Front end Dashboard for Vendors
- Earn from each sale
- Store Insight with reports and statement
- Coupon Management
- Stylish storefronts
- Order Management
- Review Product publishing
- Easy withdraw system
- Vendor profile completeness
- Store page SEO Management
- Complete Store settings control for Vendors
- Vendor payment method setup
- Social profiles integration for Vendors
- Shipping Management for each Store
- Order and earning widget on Vendor Dashboard
- Easy customer refund process
- control selling capability
- Customer service
WP Page Builder
WP Page Builder is a plugin to build website in WordPress. This tool has everything in it to power a full-fledged website – lot of design elements, add-ons, functionalities like device specific responsive controls, export/import options, padding adjustment, and above all, drag & drop real-time frontend editing system etc. It’s a free page builder plugin that helps you build beautiful websites like a pro.
Features:
- Drag & Drop Website Building
- Faster, Real-Time Front-End Editing
- 30+ Add-Ons and Counting
- Device Specific Responsiveness Controls
- Plenty of Pre-made Layouts
- Ready-Made Pre-designed Blocks
- Tons of Essential Icons
- Built with User-Friendliness in Mind
- Library to Save Your Own Blocks
- Easy and Flexible Building Mechanism
Now let’s start creating a multi-vendor eCommerce website. For that purpose, we will use a free WordPress theme, Corlate, Dokan multi-vendor and WP Page Builder plugin.
As Dokan is based on WooCommerce, we need to install and activate WooCommerce plugin also.
For further of WooCommerce installation process, Read this article.
Set up a product slider
Product sliders play a significant role when it comes to show curated products to your site visitors. With WP Page Builder you can create gorgeous looking product sliders quickly with its Carousel add-on.
There are lots of styling options to bring the desired look to each of your product slides. You can set up product slides with product image, title, subtitle, description, and price. The Carousel add-on also lets you to add different effects/ behaviors to your slides.
Show popular products on the homepage
Despite of showcasing all products in a dedicated store page, a custom home page with multiple sections of sorted/handpicked products attract visitors more. This will help the customers to pick their chosen products without being lost to a large number of products available on the store page.
Dokan Shortcode addon
There are several shortcodes available in the Dokan plugin to display the best selling products, top rated items, Dokan dashboard, store listing, and more. By using those shortcodes, you can create a dedicated add-on to display those products and others elements in a wonderful way.
The Dokan Shortcode add-on we created that shown below the WP Page Builder’s default add-on section. Dragging it on any column of the page enables you to select any of the available shortcode options to display there.
Show Dokan vendors’ stores
Showcasing stores of registered vendors on your eCommerce website with the created Dokan Shortcode addon of WP Page Builder is very easy. This add-on offers multiple shortcode options. Just place the add-on on a particular place and select Store Listing in the add-on’s settings and you are ready to go. Store Listing lets your visitors go to a specific vendor’s store and shows all of their products on a single page.
How to create Dokan Shortcode addon
The WP Page Builder can be extended with third-party add-ons. If the default add-ons of WP Page Builder miss out the feature you want, then you can create your own add-on and use it with WP Page Builder. This is exactly what used here. This shortcode is dedicatedly created for the tutorial purpose.
Creating Dokan Shortcode add-on for WP Page Builder
Creating an add-on for WP Page Builder is very easy. Because of its clear and rich developer documentation, any developer can create a plugin to annex an add-on to WP Page Builder. When it comes to create an add-on for Dokan, it’s easier if you follow this way, as there are several useful shortcodes in Dokan multi-vendor plugin.
Dokan Shortcode Add-on for WP Page Builder code:
Visit Github to see the gist.
get_icon()
Use this function to get the icon of add-on. WP Page Builder has 340+ custom icons available for developers. You can also use Font Awesome 4 here.
get_name()
Using this function you can get the addon ID. It should be without space and unique.
get_category_name()
If you use this function, you can categorize the add-on.
get_title()
By using this function, you can show the name of the add-on on the front-end editing panel.
get_settings()
Get settings option of the panel for the add-on. Developer documentation can help you more here.
render()
You can use this function to get PHP output of the add-on. Here, the add-on renders the following settings and makes the output.
getTemplate()
This function is not used here but for the static add-ons, it has an extra benefit. It is a JavaScript (Actually Lodash) template which makes your static add-ons super faster.
Finally, you have to add your add-on to WP Page Builder using this “wppb_available_addons” filter.
Check out the full example in GitHub.
Build Multi-vendor eCommerce website: Last Words
Building an multi-vendor eCommerce website is not a simple process to complete start-to-finish. The guidelines offered here are just a tutorial for creating your first eCommerce website and provides a comprehensive walk-through.
If you have any suggestions to build multi-vendor eCommerce website, please let us know through the comment section below, we do appreciate them!
Please make a post on WCFM vs Dokan.