Dokan Multi-vendor Marketplace is getting popularity day-by-day. If you are using WordPress as your online store, then with just a simple plugin (Dokan) you can turn your single store into multi-vendor website. If you have more products, you may have more vendors, thus more sales and more revenue.

In this article, we’ll discuss how to customize Dokan Multi-vendor Marketplace with it’s free extension.

What is Dokan Multi-vendor Marketplace?

Dokan multi-vendor plugin is the most popular marketplace solution for WordPress. It lets entrepreneur to create and manage their own online marketplace that caters to multiple vendors from around the world. Dokan has a separate dashboard for admins and vendors which is the best feature of this solution.

According to a statistics Dokan is becoming the tough competitor to the autonomous marketplaces like Magento, BigCommerce, Shopify etc.

With Dokan, users give online vendors a space on the internet where they can set up and run their own store, manage all aspects of their operations, and grow their business. It is the ideal plugin to built the multi-vendor marketplace like Amazon or eBay.

It comes with an intuitive front end that even vendors with limited to no e-commerce experience can create their own store and sell immediately. Vendors can leverage the power of professionally crafted storefront, ensuring their customers have the best marketplace experience whenever they visit.

Dokan is compatible with over a hundred WooCommerce themes, making it easy for online vendors to set up their store without having to start from scratch.

Till now, Dokan has created more than 10,000+ online marketplaces world-wide and has downloaded more than 173,000 times.

Download Dokan from here.

What is a Marketplace?

A marketplace or online marketplace refers to a platform where buyers and sellers initiate or conduct transactions. The marketplace acts as a digital middleman that connects both buyers and sellers, to make it convenient for them to find each other as compared to before.

Multi-vendor marketplaces made their debut twenty years ago, with most of such platforms focusing mainly on retail and goods.

Remember the following basic question for the development of a marketplace:

• What types of products and/or services?
• What are the transaction currencies?
• Which areas to cover?
• What are the legal regulations?
• What about internationalization?

Why Dokan?

Dokan has some splendid features with its minimalist design. Here are the features:

POWERFUL USER-FRIENDLY DASHBOARD

Dokan has the full WooCommerce options to frontend. Sellers can manage almost everything without touching WordPress backend. From editing their profile information to manage products, orders and all other features, vendors can do it directly from the frontend dashboard.

VENDOR-ADMIN FACILITY

With Dokan vendors can:

• Upload products according to their requirement.
• Dokan has quick editing option.
• Vendors can run their own offers. They can also add blogs and reviews.
• But admins has got the ultimate power.

ADVANCED PRODUCT OPTIONS

With Dokan seller can customize advanced product options such as product variations, stock, discounted price, scheduling of discount, SKU, limit quantity per order, allow/disallow back orders, image gallery etc..

VIEW ORDERS/UPDATE ORDER STATUS

In Dokan, sellers can view all orders, filter orders by date or order status. They can update order status (such as processing, pending, shipped etc..)

PERCENTAGE BASED CUSTOM COMMISSION SYSTEM

As admin you can set custom commission per sale, based on percentage system. You can add a specific commission for a specific seller.

CUSTOM COUPONS FOR SELLERS

Dokan makes things easier by incorporating the coupon system for WooCommerce into frontend and sellers can feel free to create their own custom coupons.

SELLER VERIFICATION ADD-ON

In Dokan, there is seller verification add-on. Seller verification add-on adds the verification option to your website. If you want to make your website more reliable, you can add a verification system. Verification add-on adds photo ID upload, phone verification and social media sites account verification like Twitter, Facebook.

FUND WITHDRAWAL OPTIONS

Dokan has PayPal and Skrill as withdrawal options. There are also PayPal adaptive and Stripe options but as paid options.

CUSTOM STORE OPTIONS

Sellers can add custom banner to their web store pages, contact form,  social media links, Google map etc..

VACATION MODE FOR SELLERS

Vacation mode for sellers is one of the most important features for a marketplace. If seller wants to pause their store for some times, they can put their store on hold for a certain period of time. Vacation mode will avoid unwanted orders and their unfortunate cancellation after order placement. This mode helps sellers avoid negative customers feedback.

SELLERS CAN EDIT CUSTOMER REVIEWS

As a site admin you can enable customer review options. After enabling this option sellers can manage their customer reviews.

SUPPORT SYSTEM

Support system is available in Dokan as add-on. If site admin enable this add-on, sellers will have a support button on their web store page. Customers can generate support tickets which in turn should be be handled by sellers.

TAX OPTIONS

Dokan sellers now have options to customize tax on their own.

PRICING

The Pricing plan of Dokan seemed most convenient to any beginner.

Compatible Extensions of Dokan

Dokan comes with a wide range of extensions that enhances its core capabilities for different types of business. You can pick any of them depending on your requirements and give a new dimension to your WooCommerce marketplace.

For example, seller verification is an extension that lets you check the authenticity of your sellers by obtaining their social profiles, phone number, and photo verification. Dokan Simple Auctions allows vendors to create stores of auction-able products so they can create their own eBay like store.

Free Extension of Dokan for You

As the multi-vendor marketplace builder solution, Dokan provides mainly four free extensions to customize your WordPress multi-vendor marketplace.

1. Dokan Product Duplicator
2. Dokan PDF Invoice
3. WPML Integration with Dokan
4. Dokan WC Vendors Migrator

How to Customize Your Dokan Multi-vendor Marketplace 

As you know, Dokan is an open source multi-vendor marketplace plugin, that means it’s free to use and customize. As mentioned above Dokan supports a wide range of extensions besides these four free extensions. Let’s see how to apply them properly to customize your marketplace.

1. Dokan Product Duplicator

When you will have a marketplace, vendors across the countries would join to sell their products. Dokan multi-vendor marketplace made it easy to come and sell all type of products from one single platform. Sometimes your vendors may need to sell the same products what other vendors are already selling.

Using Dokan Product Duplicator, with just two click you can copy all the information including the product pictures. Because Product Duplicator adds a button to any single product page named Add To My Store. When you will click on that button the product goes directly into an Add New Product Page using all the previous product data. Now, edit it as per your requirement and publish to your store. The task is such easy and simple with Dokan Product Duplicator.

2. Dokan PDF Invoice Generator

Dokan PDF Invoice generator is something that helps you to create and maintain a trustworthy environment in your multi-vendor marketplace. People want to get quick information about the product what they bought and how much does it cost. This is also an easy way for you and your vendors to collect selling data to measure daily performances and design for better plans.

Dokan offers you the PDF Invoice generator to make your job done with free of cost. This is an awesome extension for your marketplace. Let your customers collect the invoice of their daily orders with detailed information. Dokan PDF Invoice Generator will enable them to download all order report in PDF format. Your customers feel more comfortable to shop from your marketplace.

With PDF Invoice generator, Admin, Seller, and Customers have their own menu to generate invoices.

3. Dokan WPML Integration

eCommerce business has no limit. Anyone can join your multi-vendor marketplace from anywhere they want. All the people around the world may be your customer and they may use their local language. English may not be their mother language.

WooCommerce developed a solution to easily display your vendors’ dashboard, product categories, store pages etc. in various languages. You can easily turn your marketplace into the multilingual marketplace by just adding this extension-WPML Integration for Dokan.

You will be able to translate the following fields into multiple languages using Dokan WPML integration plugin.

• Product categories
• Vendors’ products
• Attributes
• Variations
• Dokan vendor dashboard
• Store listing
• Store pages etc.

4. Dokan WC Vendors Migrator

Depending on your business growth, you may want to migrate your site from WC vendor to Dokan to ensure better ROI. WC vendor is good to begin the projects, but Dokan is better. With 1000+ businesses, Dokan got two prestigious awards in 2018 for great performances and awesome support.

Dokan WC Vendor Migrator is another outstanding extension offered by weDevs to easily migrate your marketplace within a minute. Go ahead with installing and activating the free extension to your WooCommerce multi-vendor marketplace.    

Once completed the installation, you will get a new sub menu under the Tools menu in the WordPress admin Dashboard. You just have to select the Data Type and run the synchronization.   

Use Free WP User Frontend to Make Your Marketplace More User-friendly and Secure

Security is an important factor you can’t ignore, especially while running an online business. You need to add and manage various vendors to your WooCommerce multi-vendor marketplace. How will you secure your marketplace from various vendors?

WordPress user frontend is an awesome solution for you to solve the problem. Add this free plugin to your WordPress multi-vendor marketplace and let your users and vendors manage everything from the Frontend!

It also enables you to build Registration Forms, User Profiles, Products, Subscriptions & Contact Forms with ease. You will get this awesome plugin with Dokan installation by default. You just need to activate it. 

More Ways to Customize Multi-vendor Marketplace

With Dokan, you will get lot’s of plugins to design your marketplace. Payment, shipping and tax are the three major fields you have to consider to make your marketplace ready to go. Dokan supports all the plugins that are compatible with WooCommerce. 

1. Payment
2. Shipping
3. Tax

Customize Dokan Multi-vendor Marketplace: Final Thoughts

With Dokan you can easily create a multi-vendor marketplace. After creation you will get the above mentioned free extensions to customize your marketplace. So, grab this opportunity to decorate your marketplace. So, attract more vendors and customers by customizing Dokan with its huge collection of useful extensions.