This is an update for Dokan Multivendor Shopping Cart. The older post can be found here.

With the increasing popularity of online shopping, lots of people are looking to start online stores. Instead of doing it alone, it’s much better to make it a multi-vendor e-commerce store. Multi-Vendor E-commerce platform means an online marketplace where you can have different sellers register on your platform and sell their products. That way, you can have more products available on your store and attract more customers to look for products while you sit back, relax and enjoy the commission.

With everything planned out, the toughest part is to choose a software where you want to actually run your multi-vendor e-commerce platform as there a large number of multi-vendor e-commerce platforms out there and you end up scratching your head if you haven’t done proper research. Every software out there has some Pros and Cons and it’s up to you to decide which one of them is most suited to your needs.

We are going to make things a little bit easy for you as we are providing a detailed review for by far the most economical multi-vendor solution. So if you are planning to build a multivendor store using WordPress, then Dokan, a multivendor plugin by weDevs, could be a great solution.

Dokan is a WooCommerce based multivendor plugin for WordPress, built by weDevs. It has been created to allow you to build a multi-vendor ecommerce marketplace. With an online store built using Dokan, users can register an account and begin selling their own products at your marketplace, pending your approval.

In this review of Dokan, we will talk in detail about the features of this app-theme but first let’s take a quick look at its Pros and Cons.

Pros:

• WooCommerce (WordPress Ecommerce) Based
• Independent Stores
• Lots of extensions and supported Features
• Frontend Vendor Product Management
• Beautiful Statistics and Report(Sales, Products Inventory)
• Different monetization (Product Listing Fees, Sales Commission…)
• Responsive/Mobile Friendly Support
• Comparatively Cheaper and one time price

Cons:

• Support is not up to the mark, most of time you get a response that Office hours is closed, and we will get back soon!

Enough about the Pros and Cons, let’s get down to the features and functionalities that Dokan offers at a very reasonable price.

It’s based on WooCommerce!

Yeah you’ve heard it right. Dokan is based on WooCommerce (2.6+) which itself is hugely popular and very feature rich.  Woocommerce is one of the most popular e-commerce platform build with widely popular, open source CMS, WordPress. It powers thousands of e-commerce website ranging from individual stores to enterprise e-commerce solutions. That means Dokan can work in any WooCommerce compatible theme.

Front end Vendor Product Management!

Now for some of you who don’t have any idea about frontend or backend management, I’ll try to explain it. Usually, all management of your WordPress website is done from the back-end of your site, referred to as the Dashboard. And its takes some time to learn and get used to all the functions. And if your sellers are not tech savvy, they would feel lost if they have to play with complex settings menus and functions. They’ll only like to add products, manage inventory, pricing, etc.

As Dokan is front-end, it gives your sellers the comfort of managing their products from the front-end of your site. The front-end option of Dokan can appeal to your sellers as their product management will be less scary and easier than ever.

Lots of Themes!

As the whole design is independent and adaptive, you can use any theme you want. So there is no binding on your imagination and creativity. The plugin is completely open source and the codes are well documented. You can even add features from your theme or make a new add-on.

 Features for Sellers:

It offers a simple, straight-forward dashboard to vendors that allows easy management of product inventory, including sales, discounts and promotions. Seller’s dashboard offers variety of features such as:

• Independent & Customized Stores:

With Dokan, you can allow sellers to setup their own independent stores. With great customizing capabilities, the sellers can match their stores according to their branding making it quite similar to giants like eBay and amazon.

• Easy Product Management:

Dokan allows individual sellers to manage their products that are listed at the store. They can view all the individual product pages, in the same way you would view a list of posts in WordPress. Individual products can be added or multiple products can be imported in bulk.

• Complete Reports and Statistics:

Every seller can see his/her own sales report and see a bird eye view on the sales they are making. The seller dashboard designed with the eye catching reports that are generated automatically and provide quick clues about number of products in the inventory, total number of orders and sales in the particular time period.

• Coupon Management:

Coupons management function offers allows every seller to manage their own products and discounts they offer. Also features such as creating discount coupons for special sales, limiting the coupons usage with time (date of expiry), fixed amount or percentage discount of the coupon are available.

• Managing reviews:

Product reviews can be managed from the seller dashboard, any time the seller can approve, modify or delete the product reviews.

• Orders Management & Product Publishing Review:

Managing orders can become quite easy with Dokan. Each seller manages their own orders. Order status can be updated like completed, in-progress or shipped etc.

• Marketing & SEO Management:

Each seller can manage SEO for their own store page. They can use custom SEO Meta and description for their store page. They can also set and manage their social profile on the store.

Features for Admin:

• The potential to earn from each sale:

Dokan allows you to charge your sellers a percentage for each order, giving them an e-commerce solution free of any monthly fees or you can go by the old way of charging the membership fees from the seller.

• Complete control over selling capabilities:

Dokan gives you the power to take full control of what is sold on your store and what not. You can activate/deactivate merchants and select which merchant can sell their product. This feature prevents merchants from selling any illegal product from your store. You also have the capability to promote merchants so that they can become a part of your “Trusted Sellers list” and can sell whatever they want without having to wait for your approval every time.

• Managing User accounts easier than ever:

Dokan can be used to create a marketplace which supports multiple vendors. Each vendor has their separate dashboard where they take control of their products and other settings, which makes the job easier for administrator. Admin can also set announcement for sellers from back-end which then shows on seller dashboard.

Dokan for Customers:

With Dokan you have the flexibility to design and manage a wonderful looking store that is sure to attract lots of customers. Visitors to the store can browse products listed in a nice and clean interface or search through the inventory. Products from all stores are displayed in front of them so they get to choose from a large variety of product without having to browse each store individually. However, if the customer wants to view the individual seller’s stores, they can do so via the seller list.

Pricing:

The theme comes with 3 pricing modules, depending upon the number of domains the software can be used with.

• Single Site License: $199
• 5 Sites License: $299
• Unlimited Site license: $499

All plans provide one-year forum support and updates

If Dokan Multivendor Shopping Cart is for you, please visit the weDev site here, and leave a comment to let us know your experience.