Magento 2 Marketplace Solution

We have worked on many Marketplace projects for our clients including B2B and B2C. A marketplace is nothing but a multi vendor setup which allow multiple sellers to sell their products from one platform. There are many extensions available in Magento Marketplace which help Magento 2 store owners to have their own Marketplace website which all required features to run their business.
The features offered by Magento multi vendor marketplace extension gives options to add sellers, manage their products/categories and keeping track of the sales from their respective login.

Below are the common features Marketplace website should have to enhances Magento’s default architecture to fulfil Marketplace requirement.

Engaging Experiences On All Devices

A modern and state of art frontend enhances use experience and help to engage user on website. An engaging, mobile-optimized experience empowers your customers and sales staff to place orders on any device, at any time.
A website designed and developed by considering the web usability always help customer to easily navigate through out the website and find desired product. This also increases the flawless trading on website.

Vendor/Seller Registration & Management

A vendor should get easily register on website and shall able to add and manage their own products within the Marketplace.
Most of the cases vendors/sellers activation needed to have quality service on Marketplace. So there should be due diligence process need to be in placed to verify the vendor/seller and approve them to business via marketplace. A marketplace admin shall always do moderation & approval of Vendor / Seller. Also there should be a facility to enable & disable seller/vendor from Magento admin.
A vendor shall see its own dashboard after login to the marketplace and can manage orders, create shipments and ship products to customers all from a very easy to use management interface.
On frontend every vendor should have its own page with its own store information and product listed on the same.

All Product Type Support & Category Management

In Marketplace, a sellers want to add their products with quantity and price. All the product data is managed by seller only. There always be the chances of different sellers selling different types of products. So being a Marketplace, system should support and allow sellers to add different type of products. The Magento and Magento Multi-vendor Marketplace plugins supports all type of products like

  • simple
  • configurable
  • bundled
  • downloadable/virtual
  • bundled Products
  • group products

Also these modules allow admin to add or remove any of the products from the back-end of the Magento. In many marketplace where curate products are being sold needs product approval system which is done by marketplace owner.
On a marketplace sellers cannot create a category by their own. However, sellers can request to add a new category. This request then will be processed by marketplace admin.

Thus, product & categories management always being done by marketplace admin from Magento admin.

Commission Management

When you are running a multi vendor marketplace portal, you are entitle to levy commission for marketplace service you provide. This commission can be at global level as well as vendor / seller level. There are commission add-ons available on Magento marketplace which help Marketplace owner to have

  • Global Commission Management for all vendors / sellers
  • Vendor based commission management
  • Category based commission management
  • Product based commission management

Order & invoice Management

It is always upto marketplace owner to decide whether to allow seller to manage order on their own. If marketplace admin allowed then a seller can manage orders by logged into the marketplace portal and process the same. There should be a notification system in place so that whenever an order is placed, respective seller should get notified with an order email.

A seller can do below activities over an order:

  • Creating Shipment of the order.
  • Create an invoice.
  • Send email to customer regarding notification.
  • Cancelling the order.
  • Print the order.
  • Create Credit Memo.
  • The seller has also the provision to add the Carrier details and Tracking numbers to the orders.

Mass Import/Export Products

A seller who sell products on a marketplace always has large catalog. To manage the products and its prices/quantities, marketplace need to give provision of bulk import/export for products. There are extensions available in Magento marketplace that allows vendors to add a large number of products to his store quickly instead of one by one and also helps in managing product stocks.

Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA)

As marketplace always has more product options to purchase for a buyer. When catalog is large and many options are open to buy, customers always report or want to replace or return a product. To mange this return goods authorization (RGA) process of returning a product to receive a refund, replacement, or repair within the given period (decided by marketplace owner or seller) need to be in place.

Promotions, Deals & Offers

Deals and offers always attracts buyers and increase conversion rate. Deals can be shown with some message and with timer. Marketplace or sellers should always target festival seasons to run offers.
The deals or offers can be product specific, category specific or they may be a discount on order total.
Magento allows marketplace to define various Promotional rules based on shopping cart and catalog.

Vendor Ratings & Review

Customers can rate vendors and provide their reviews as feedback regarding the quality of their products, service, price, brand value, etc. A buyer always prefer to buy a product from a vendor having most positive review and it also help customer to evaluate the sellers.
This review and rating will display at seller / vendor profile , also marketplace shall allow buyer to check all the review for any particular seller / vendor .
Only buyer those purchased the products shall allow to rate and review the seller and Admin shall have all the access to manage the seller review and rating .

Split Cart and Split order

On a marketplace customer add products from various sellers / vendor at once in the cart and do checkout. If marketplace owner want to show products vendor wise on a checkout page then split checkout will need to be implemented. In this scenario, order is split into number of vendors products in cart.

Auction

The auction helps seller or Marketplace owner to sell rare product at proper price. It is like customer acquisition.
The auction feature allow admin/seller to add auction for their product and the buyer can bid on that product. There are many extensions available for auction for marketplace. This extensions allow admin to update and delete the auction. Admin can set Automatic, Reserve Price, Incremental Auction for their products. This extensions works with simple, virtual & downloadable product types.

Performance And Scalability

On a Marketplace website catalog size is huge and traffic on the website is high. While developing a marketplace website we need to consider the performance of the website. The module/extension selection should not only be considering the features but shall be looked for its compatibility with magento version. This will not affect your existing store performance and will support all your standard magento cache handlers.
It is mandatory to choose a Marketplace extension wisely as it should support all type of cache handlers including APC , Memcached , Redis etc .
As we know a Marketplace can be B2B or B2C. The feature we mentioned above a the common features which a Marketplace website should have.
The B2B marketplace is more business centric so need of business related feature is more. In B2B order quantity and price are the main factors. There are few important features those must have on a B2B Magento marketplace.

  • Enquiry, Quote & Negotiation
  • Payment options
  • Shipping integration
  • ERP Integration
  • Customer (Wholesaler) Registration
  • Permission for CMS at customer group level
  • Tax Configuration and Tax compliance
  • MultiWare house
  • Customer sub user account- Roles and Permissions

We have discussed these B2B aspects of Magento. Click here