Back in summer, we introduced MultiMerch dashboards - a tool for MultiMerch marketplace owners and vendors designed to provide an overview of the current state of the marketplace and seller stores.
Today, I'm happy to introduce a redesign of MultiMerch dashboards for both marketplace owners and sellers.
MultiMerch marketplace owner dashboard
The new marketplace owner dashboard is designed to be as useful as the previous version, but provide information in a more user-friendly way.
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First, MultiMerch marketplace owners now have complete data on their marketplace numbers displayed in the top tiles. These show the total number of sellers, products and orders in the marketplace, as well as total revenues, totals across seller balances and data on product views and customers.
The main focus of the new dashboard is the MultiMerch sales analytics chart. The chart displays historical data on orders and revenues grouped by months with additional information for each month displayed in a tooltip. Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
The sales analytics chart is followed by four "top" blocks. These display the top countries by sales numbers, most valued customers, top sellers and the best selling products.
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MultiMerch tops are designed to provide the marketplace owners with valuable information on where exactly does the marketplace get its revenues from for further actions.
Finally, the new marketplace owner dashboard offers the same activity fees that were present in the original one - marketplace activity and latest orders.
Marketplace activity keeps track of all events happening in the marketplace such as newly created products, new seller registrations and customer activity. This provides an overview of the happenings in the marketplace at a glance.
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Latest orders is just what it sounds like - the list of the latest orders created in the marketplace. The list makes it easier for the marketplace administration to keep track of newly created orders without having to open the main list of orders.
We are really proud of the new dashboard and hope to make it a great start for our MultiMerch redesign process!
MultiMerch vendor dashboards
In addition the the new administrator dashboards, we've also updated seller dashboards and gave them a modern style.
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Seller dashboards now follow the same pattern as the ones for the marketplace administration.
On top, MultiMerch displays the total numbers for the seller's store. These include the current balance, total earnings, total orders and product views.
Following the totals is seller's own sales analytics chart, which displays the historical sales data for their store.
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MultiMerch also offers sellers an insight into their tops via the top selling and top viewed products charts.
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Finally, seller dashboards display four lists with data on recent activity in their store - latest orders, latest reviews, new customer messages and the latest invoices.
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This lets MultiMerch sellers keep track of the day to day activity in their stores without leaving the dashboard.
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Responsive and mobile friendly
MultiMerch uses Chart.js to power its dashboards - and we paid extra attention to make sure they are responsive and can be used on mobile devices.
This is the first step towards making all MultiMerch interfaces modern, responsive and mobile-friendly for 2018.
MultiMerch dashboards with custom themes
When designing the new seller dashboards, we took custom themes into account. Thus, all of our partner themes will have no issues displaying the new dashboards.
Since Basel is our new favorite theme, we specifically made sure it has no problems with the dashboards.
As you may have noticed, all seller account screenshots in this blog post are made with Basel theme installed.
Furthermore, we've just uploaded the new dashboards to our public demo running Basel - be sure to check it out here:
You've been telling us that MultiMerch dashboards and seller lists look a bit boring.
We also heard that it would be nice to see sellers on a map and that having Google and Facebook display shared product pages with rich snippets would make it so much better.
All this – and other exciting things – are now available in MultiMerch 8.14!
New dashboards for admins and sellers
We've been featuring these for a while now, but the new MultiMerch dashboards for marketplace owners and sellers are now official.
It wasn't an easy task and we appreciate all of your feedback – these wouldn't be possible without you!
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Since I already covered the new dashboards in detail earlier, check out that blog post for more information: Introducing MultiMerch dashboards.
New styles for seller lists in 2018
What's the point of featuring your sellers if their profiles just don't catch your customers' eyes?
They're there, but you just don't feel like exploring their stores.
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We've restyled the list of sellers and the new and top seller blocks in MultiMerch to make them look more enticing.
Here's an example of MultiMerch 8.14 sellers in a marketplace powered by the Basel theme.
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Now that's what I call enticing.
This is an example with the Basel theme, but we also made sure the new styles look good with the rest of our partner themes.
Map view of seller stores
This has been a long time coming and local marketplace owners will love this one.
Starting with MultiMerch 8.14, seller stores can now be displayed on a map in addition to the regular list view.
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To enable map view, you'll need to specify your Google Maps API key, which can be obtained from Google under both free and paid plans.
We will soon be extending this feature to make it possible to display individual seller store locations in their profiles, too.
Microdata for SEO and social media sharing
Microdata (or Structured Data) is a page markup that lets search engines and social networks better understand the content of your pages.
This improves the appearance of your page when it is displayed in search results and shared on social media.
From now on, MultiMerch will add Schema.org and Open Graph structured data to product and seller pages to improve their appearance in search results and on social media.
For now, MultiMerch will display product and offer Schema markup, which will have Google display your products' prices and ratings on search results pages.
MultiMerch 8.14 also features a new SEO system architecture and the new SEO caching system for improved stability and performance.
All of these improvements are part of the MultiMerch SEO system and do not have to be enabled separately.
From your feedback to interface improvements
We've recently started collecting and systematizing your feedback about various MultiMerch pages and features to see where we can improve.
Your feedback has been invaluable – in MultiMerch 8.14, we introduced subtle improvements to seller and product management pages for marketplace admins.
For example, seller profiles can now be sorted and filtered by store name and seller's email separately and have profile images displayed for easier recognition.
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You can now also use a shortcut button to view seller's public profile as it appears on the marketplace without having to search for it manually.
The list of products has received similar improvements for marketplace admins.
MultiMerch now displays product thumbnails, makes it clear (and possible to edit) which seller the product belongs to and lets you assign multiple products to a different seller in bulk.
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As usual, MultiMerch 8.14 comes with a number of bugfixes, minor improvements and updated partner theme integrations for better compatibility with our supported themes.
Now, the new version is available for download in your MultiMerch accounts and on OpenCart Marketplace.
We all here hope you'll like it – and are eager to hear your thoughts on the improvements!
Looking for a perfect online marketplace solution for OpenCart?
There are quite a few different marketplace extensions for OpenCart out there, so comparing them can be a pain.
Here we've assembled the complete list of multi vendor extensions for OpenCart – free and commercial – to help you choose the one for you.
Free marketplace extensions for OpenCart
ClerksCart Multi Vendor for OpenCart 2.2
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ClerksCart has been around since June 2016 and was last updated in December 2016. It currently has under 4000 downloads on OpenCart Marketplace.
According to the description and screenshots, ClerksCart offers basic multi vendor features such as seller account creation and balance management.
The main drawback of ClerksCart is that it overwrites core OpenCart files according to its GitHub source code.
Modifying OpenCart core files directly is a terrible development practice. Extensions that do this will prevent you from updating your OpenCart setup, will cause trouble with custom themes and extensions and will generally make your life as an OpenCart marketplace owner miserable.
Another drawback of ClerksCart is that supports OpenCart 2.2 only, which is a dated version. We generally recommend using OpenCart 2.3.0.2 – currently the most stable one.
MultiMerch Core (discontinued) for OpenCart 1.x to 2.0
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MultiMerch Core is a free multi vendor distribution of MultiMerch that was available in 2015 and discontinued in 2016.
It was released under a GPL license on GitHub and offered a wide array of multi vendor features like seller account and product management, transaction and balance management for sellers as well as seller group commission system and payments between sellers and the marketplace.
While we ultimately had to discontinue MultiMerch Core for a number of reasons, its unofficial forks, clones and modifications can still be found on GitHub and being rebranded and resold by third party companies.
If you're a developer looking into multi vendor marketplace system internals, getting a copy of MultiMerch Core with OpenCart 2.0 will give you a good overview of the multi vendor architecture.
However, we wouldn't recommend using MultiMerch Core and OpenCart 1.x/2.0 on a live online marketplace in 2018.
Pros:
Codewise follows OpenCart guidelines
Offers a decent multi vendor feature set
Cons:
Officially discontinued
Only supports OpenCart 2.0
No updates since 2016
Requires manual integration with custom themes
Price: Free
OpenCart Marketplace link:(discontinued, not available)
Demo link:(discontinued, not available)
Commercial marketplace extensions for OpenCart
PurpleTree Software Multivendor for OpenCart 2.3 to 3.0 ($99 to $199)
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PurpleTree extension is a relatively new one and was published on OpenCart Marketplace in July 2017. Since then, it has accumulated a little over 100 sales and has received mixed feedback from customers - from positive reviews to complaints regarding poor support.
According to the description, PurpleTree offers basic marketplace features such as seller profiles, product and order management for sellers, as well as marketplace owner payouts to sellers and a possibility for buyers to contact sellers through a contact form.
In addition to keeping their OpenCart Marketplace listing up to date, PurpleTree team also offer a number of other OpenCart extensions unrelated to multi vendor both from OpenCart Marketplace and through their own website.
4Kode Multivendor Shopping Cart for OpenCart 2.3 to 3.0 ($75)
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4Kode is a new OpenCart team – the initial version of 4Kode Multivendor was released in November 2017 and has since then had one sale and no public feedback.
According to the OpenCart Marketplace listing of 4Kode Multivendor, it features basic marketplace features and a few extras, such as product and seller reviews, notifications and a way for sellers to contact the marketplace owners.
In addition to the multi vendor extensions, 4Kode offers two other products for OpenCart - a free theme and a mobile app, which is also available on Play Store.
Aditya Multishippers Advanced Pro for OpenCart 2.2 to 3.0 ($159)
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The multishippers extension for OpenCart by Aditya has been around since January 2016 and has 81 sales on OpenCart Marketplace as of February 2018.
According to the description, Multishippers extension offers basic multi vendor features, as well as a number of extras, such as bulk product uploads, individual subdomains for sellers as well as multiple different prices per single product.
The developers of Multishippers – Aditya team – have been with OpenCart since 2011 and have published a number of unrelated OpenCart extensions for OpenCart in addition to Multishippers.
Pros:
OpenCart developers with a track record
A number of extras in addition to basic vendor features
A0twa MultiVendor / Dropshipper Marketplace Management for OpenCart 2.1 to 2.2 ($30)
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A0twa has been registered on OpenCart Marketplace in 2015, but the Dropshipper Marketplace extension was published in June 2016 (and last updated in July 2017) and has since then been sold 3 times only.
Compared to other multi vendor extensions for OpenCart, the one by A0twa is offering a different model where the marketplace owner creates vendor accounts and products manually, which is akin to OpenCart's Manufacturers feature.
Waabay Multivendor/Dropshipper for OpenCart 1.5 ($159)
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The Dropshipper extension by Waabay is one of the better known multi vendor extensions for OpenCart - and the oldest one, having been originally published back in August 2011.
It has since then accumulated 230 sales, but was last updated in May 2017 and only supports OpenCart 1.5.x.
Waabay Dropshipper, as the name implies, is intended for dropshipping marketplaces rather than regular online marketplaces.
This means the marketplace owner will usually be responsible for inviting vendors and managing the product catalog, while vendors have access to their orders through their back end dashboards.
The main difference from regular online marketplaces is that Waabay Dropshipper vendors have no front end accounts and profiles that can be styled to match the marketplace theme's look and feel.
Apart from this, Waabay offers all of the basic multi vendor features for vendor management, order handling and payments to vendors.
Pros:
Prominent OpenCart developers
One of the oldest multi vendor extensions for OpenCart
Webkul Multivendor Marketplace for OpenCart 2.0 to 3.0 ($199 to $6,500*)
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OpenCart Multivendor by Webkul has been first published in March 2013 and has since then been sold more than 280 times on OpenCart.
Unlike other marketplace solutions for OpenCart, Webkul Marketplace is built in a modular way with the core system providing the basic multi vendor features and additional features being offered as paid addons.
As of 2018, Webkul offers over 50 different addons to their core marketplace system with addon prices ranging from $50 to $400 each.
Webkul itself is a large team of developers offering a wide range of development services for all kinds of platforms. In addition to OpenCart, they are also the developers behind a number of multi vendor plugins for systems such as Magento, Prestashop, Cs-Cart and Odoo CRM.
Pros:
Lots of addons for custom feature support
Maintained by a large development company
Updated on a regular basis
Supports OpenCart 2.x and 3.x
Cons:
Pretty expensive, the price gets quite steep with addons and setup/support costs included
Mixed feedback
Price: $199 to $6,500 (the latter with all addons included, prices taken in February 2018 from the official Webkul website)
MultiMerch Marketplace 8 for OpenCart ($485 to $1,500)
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MultiMerch Marketplace is an online marketplace solution for OpenCart that focuses on user experience and reliability.
We've been around since 2012 when MultiMerch was first released as OpenCart Digital Marketplace and later renamed to OpenCart Multiseller. The MultiMerch brand was created in 2014.
MultiMerch is designed to provide the best possible experience for marketplace owners out of the box, thus we include the most important marketplace features in the core and don't offer paid addons at the moment.
These are the marketplace extensions for OpenCart that are available as of February 2018.
Which one do you choose?
We'll publish a more in-depth guide for choosing a marketplace extension for OpenCart shortly, but the main points are:
think about your business model upfront and see whether the solution you're looking at supports it – if you intend to collect sign up fees, will you be able to do it easily?
consider your team composition, your skills and the level of support offered by the developers – will you be able to handle issues when they eventually arise or will you need help?
set aside a budget for the extension itself, for its customization according to your requirements and for any services you may need down the road – can you afford it?
if you're looking for more than just the extension code, research the team behind the project – is it a company you can build a business relationship with?
Definitely consider free alternatives first – they just might suit you.
Before committing to the purchase of a commercial extension, you'll definitely want to check out all of the available demos, to through the reviews and get in touch with the developers to make sure you're on the same page.
Using one of the extensions we listed here? Share your feedback in the comments below!
MultiMerch is an online marketplace solution for OpenCart.
"What is OpenCart?" is the first question we get from marketplace owners who come from different systems or industries.
In this blog post, I tried to answer your questions and cover all things OpenCart – from its history and technical specifications to pricing, themes, extensions and suggestions for alternatives.
Introduction. What is OpenCart?
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OpenCart is an open source shopping cart solution that is available for free under the GNU GPL license.
This means its source code is available on GitHub – you can download it for free and build your own online store.
Just like any other open source software, OpenCart has its advantages and disadvantages.
I'll start with technical specifications and a brief history of OpenCart and go through OpenCart features, themes, extensions, pricing and communities before drawing a conclusion.
Technical specifications. What is OpenCart built with?
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OpenCart is open source software built with PHP/HTML and MySQL (the LAMP stack).
Designed with code simplicity in mind, OpenCart uses a simple Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.
OpenCart is self hosted, which means you'll need to install it on your own server (in contrast to many popular cloud-based solutions like Shopify).
System requirements
The system requirements for the current OpenCart version (3.0.2.0) are:
a web server (Apache is recommended, but others can also be used, such as nginx or IIS)
PHP with cURL support (at least PHP5.4, but PHP7 is supported)
a database management software (MySQL is recommended, but MariaDB and PostgreSQL can also be used)
OpenCart is known for its simplicity – you can install it on even the most basic shared servers.
Architecture
Code-wise, OpenCart uses a plain MVC pattern (sometimes called MVCL where L stands for Language files) pattern for its underlying architecture.
This makes the solution relatively easy to work with compared to many larger online store solutions like Magento, especially for novice developers.
Generally, OpenCart code base consists of two different parts – one for the front store and one for the administration interfaces – and a number of global system files.
Each part contains an MVC structure for models, views and controllers, which makes the final structure of OpenCart code look as follows:
Starting with version 3, Twig template engine has replaced regular PHTML template files for OpenCart views.
History
The original OpenCart project was a Perl-based online shopping cart system created in 1998 by Christopher G. Mann. The project was abandoned in 2000.
In 2009, the name OpenCart was used by Daniel Kerr for his own open source shopping cart system built with PHP.
As of February 2018, there are 3 major OpenCart versions.
OpenCart 1.x (2009 - 2014)
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OpenCart 1.1.1 was the first official release of OpenCart in 2009.
While the initial 1.x versions of OpenCart were plagued by bugs, security issues and inconsistent releases, the project was stabilized by the version 1.4.7. At this point, Daniel Kerr was joined in OpenCart development by another prominent OpenCart developer, Qphoria.
Ultimately, OpenCart 1.x has culminated into 1.5.6.4. This has become the most stable and popular version of OpenCart 1.x (also the latest one - 1.5.6 never happened).
OpenCart 2.x (2014 - 2017)
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OpenCart 2 was a major OpenCart release that has introduced a redesigned administration interface and has received a front store facelift.
In addition to the styling changes, OpenCart 2 has implemented its own modification system based on vQmod (OCMOD), as well as a new event system to make it easier for developers to extend OpenCart.
Although the initial 2.0 release has received its share of criticism, 2.3.0.2 has ultimately become the most beloved OpenCart version among many marketplace owners and developers (MultiMerch included).
OpenCart 3.x (2017 - .. )
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OpenCart 3 is a major version released in 2017 that has introduced a new PHP template engine (Twig) to replace the regular PHTML views. This move was negatively received by some OpenCart users and developers as it requires developers to maintain compatibility with a yet another version.
While being advertised as the latest stable version, the roadmap is still unclear and the latest version of OpenCart 3 (3.0.2.0) was released back in July 2017.
As of February 2018, many popular themes and extensions still do not support OpenCart 3.
Which one do you use? I covered the differences between OpenCart versions in a bit more detail in a separate blog post: Which OpenCart version should you use (and how to find yours)?
Features. What does OpenCart offer you – the store owner?
If you're a store owner, OpenCart offers you a decent set of online store features out of the box.
OpenCart does most of the things you'd expect from a free and open source shopping cart project and you can extend it further through third party plugins.
Manage your product catalog
First and foremost, OpenCart lets you publish products and organize them into categories.
OpenCart store owners can use over 50 predefined product fields – from generic fields like name, description and price to unique product identifiers like SKU, UPC and EAN, dimensions, options, attributes and more.
To make it easier for your customers to find relevant products, OpenCart makes it possible to sort and filter products via filters.
You can also sell digital products through your OpenCart store – such as software, music or e-books – by uploading files and attaching them to individual products.
Process payments and handle shipping
OpenCart comes with some 50 different payment plugins and a dozen of shipping extensions out of the box. It can further be extended with hundreds of payment and shipping plugins from third party developers.
By default, OpenCart lets you use such payment solutions as PayPal, Authorize.Net, Skrill, 2Checkout, Amazon Payments and others – as well as a number of manual payment options like manual bank transfer and cash on delivery.
OpenCart also includes integrations with popular shipping gateways like UPS, Royal Mail, USPS and FedEx out of the box.
Once you've created your product catalog and configured payments and shipping, you can start accepting orders.
OpenCart offers store owners basic order and customer management.
First, you can receive, process and modify orders, generate invoices and print packing slips.
You can also view and modify customer accounts, assign customer to different customer groups and view their purchasing histories.
After having made an order with OpenCart store, customers can leave feedback about your products. Customer feedback is then publicly displayed on product pages.
Offer special prices and run discount campaigns
If you're running a promotion, OpenCart offers a number of options to do it.
First, you can define a special price for each of your products and limit it to specific dates if it's a limited-time offer.
Second, OpenCart lets you have bulk pricing for your products for wholesale buyers or to entice buyers to purchase larger quantities or specific products.
Finally, you can create discount coupon codes, send them out in a newsletter to specific customer groups and track your campaign performance through OpenCart's marketing campaign tracking.
Create custom pages and modify page layouts
We'll be honest here – OpenCart custom page management is nowhere near WordPress in terms of simplicity and user friendliness (this website is powered by WordPress – so, we have something to compare OpenCart to).
However, while not as convenient, OpenCart does make it possible for store owners to create custom store pages using the information module.
OpenCart also offers a basic page layout builder, so you can assign different modules to a few specific locations on individual pages.
So, it's not great – but it's there.
Generate reports and see analytics
When it comes to reporting, OpenCart offers about a dozen of basic reports for sales, products, customers and marketing campaigns:
Sales reports
Orders
Taxes
Shipping
Returns
Coupons
Product reports
Viewed products
Purchased products
Customer reports
Online
Activity
Searches
Orders
Reward points
Credit
Marketing reports
Marketing report
Affiliate report
Affiliate activity
Although there is no built-in analytics system in OpenCart, you can specify your Google Analytics tracking code to link your OpenCart store to your Google Analytics account (no gA Ecommerce tracking, though – but there's an extension for that).
Create a store with multiple languages
OpenCart comes with support for multiple languages by default – and makes it quite easy to build a store with multiple languages.
There are a few simple steps to adding a new language to your OpenCart store:
search for a decent translation pack for your language (via OpenCart project on Crowdin or the Languages category on OpenCart Marketplace, for example)
uploade the translation pack to your server (make sure you're downloading the right one for your OpenCart version)
enable the new language in OpenCart settings
OpenCart will use multiple languages in product descriptions, front store pages and admin-area interfaces.
However, we recommend to always get your OpenCart themes from ThemeForest (with a few exceptions – like if you're using a localized version of OpenCart).
In our experience, ThemeForest offers:
the best selection of quality OpenCart themes
a way to browse feedback by real customers
at least some vetting process of listings
a way for you to get a refund for poor quality products
Unfortunately, most other online marketplaces selling OpenCart themes have a worse track record (even the official OpenCart Marketplace) and can't be trusted this much.
The exceptions are online marketplaces within local OpenCart communities.
For example, OCStore is the most popular Russian localization of OpenCart and their forums are the most popular marketplace for OpenCart extensions and themes by Russian developers – you won't usually find these on ThemeForest.
First, they look great and will suite different store types.
Second, they are pretty good in terms of design and code quality. This is more important than you'd think it is – especially when you'll eventually need to customize a theme for you.
Finally, these themes have great developers and support teams behind them – if you run into issues, you'll get quality support – and get treated fairly.
Extensions. How can you extend your online store with additional features?
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Like most other open source shopping carts, OpenCart has an extension system. You can use OpenCart extensions to add new features to your online store.
There are thousands of OpenCart extensions available online for pretty much any purpose you can think of:
payment plugins
shipping integrations
marketing tools
performance and optimization extensions
improvements to product and order management
and lots of others
The question is – how much do you need OpenCart extensions to run a successful online store?
Do you need OpenCart extensions?
OpenCart itself offers a decent set of online store features to get started and you'll get some extra features by investing in a decent theme. Still, you'll usually need at least a few extensions as your online store grows.
In most cases, you'll be looking for OpenCart extensions that allow you to:
import and export your product catalog and order data
improve the performance of your store and optimize it for search engines
run marketing and promotion campaigns with OpenCart
generate better reports and look into advanced analytics
You'll also usually need a third party OpenCart extension if you want to use a specific payment gateway or a particular shipping method.
Where to find OpenCart extensions?
OpenCart extensions can be found all around the web, but we usually recommend sticking with the official OpenCart Marketplace when purchasing extensions.
While it does not offer any kind of vetting of extension developers, you'll usually be able to research the specific extension you're looking at and look through feedback from other customers before making the purchase.
You will also be able to request a refund from the OpenCart Marketplace team if you're not happy with your purchase.
In addition to OpenCart Marketplace, some of the other decent third party marketplaces to shop for OpenCart extensions are CodeCanyon and iSenseLabs Marketplace.
Is it difficult to install OpenCart extensions? How safe are they?
Installing most OpenCart extensions is pretty straight forward – you'll only need to upload the files and enable the extension through OpenCart admin area.
However, OpenCart extension system has a few architectural flaws. Unlike WordPress, which offers a safe and flexible hook system, most OpenCart extensions built with vQmod and OCMOD and will use low level code edits through xml.
This means that some extensions (especially the large ones and the poorly designed ones) will cause conflicts with other themes and extensions as they modify the same OpenCart code.
In the worst case, this will take your whole OpenCart store down – so be careful when choosing OpenCart extensions to install, don't use too many of them and only purchase extensions from credible developers through trusted sources.
Pricing. What will it cost you to build an online store with OpenCart?
OpenCart is absolutely free and can be downloaded from the official website and from GitHub.
This means that technically, you can create and run an online store with OpenCart at no cost.
That is, if you manage to find a decent free hosting provider and have enough technical skill or are willing to seek help in OpenCart communities.
However, if you're seriously intending to build a successful online store with OpenCart, you'll need to invest in a few things.
Hosting costs
Free hosting generally isn't something you'll want to rely on when running an online store. This means you need a paid hosting for your business.
Fortunately, OpenCart doesn't need much in terms of resources compared to larger shopping cart solutions like Magento. So, a very basic shared hosting will do for a start.
We at MultiMerch have had great experience with a few hosting providers:
A2Hosting (also the official hosting partner of OpenCart)
These are offering basic shared hosting starting at $4/month.
Theme and extension prices
OpenCart comes with a basic default store theme included, so you could use that. However, it's just not great.
You'll need a decent theme for a decent online store.
While you can find a third party theme for free, we strongly recommend investing in a decent theme. Not only your store will look great, but you'll also get support, regular updates and (usually) a set of extra features included in the theme price.
Premium OpenCart themes on ThemeForest start at $30.
When it comes to OpenCart extensions, the prices vary – but so does the quality.
While OpenCart extensions generally cost less than those for larger shopping cart systems and you'll find lots of free ones, the high quality OpenCart extensions will usually cost around $100 a piece.
However, in most cases you don't need expensive OpenCart extensions right away, especially if you've invested in a premium theme that comes with a lot of extra features itself.
Development costs
If you're a developer yourself, you may not need this.
If you're not a developer, you can look for free assistance on OpenCart Forums and other online communities.
However, we usually recommend having access to a technical person to help you run your OpenCart store. Why spend time digging through code when you can spend it growing your business?
The good news is – OpenCart is generally on the budget side when it comes to custom development (again, compared to larger solutions like Magento). OpenCart is also pretty simple in terms of code architecture – so even non-OpenCart developers will usually have no trouble working with it.
You can find OpenCart freelancers on Upwork starting at as low as $5 per hour, although the price range for decent developers usually starts at around $20 per hour.
Resources and communities. Where can you find support and information about OpenCart?
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OpenCart has been around for almost 10 years and is a well known system. This means you can usually find answers to most questions and issues online.
Where to find documentation and tutorials?
OpenCart's official documentation exists, but it's quite lacking.
Generally, you'll get more useful information on running an OpenCart store from unofficial resources.
Some of the decent places to look for OpenCart tutorials in addition to the official documentation are:
The first place to look for OpenCart help are the official OpenCart Forums. On OpenCart forums, you'll find subforums dedicated to support for different OpenCart versions, developer discussions, theme and extension support and even local subforums offering support in other languages.
In addition to OpenCart Forums, you may find answers to your OpenCart questions on Quora and StackOverflow.
If you've run into a generic OpenCart issue, you'll usually find that you're not the only one. Solutions to most of the generic OpenCart questions and issues are usually available on OpenCart Forums.
The things get a bit more difficult if you've stumbled upon something unique for your particular setup or if you're modifying OpenCart to suit your needs.
Still – in most cases, you'll be able to post your question on OpenCart Forums, Quora and StackOverflow and get it answered by the community.
Local OpenCart communities
In addition to large international OpenCart communities, you may also find a local OpenCart community in your own country and language.
Some local OpenCart communities are more active than others and often offer their own localizations of OpenCart.
A few of the prominent unofficial OpenCart communities and localizations in different countries are:
Depending on the quality of the localized version, you may find it easier to start with it instead of the original OpenCart if you're building an online store specific to your country.
Pros and cons. What are the goods and the bads of OpenCart?
Just like any other shopping cart system out there, OpenCart has its benefits and drawbacks.
Some of these articles are heavily biased, others have been relevant to specific OpenCart versions, but aren't relevant today.
Here, I tried to gather the most relevant benefits and drawbacks of OpenCart and present them in an unbiased way.
The main pros of OpenCart are:
simple architecture and no learning curve for developers – as a store owner, you'll usually be able to find a decent OpenCart developer to help you build your store
relatively low cost of themes, extensions and services – you won't need to spend a fortune to get started with OpenCart
low performance requirements for hosting – you'll be able to host your OpenCart store on a budget, at least for a start
relatively large international following and local communitites – if you have a question or an issue with OpenCart, it has most likely been already solved by someone else
extensive unofficial documentation and resources for store owners and developers – you'll find a number of guides, tutorials and books explaining the workings of OpenCart
The main drawbacks of OpenCart are:
lacking core feature set and sometimes poorly designed interfaces – as a store owner, you may find the job of managing your online store more complex, than you'd expect
no simple way of updating your setup, lack of upgrade documentation and often broken upgrade scripts – if you need to update your OpenCart store to a newer version, better hire a developer to do it for you
lack of a clear project roadmap by the OpenCart team – you don't usually know when the next OpenCart version is out and how much trouble it will cause you
lack of a robust plugin system and no strict guidelines for developers – always keep in mind that the next extension you're installing may cause a conflict with one of the other ones and bring your store down
lots of low quality themes and extensions and no quality assurance on the official extension marketplace – purchasing OpenCart extensions will be a hit and miss
While none of these things are deal breakers on their own, many of them will slow you down in launching your OpenCart store. In some cases, they just might make your life a nightmare if you're not prepared.
So, make sure to weigh these OpenCart pros and cons before deciding to go with OpenCart as your shopping cart software of choice.
Making the decision. Is OpenCart right for you?
Generally, OpenCart is a decent all-round open source shopping cart system, which can power both small and large online stores.
However, in some cases OpenCart will work better than the alternatives – and in other cases, you might want to look for something else.
Choose OpenCart if:
you're willing to build your own online store on a smaller budget – running an OpenCart won't cost you a fortune
you have at least basic technical skills or have access to a developer or a team – with some technical knowledge, you'll find OpenCart quite easy to work with
you're comfortable looking for solutions to problems online and seeking help on forums – you'll find OpenCart support online if you know where to look for it
you're building a store only and don't have plans to turn it into a larger multi-purpose website – OpenCart is a decent shopping cart system, but not a great website platform
Look for an OpenCart alternative if:
you need the easiest possible way to sell your stuff online without dealing with technical details – in this case, you'll be better off signing up for a hosted online store
you're building an enterprise-grade online store and have a team and budget to make it happen – you can do it with OpenCart, but there are more suitable enterprise shopping cart solutions
you're looking for a low maintenance online store which you can leave on autopilot – maintaining an OpenCart store is often quite a manual process
you want to make your online store part of a larger website, e.g. blog or a company website – OpenCart wasn't designed as a website builder, so doing things unrelated to selling products will require increasingly more work
You can definitely use OpenCart in all of these cases if you feel like, but it just doesn't make good business sense to use a tool for a purpose it wasn't designed for.
Alternatives. What other platforms can you use if OpenCart is not for you?
Did you go through OpenCart pros and cons and realized OpenCart won't do for your project?
Well, there's a number of decent OpenCart alternatives for different types of businesses available to choose from.
If you're looking for something similar to OpenCart, but different, try one of the popular OpenCart alternatives in the same weight class:
PrestaShop is another open source shopping cart built with PHP, but has a larger community and a team behind it
X-Cart is a commercial shopping cart system built with PHP, which has both downloadable and hosted plans
nopCommerce is an open source shopping cart solution built with ASP.NET and MS SQL Server
If you're an individual and don't wish to deal with technical stuff, try one of the hosted platforms or website builders (or even sell on regular online marketplaces):
Shopify is a hosted online store platform – sign up for Shopify to start your own online store in the cloud
Etsy is an online marketplace – create a profile with Etsy to sell your own (most handmade or vintage) products
Wix is currently regarded as the best website builder out there – use Wix to build your own multi-purpose website
Squarespace is another popular website builder – it is one of the oldest popular website builders with a track record
eBay is the original online marketplace and auction website – use eBay to sell anything to anyone if you're not concerned about having your own website
Amazon is the popular alternative to eBay – sell your products on Amazon if you have something to offer from Amazon's catalog
If you're building an online store that is only one part of a larger website, try WordPress with one of the popular e-commerce plugins:
WordPress with WooCommerce – use WooCommerce if you want to go with the largest and the most popular e-commerce plugin for WordPress
WordPress with Easy Digital Downloads – use EDD if you're building a smaller store or an online store for downloadable and license-based products
If you're building a larger online store, try some of the alternatives geared towards enterprise-level stores:
Magento is an open source shopping cart built with larger online stores in mind
BigCommerce is a hosted alternative to Magento if you prefer hosted cloud solutions
As you can see, there's a plenty of alternatives to choose from if you think OpenCart is not for you
Conclusion. Should you use OpenCart?
When it comes to open source shopping cart solutions, OpenCart is a decent all-rounder, all things considered.
It has a long track record of releases and has had its ups and downs over the past years.
Due its technical simplicity and general affordability, OpenCart has attracted a following among developers and store owners around the world.
Thus, OpenCart won't go anywhere anytime soon. Give it a try and see if it suits you – just keep in mind that OpenCart is not perfect. But this is true for everything out there, though.
There are 3 major OpenCart versions out there available to choose from.
What's the difference between them? Which version should you be using?
And if you already have an online store with OpenCart – how do you find out, which version you're using?
In this quick guide, I'll try to cover the differences between OpenCart versions and help you choose the right one.
How do you find which version of OpenCart you're using?
First things first. If you're already using OpenCart, you'll need to find out which version you're using.
Fortunately, OpenCart makes it quite simple.
Check the footer of your admin area
By default, OpenCart displays the version number you're using when you're logged into your OpenCart administration area.
Older versions of OpenCart (e.g. 1.x) also display the version number in the footer of the admin login screen, so you may not even need to log in (this was removed in OpenCart 2.x for security reasons).
So, simply log into your OpenCart admin account and check the page footer – you'll usually see the OpenCart version number displayed right there.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
However, this may not work in all cases. Your OpenCart version number might be hidden from the admin area footer for a number of reasons. For example, you may have a third party extension installed to hide your OpenCart version number – or your developer may have decided to do it manually for security reasons even from admins.
In this case, you'll need to look into the index.php file, which is the main file responsible for booting up OpenCart.
Look for VERSION inside the index.php file
All versions of OpenCart come with two index.php files – one in the root of your OpenCart folder and one inside the admin/ folder. You can use any of these.
Access the index.php file using FTP, CPanel File Manager or any other file manager you're comfortable with and search for VERSION.
You'll usually find it in the very beginning of the file and it will look something like this:
// Version
define('VERSION', '2.3.0.2');
This is your OpenCart version. Pretty simple, right?
Now, which version of OpenCart should you be using? We have a few suggestions for you.
What's the difference between OpenCart versions?
If you search long enough, you'll probably find a number of reasons to use and not to use each of the available OpenCart versions.
When choosing a version of OpenCart, there are a few good things to consider:
design and features
security and stability
development and updates
theme and extension support
Generally, all three versions of OpenCart come with a similar set of features – the core OpenCart feature set hasn't changed much since the initial OpenCart releases.
Design-wise, OpenCart 1.x looks a bit more dated than 2.x and 3.x, but this usually concerns administration interfaces, since you'll use a theme for your front store.
As to theme and extension support, you'll find that most OpenCart themes and extensions support OpenCart 2.x, many popular ones also support 3.x and some new ones don't support 1.x.
When it comes to security, stability and updates, things get a bit more tricky.
While OpenCart 1.x is the oldest version of OpenCart and has had its share of security issues in the past, most of them were ironed out by 1.5.6.4. On the other hand, it has been discontinued with the release of OpenCart 2.x, so don't expect any updates – including security updates.
When OpenCart 2.x replaced OpenCart 1.x, it brought new interface design to OpenCart – but also new issues to work around. By the version 2.3.0.2, however, OpenCart has become pretty stable and well-tested.
Today, although OpenCart 3.x is technically the newest and the best version of OpenCart, it has its own problems. It has also not been updated since July 2017.
All these things considered, which version of OpenCart should you use? Tough choice.
Here's what we at MultiMerch recommend as of February 2018.
OpenCart 1.x is the original version of OpenCart, which has reached its end of life
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The first official version of OpenCart was 1.1.1, which was released back in February, 2009.
OpenCart has achieved its mainstream success by versions 1.4 and 1.5 from 2010 to 2014.
The latest version of the 1.x line - OpenCart 1.5.6.4 - is still being used by many who were reluctant to switch to OpenCart 2.0 when it was first released in October 2014.
While earlier OpenCart 1.x releases were plagued by bugs and vulnerability issues, all (or most) of them have been ironed out by OpenCart 1.5.6.4.
Still, there's no major reason for you to be using a version of OpenCart that has reached its end of life and will be 4 years old in 2018.
Another thing to consider here is the fact that most new themes and extensions do not support OpenCart 1.x. This means you'll be stuck with the classics – the ones that were initially released for OpenCart 1.x and still support it. And thery're getting fewer.
OpenCart 2.x is a reliable successor to 1.x and is still widely used
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
OpenCart 2.0 was initially released in October 2014 and has received mixed feedback.
Among its main improvements were front store style and interface updates, a major admin interface redesign as well as a number of changes to some of OpenCart's core internals.
OpenCart 2 has also introduced OCMOD - its own version of the vQmod modification system. Due to some questionable decisions, OCMOD wasn't too well received by developers initially.
While it took OpenCart 2 time to mature (just like its early OpenCart 1.x predecessors), it has become quite a reliable system by the version 2.3.0.2 – which was also the last version in the OpenCart 2.x line.
As of 2018, OpenCart 2.3.0.2 is still considered one of the most stable OpenCart versions and recommended by some prominent OpenCart developers and community members.
We at MultiMerch use OpenCart 2.3.0.2 extensively for all of our projects. At this point, OpenCart 2.3.0.2 is the primary OpenCart version we test MultiMerch Marketplace with.
OpenCart 3.x is new and cutting edge, but it's not quite there yet
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
OpenCart 3 was released in 2017 as a successor to OpenCart 2 and has received mixed feedback, just like OpenCart 2 had a few years earlier.
While it has introduced a facelift for the default store theme and the admin area, most other core OpenCart features have stayed the same.
The biggest change that came with OpenCart 3 is not visible from the outside, though.
OpenCart 3 has introduced a completely new PHP template engine under the hood – it has switched from plain PHTML templates to Twig (which is a popular PHP template engine).
The change doesn't affect you as the store owner directly. However, it is a major issue for theme and extension developers as most of them have to be rewritten to support Twig. Is it a difficult process?
It's not too bad per se, but keep in mind that OpenCart 2.x is still the major stable version and there are stores running OpenCart 1.x. For OpenCart developers, this means the need to maintain at least 3 different variations of their products – while also dealing with compatibility between minor OpenCart releases (e.g. 2.0 and 2.2).
We've reviewed OpenCart 3 back in July 2017 and found it lacking and not yet ready for production marketplaces. Unfortunately, while development continues on GitHub, there have been no official OpenCart 3 releases since then.
This leaves you with two options – you can either use the officially released OpenCart 3.0.2.0 and miss out on 6 months of bugfixes or use a development version from GitHub and risk running into new problems.
In addition to these inconveniences, ultimately OpenCart 3 did not address any of the underlying problems – such as lack of a decent modification system, often inconvenient interfaces, no strict guidelines for theme and extension developers and missing important core features.
Conclusion. Which version of OpenCart should you use?
While I'm hoping this will soon change, as of February 2018 we can't recommend OpenCart 3 to MultiMerch marketplace owners.
Running an online marketplace is a more complex task than running a regular online store, so at least some stability is needed.
What about you – the regular OpenCart online store owners?
Here's what we at MultiMerch recommend when it comes to choosing an OpenCart version for your online store:
don't use OpenCart 1.x as you'll miss out on themes, extensions and support
use OpenCart 2.3.0.2 if you're looking for maximum stability and reliability
try OpenCart 3 if you're not afraid of running into issues and looking for solutions
I'll keep this post updated as we see OpenCart 3 evolve – hopefully sooner rather than later.
In this case, a good OpenCart theme will be among the very first things you'll need.
Fortunately, there are hundreds of OpenCart themes available on ThemeForest and third party marketplaces.
Unfortunately, many of them just aren't good.
In this guide, I'll try to cover some of the most important steps you'll go through when choosing an OpenCart theme.
Introduction. What to look for in an OpenCart theme?
In a perfect world, you should be able to just look at a few different themes, choose the one that looks the best and build a great online store with it.
However, it's not a perfect world we live in – there's much more than looks ti pay attention to when shopping for OpenCart themes.
Here are just some of the things you'll need to consider before diving into the world of OpenCart themes:
how much you're willing to invest in the theme
whether you want a generic (multi-purpose) theme or a one specific to your industry
which theme features are crucial for you and which ones aren't
what do you expect from the developers behind the theme in terms of support and code quality
finally – where to look for themes (and where not to)
We've been working with OpenCart themes for years – believe me, you'll make your life so much easier if you answer these questions first.
How much are you willing to invest? Are free themes worth it?
Going with a free theme may sound like a good idea. After all, OpenCart itself is free and open source – why not a free theme?
The thing is, many popular open source projects can afford to be free thanks to other means of monetization – from donations and extension revenues to sponsorships and investments from other companies.
Still, even popular open source projects often fail due to the lack of funding.
An individual theme developer won't have this luxury – and creating and maintaining a good OpenCart theme takes A LOT of work.
It will take thousands of hours of design, development, technical support, maintenance and updates to design, create and maintain a good product for a longer period of time.
Yet, the average OpenCart theme will cost you about $50 for a lifetime of updates and months of years of free support – less than what you'd pay to hire a professional developer or a designer for one hour of work.
If you're serious about building a successful and profitable online store, there's no reason not to invest in a high quality theme.
Do you need a multipurpose or a specific theme?
Multipurpose themes are great in that you can generally use them for pretty much any kind of project and it won't look too bad.
The drawback of multipurpose themes is that being fine at everything often means being great at nothing.
While it will obviously depend on your requirements, I advise you to ask yourself – am I building an online store or am I building the best, most beautiful online store in my industry?
In many cases, a multipurpose OpenCart theme will do just fine. In other cases, you may want to look for a theme that was designed for your particular online store type and your specific industry.
What features do you need in your theme? How many is too many?
Some OpenCart themes will make your store look great – but not much more than that.
Other themes will come with hundreds of extras – from page builders, layout editors and blogging systems to custom checkouts, live chats, messaging systems and anything you can imagine.
Should you go with the one that offers the most features just in case you need something in the future?
It depends. More features usually means more possibilities, but also more feature bloat, lower performance and more possible issues down the road.
Who are the developers? What's the quality of code and support?
When you're investing in an OpenCart theme, you're also investing in the team behind it.
No matter how good a theme is, sooner or later you'll need to seek help from theme developers – will they be there to help you out?
Is the code quality of the theme good enough that your own developer can work with it if needed?
Finally, can you trust the company behind the theme and are you willing to do business with them?
Purchasing themes from friendly and reliable developers is a good way to ensure long time success – make sure to check the reviews!
Where to look for themes? Is there a "go-to" place to buy OpenCart themes?
There are lots of websites selling OpenCart themes. Where do you search (and where you don't) when choosing your next theme?
A good rule of thumb is to purchase themes from reputable sources.
When it comes to themes and templates, ThemeForest is usually the first place to look into – OpenCart themes are not an exception.
While buying a theme from ThemeForest won't guarantee you'll get a great one, it will at least minimize the risk somewhat. You will also have a chance to browse real reviews before making the purchase and request a refund if something goes wrong.
Since most of the popular OpenCart themes are only available on ThemeForest and you have lots to choose from, we recommend sticking to it with a few exceptions.
There are definitely other third party marketplaces – TemplateMonster, OpenCart Marketplace and others. While these may sound enticing, they're often are plagued with low quality themes, so I wouldn't recommend them.
An exception to this rule are localized themes designed specifically for localized versions of OpenCart. These may not be available on ThemeForest – still, you'll usually get them from a well known local community marketplace (such as the official OpenCart community in your country).
Finally, I wouldn't recommend purchasing OpenCart themes directly from individual developer websites. If the theme is not available on one of the most popular marketplaces – there's usually a reason for this.
So – get your OpenCart themes from trusted sources and you'll be fine!
Doing the research. How do you pick and compare OpenCart themes?
Now that you know what you need, you're ready to start researching and comparing OpenCart themes.
What to look for when considering a theme and how to tell if it's a good one?
Here are just some of the things to pay attention to when comparing OpenCart themes:
sales numbers and ratings
customer reviews and discussions
look and feel, live demos and real life website examples
the teams behind the themes
system requirements, of course
There are definitely other factors, but I consider these to be the most important ones.
Pay attention to sales numbers and ratings, but do it carefully
While it may feel enticing to purchase one of the best sellers when choosing an OpenCart theme, sales numbers aren't everything.
In some cases, sales numbers simply mean that the theme has been available long enough to accumulate sales – even if the theme itself isn't that great.
The same goes for the average rating. Not all 5 star rated themes are great – they may simply be "good enough" for buyers not to think twice when rating them.
All else being equal, however, you'll definitely have a higher chance of success going with a top selling theme compared to a newly published one.
Reviews and discussions are crucial when evaluating a theme
ThemeForest lets you browse through buyer reviews and comments when researching themes. Don't skip this step!
Are there lots of buyer questions that went unanswered by the theme developer? That's a red flag.
Is the overall rating favorable, but you're seeing quite a few 1 star ratings complaining about poor code quality and support? That's a red flag.
Does the theme developer sound arrogant when responding to questions? That's a red flag.
On the other hand, if you're seeing favorable customer reviews praising code quality, personal support and a friendly attitude by the developer – that's a fairly good indicator that the developer is genuine.
Go through live demos and real life website examples
You can almost always find a link to the live demo of each of the OpenCart themes that are sold on ThemeForest. Do it!
What should you look for when checking live demos?
The overall quality of the demo. Broken demos and error messages aren't a good sign.
The look and feel of the theme. That's a bit subjective, but you can often tell a clean, modern, fresh looking and pixel perfect OpenCart theme from a "generic", sloppily designed one.
The performance. If you're seeing noticeably slow page loads on a live demo, you may have a hard time using it on a live store with tens of thousands of products.
When looking at live demos, make sure to check the admin theme controls as well.
There's no real reason for theme developers to restrict access to theme control panels – and neatly designed and powerful control panels are an indicator of theme's functionality.
Finally, while live demos are great, they're specifically designed to make a good impression.
So, try to find a few real life marketplaces running the theme you're looking into and see if they look as good as the live demo.
Research the developers and the team behind the theme
When researching the developers behind the theme, try to find other products offered by the same developer.
In many cases, quality theme developers will either focus on a single theme or work on a few different themes for different marketplace types.
For example, the same developer may work on an OpenCart theme for electronics marketplaces and a different theme for fashion marketplaces.
If you're seeing the same theme developer sell a dozen different themes looking pretty much the same, it may indicate they're just putting quantity over quality – which will also often reflect on support quality.
Make sure to check the system requirements and documentation
ThemeForest requires theme developers to specify the technologies used in and required by their themes, as well as displays the quality of the documentation and the list of included files.
A good OpenCart theme will usually:
use responsive layouts and Bootstrap as its framework
support at least OpenCart 2.3.0.x
be well documented
include high resolution images and layered PSD files in addition to templates
You may also want to look into the official theme's website – if there is one in addition to the ThemeForest listing. This isn't a must have thing, but is usually nice to have as it may contain additional resources and documentation.
If you're using complex third party extensions – such as multi vendor OpenCart extensions – you might want to ask the theme's developer whether or not they'll be compatible.
Finally, make sure the theme supports your version of OpenCart – there are three different versions of OpenCart that aren't cross-compatible.
Making the decision. How to choose the best OpenCart theme?
Ideally, your perfect OpenCart theme will have clean and well documented code, modern responsive layouts with hi-res imagery, regular updates and a friendly developer team to support you if something goes wrong.
Here's a quick summary of the things you'll need to decide on before proceeding with the research:
free vs premium
multipurpose vs specific
basic vs full blown
support, documentation, code quality
where to look
Once you've decided on these crucial things, you can proceed with the research!
Your next ideal OpenCart theme will:
be a decent seller in terms of sales numbers
have a good overall rating
have lots of reviews with zero or few negative ones
offer both live demos and real life websites to look at
be created by great and friendly developers
obviously, match your system requirements
At this point, you'll usually have a a few themes on your wishlist. How do you ultimately choose the one?
Here are a few of our tips to choosign a great OpenCart theme:
premium themes are better than free ones
multipurpose themes will work ok in most cases, decent industry-specific themes will work great for specific cases
more features isn't always better, although it's nice to have at least the basic ones
good documentation will save you a ton of time in the future
swift support is a must – beware of reviews complaining about bad support
clean code is a benefit – it's not a deal breaker, but is nice to have when you or your developer will need to customize the theme
the more sales numbers the better chance of having your issues resolved in a quick manner
live demos are great, real life websites are even better
friendly and human responses from developers are an indicator of team's personality (compared to generic "please submit a support ticket" replies)
With this knowledge at your disposal, you can now go and start searching for your next perfect OpenCart theme!
P.S. Our personal list of favorite OpenCart themes
We have our own list of themes that we love to work with here at MultiMerch.
Selecting and implementing the right online marketplace monetization strategy is a question of life and death when you're building an online marketplace.
Here at MultiMerch, we've seen many beautifully designed marketplaces fail to generate revenues and die a miserable death.
In this post, I would like to lay out all of the monetization strategies for online marketplaces we've learned about while building MultiMerch to help you choose the right one.
Sign up fees
Sign up fees are simple – a sign up fee is a flat payment collected from your sellers when they apply for an account to sell through your platform.
Collecting a sign up or registration fee is one of the most straight forward marketplace monetization ways – it doesn't require a complex payment gateway integration and you're collecting the payment in the very early stage of your seller's journey.
Technically, you can charge sign up fees even without having an active, thriving marketplace – as long as you can sell your idea to your vendors and convince them it makes sense for them to join you early.
And it often does if the fee is affordable – even if your platform doesn't have a lot of customers yet, it may still make sense for vendors to join and publish their products even just for exposure.
Still, you'll need to be convincing to make your sellers pay up upfront.
Here are a few tips for collecting sign up fees, especially in the early stages:
make sure the sign up fee is affordable and feasible for your sellers
think of the benefits your vendor will gain by signing up with your platform – and list the benefits for vendors clearly!
create an incentive for early bird sign ups – make your vendors want to sign up early
offer a personal approach to vendors signing up – after all, they're investing in your idea
It's also possible to defer the sign up fee payment – for example, ClickBank charges you a $49.95 "activation charge" only after your first product is approved. While still essentially a sign up fee, it gives vendors a bit of assurance they'll only pay when they're ready to start selling.
If implemented properly, sign up fees can be a motivator for legit vendors and a safeguard against dummy signups.
Pros of sign up fees:
feasible in the early stages
simple implementation
Cons of sign up fees:
doesn't scale well in the long run
you'll need to be really convincing
Thus, while collecting marketplace sign up fees is a decent monetization strategy in the early stages of your project when selling fees aren't feasible due to low sales volumes, you should combine them with something else to make it work in the long run.
Recurring payments/subscriptions
Subscriptions are a popular monetization strategy – and not just in the online marketplace field.
From digital products such as software, books, music and movies to services and even regular sales (think leases and installments), subscriptions rule the world – and for a reason.
First, subscriptions make it possible to split a large payments into multiple smaller ones, which are affordable. Shelling out $700 for a copy of Adobe Lightroom for personal use? Probably not. Subscribing to use Lightroom for $10 a month? Sounds like a bargain!
Second, recurring payments are a great way to help keep the project funded and evolving over the longer period of time. Doesn't matter if you're building an online marketplace or a mobile app – charging a subscription will let you keep your product maintained and improving as long as your users think it's worth paying for. Selling it for one time payments? Good luck trying to maintain it for 5 years.
The most important rule of subscriptions is simple – as long as your users are getting more value out of your services than it costs them keep being subscribed, they'll keep paying. The same applies to online marketplaces – your vendors won't mind paying $10 if this earns them more than that.
While implementing subscriptions is a more complex feat than collecting one time sign up payments, you'll usually find many popular payment solutions that are offering them out of the box. You can combine them, too.
If you're considering monetizing your online marketplace via subscriptions, here are a few tips:
make sure your vendors are be getting more value than it costs to keep being subscribed
offer a free trial if technically possible
describe exactly what is included and how you'll collect payments
try offering a few different plans with different options and a way to seamlessly switch between them (more on this below)
have a plan to keep your vendors engaged
offer incentives for larger payments at once (e.g. 15% off for a yearly vs monthly plan)
The actual payment periods and subscription rates will depend on the industry and the products or services you're offering, but weekly, monthly or yearly payments are the most common ones.
Pros of subscription payments:
great monetization strategy in the long run
in many cases more affordable than one-off payments
Cons of subscription payments:
more complex to implement than one-off payments
difficult to implement in specific industries
If you can find a way to implement subscription payments in your marketplace and make sure your sellers gain value out of their subscriptions – you'll do great!
Product listing or publishing fees
Product listing fees is one of the most common monetization strategies with online marketplace platforms.
Along with sign up fees, subscription payments and selling fees, you'll usually consider product publishing fees when you're just starting out.
A listing fee is a flat or a variable amount collected from the vendor when they list their products.
There's a number of different ways for a marketplace to calculate product listing fees:
flat amount, e.g. $0.35 per product listing
price-based amount, e.g. 5% of product's listing price
category-based fee calculation, e.g. $25 to list a product in the Automotive category
feature-based calculation, e.g. +$5 for each additional product category
any combination of the above
Listing fees can be collected at once for each individual product or combined into a single invoice covering multiple products.
Here are a few tips to consider when implementing listing fees in your online marketplace:
make it easy for sellers to pay the fees – especially if you want to encourage them to list lots of products
provide the sellers with a convincing argument why it pays off to list on your platform – via statistics, for example
if you use price-based calculations and work with expensive products, consider maximum fee caps
While product publishing fees will work great in marketplaces for handmade or one of a kind products where vendors offer unique items, they may not work as well in regular retail online malls.
This monetization strategy is also popular among classified and ad platforms that don't process transactions and thus can't collect selling fees.
Pros of listing fees:
straight forward approach that is clear to sellers
will work great for one-off, unique and handmade marketplaces as well as classified platforms
the way to go if you don't process transactions and can't collect selling fees
Cons of listing fees:
won't work as well in the early stages while the platform is still gaining traction
not suitable for all industries
no products = no revenues
Before implementing listing fees, make sure it's a viable strategy in your industry – if none of your competitors are doing it, perhaps it's not.
Selling fees
Selling or sales fees is pretty much the most popular monetization way among online store and marketplace owners – and also one of the most difficult ones to implement correctly, in my opinion.
In an online marketplace with selling fees enabled, the platform collects a share of each sale or each order before paying out the vendor.
Both flat selling fees and percentage-based fees (or a combination of both types) are common.
The exact way you'll collect selling fees from the vendors in your marketplace will depend on the payment flow you're using.
There are three common payment flows in an online marketplace:
direct payments, where customer's payment goes directly to vendor's account
aggregated payments, where your platform collects payments from your customers and then distributes them to vendors in the form of payouts
split or parallel payments, where the payment processor splits customer's payment between your vendors and your platform at checkout
With direct payments, you have no way of collecting the selling fee at the time of payment as the payment is made exclusively between the customer and the seller. You can still collect the selling fee as a reverse payment by invoicing your seller – either automatically at the time of sale or at regular intervals, e.g. monthly.
In case of aggregated payments, you'll keep track of the selling fees owed by the sellers, but collect them at the time of your payout to the seller. Depending on the amount of business your platform gets and the payment methods used you can either track the fee amounts manually or via toools designed to make it easier, such as seller transactions and balances.
Split or parallel payments usually take more time and technical skills to implement, but then make the process of collecting selling fees simpler than the rest of payment flows. In most cases, the payment processor you'll use to process split payments will let you handle selling fee collection automatically at checkout.
There are a few different levels you can apply different fee rates to when designing your fee structure:
marketplace-wide fees, e.g. $0.35 + 3% on each sale
different rates based on plans or performance, e.g. 1.5% for power sellers, 3% for everyone else
individual rates for individual sellers – consider this if you're running a smaller niche marketplace
different selling fee rates for different product categories or even individual products
If you're building a marketplace platform with a tiered membership system, you'll have greated flexibility when planning your selling fees.
When considering whether or not to implement selling fees in your online marketplace, remember the following things:
selling fees scale well as your sales grow, but don't work as great in the early stages of the project
low selling fee rates may be enticing to your vendors, but might not be sustainable for yourself
when implementing selling fees, don't forget to take your own processing fees into account
Pros of selling fees:
they're great when scaling – 3% of $100 is $3, but 3% of $1,000,000 is $30,000
they'll work well in large retail online malls where quantity is more important, than quality
Cons of selling fees:
they're more difficult to implement compared to other monetization types
they won't work well in the early stages when your platform doesn't have many sales yet
Selling fees will get your online marketplace to success in the long run – just make sure you have something else to rely on while you grow.
Payment processing or transaction fees
While similar to selling fees at a first glance, charging payment processing or transaction fees brings selling fees to the next level.
In case of selling fees, you as the marketplace only get a cut of the order at the time of the sale.
However, there are many more payment types that will happen in a regular online marketplace in addition to order payments:
sign up and listing payments from vendors
recurring membership payments
payments for promotions and featured listings
earning payouts to vendors, referrals and affiliates
payments from advertisers
Under normal circumstances, you'll use a third party payment processor to handle these – and pay the processing fee to the payment processing company.
While the payment processing rates differ between companies and industries, even a 1% fee makes difference when you're processing millions in transactions.
Pros of charging your own payment processing fees:
earns your marketplace a great amount of money when scaling up
ultimately you don't depend on third party payment processors
Cons of charging your own payment processing fees:
difficult to implement from the technical perspective
shifting your processing fees to vendors will make them unhappy
If you can find a way to keep most of the transactions within your platform and charge the processing fee yourself, you'll save yourself a great deal of money when scaling up.
Featured or promoted products and stores
Promoting products and profiles is a great way to give your vendors that extra exposure after you've gotten your marketplace going.
Marketplace promotions can come in a few different forms, such as:
sponsored products on other product pages and in categories
promoted products in cart and at checkout
featured vendor profiles and products on the main page
promoted blog posts and newsletter mentions
Sponsored products will usually work best in product-focused marketplaces (such as eBay or Amazon, where the product is more important than the vendor), while featured vendor profiles are a great way to engage customers in vendor-centric marketplaces (where vendors sell unique or handmade products and build relationships with your customers).
When it comes to collecting payments for promotions, you can choose a few different approaches:
have vendors pay for individual product and profile promotions (and set different rates for different promotion periods and locations)
include product promotions in a higher-priced membership plan
implement a credit system to let vendors purchase credit in bulk and use it for promotions at their discretion
offer free promotions as part of a wider marketing campaign to attract new customers
If you decide to include paid featured listings and promotions in your marketplace monetization strategy, here are a few tips by MultiMerch:
make sure your offer to sellers is clear and makes sense for them – if it doesn't pay off, they'll be reluctant to do it in the future
consider the shopping experience of your customers who may be wary of sponsored products – will you promote everything or have some kind of validation in place?
don't forget about the technical part of implementing sponsored listings – can your current system handle them out of the box or will you need to have it developed first?
don't overdo sponsored listings so as to make your marketplace unusable for the organic purchase flow
Pros of sponsored listings and promotions:
sponsored listings scale well as your marketplace grows – the more exposure, the higher price that your vendors will be ready to pay
promotions are a flexible monetization strategy – the more placements you can arrange, the more combinations you'll be able to offer to your vendors
Cons of sponsored listings and promotions:
allowing promotions of low quality products may negatively affect your customers' experience
implementing featured listings may require custom development if your system doesn't support it
you'll need to convince your sellers that it's worth for them before they'll be ready to pay for it
You can implement paid sponsorships and product promotions in virtually any industry and marketplace type – just make sure you do it right!
Ads from third party advertisers
This one's a bit different from promoted products or sellers – in contrast to your marketplace members, here you allow third party advertisers to promote their products, services or websites.
In general, the approach to ads is similar to the previous case – you have a number of ad placements and charge advertisers to publish their ads.
There are a few ways you can implement ads in your online marketplace:
using inhouse ad software
using third party services, such as AdSense
manage ads manually
Depending on your requirements and your platform capabilities, you'll use one or more of the advertising models to collect payments from your advertisers:
CPI/CPM (cost per impression)
PPC/CPC (pay-per-click/cost per click)
cost per period, e.g. $125 daily or weekly for the homepage ad
cost per post, e.g. $250 per blog post
If you don't use a dedicated advertising system, the last one will be the easiest one to begin with – as long as you have at least some activity in your marketplace.
A few of the different ad types and placements you may consider:
display advertising, such sa graphics and banners
text advertising, e.g. blog posts or newsletter mentions
mixed advertising, such as sponsored third party product listings
When considering third party ads to monetize your online marketplace, keep the following things in mind:
ads essentially drive visitors away from your website – is it worth it for your platform?
you don't always control the content promoted by third party ads – how will it affect the overall experience of your marketplace members?
if you don't have a built-in ad system, implementing one will require some technical skills – can your team handle it?
Pros of ads:
if implemented properly, relevant native advertising may provide the extra value to your marketplace members
marketplace monetization through ads scales well as long as you can reach the relevant advertisers in your industry
unlike affiliate and referral systems, you don't have to implement revenue sharing with vendors for advertisement
Cons of ads:
low quality non-native advertising will negatively affect the experience of your users and visitors
successfully implementing and managing online marketplace advertising requires a cooperation of multiple members of your team
Advertisement is a huge, but often controversial industry – if you go with monetizing your marketplace through ads, make sure you know what you're doing.
Pay per lead or lead fees
If you're running a contract-based or service-based marketplace and don't process orders through your platform, charging lead fees might be a viable monetization strategy for you.
In this case, your vendors will be able to browse the list of potential clients or deals, but will need to pay to view the details or an individual deal.
When it comes to charging the lead fee, you have two distinct options:
charge to access each lead
charge for successful deals only
In the first case, your vendors will have to pay to access the details of the lead or the deal, whether or not the outcome is good for them.
With the latter option, you'll only charge your vendors if the deal with this particular lead goes through – however, here you'll need to have some control over the deal flow.
Bidding fees for auction marketplaces
Bidding fees are similar to the pay per lead strategy, but in this case you charge the other side – the customers.
The most common case of bidding fees are penny auction type marketplaces, where customers pay a small amount to bid on the product.
If you're running a penny auction marketplace, charging bidding fees will be a mandatory step as it's the primary monetization strategy for penny auctions.
In case you've got a different marketplace type – bidding fees are probably not for you.
Grow your marketplace through affiliates and referrals
While not a monetization strategy per se, running affiliate and referral systems will increase your marketplace customer and user base, thus driving sales.
Depending on your marketplace software capabilities and your requirements, you can choose either of these or run both at the same time.
The main difference between affiliates and referrals is:
in affiliate marketing, third party advertisers promote your marketplace products without being members themselves
in referral marketing, existing marketplace members refer new visitors to your marketplace based on their own experience
While running an affiliate system will usually result in a greater reach, it won't necessarily provide great results in terms of revenues.
Since affiliates are basically third party advertisers, they have a relatively low trust score among their audiences.
On the other hand, allowing your existing members refer new users to your marketplace will let you build an organic ecosystem and a community, provided you maintain the quality of your marketplace at a proper level.
If you're considering implementing a referral or an affiliate system of your own, here are a few things to consider:
while an affiliate system may be a good idea for larger marketplace, an organic referral system is great from the start as long as your existing users are happy
don't forget about fees and revenue sharing – if you sell products by third party vendors, who'll pay the affiliate/referral commission?
building your own referral system from scratch will be a complex endeavour – can you handle it?
Pros of affiliate and referral systems:
rewaring happy users to refer their friends will help you build an ecosystem within your marketplace organically
implementing an affiliate system may work good on larger marketplaces
Cons of affiliate and referral systems:
affiliates will often generate low quality traffic
you'll need to consider revenue sharing if you're selling products by third party vendors through affiliates
Referral programs will usually work well in most industries, affiliate systems are a bit more difficult – in any case, do your homework before rushing to implement these.
Bonus: how to design a tiered membership system
If you're going to implement sign up, recurring, listing and selling fees in your online marketplace, you'll usually want to create a few different tiers for your marketplace members.
In this section, I'd like to share a few helpful tips on designing a tiered membership system.
There are a few differentiators you can use when designing your plans.
Fee rates and selling restrictions:
different sign up fee rates for different plans
lower product listing fees for higher tier plans
more expensive recurring plans with more features
lower selling fees for power sellers
maximum orders or maximum revenue per plan, possibly with automatic tier switching
While you're here, you'll also need to consider whether or not to offer free and freemium plans, as well as free trials.
When it comes to product listing, there are a few product publishing restrictions (or benefits) you can use to differentiate your plans:
allow a maximum number of product listings per plan, e.g. 15 listings per week
specify the maximum number of categories sellers can list to, e.g. one category per product at the lowest plan
restrict product publishing to specific categories only and unlock the rest at higher plans
allow sellers to upload up to a maximum number of product images and charge for additional images
specify minimum and/or maximum prices sellers can define for their products, e.g. only premium plan members can list expensive products
You'll need to be careful here, though – restrict your plans too much and watch members leave to a more open competitor.
In addition or instead to product listing restrictions, you can grant or restrict access to whole features depending on your seller's plan, such as:
limits on storage space, e.g. 200 MB on image storage for sellers on the free plan
discount codes and gift cards, e.g. only paid members are allowed to configure coupon codes and create gift cards
staff accounts, e.g. allow team access to seller control panels on higher tiers
advanced analytics, reporting and sales tools – free members only get basic reporting and no access to advanced marketing tools
manual order creation – allow premium plan subscribers to manually create orders for their customers
third party shipping rate calculation – let paid tier sellers access custom shipping rate calculators for easier listing
automatic fraud analysis – grant premium sellers access to your platform's fraud tools for their peace of mind
integrations with third party solutions – restrict free members to basic tools and enable integrations with custom tools for paid sellers only
support level by your company – provide personal, live support to sellers subscribed to higher tier plans
social features, blogging, custom websites and so on
Basically, there's quite a lot of possible features you can use as a differentiator when designing the membership system for your online marketplace.
The main thing I'd recommend keeping in mind here is not to go overboard with restrictions and end up with a system that's unusable for your sellers.
As long as you don't forget about your sellers and keep your membership levels feasible for them, they'll be happy to switch to the next level when they're ready.
Which monetization model is right for you?
When it comes to online marketplace monetization, there's no "one size fits all" approach.
So, when designing a monetization strategy for your project, keep the following factors in mind:
your industry and the competitors – if nobody else is doing what you have in mind, you could be wrong (or a visionary)
the size and life cycle of your marketplace – some monetization strategies work well in the early stages, for others you'll need large selling and traffic volumes
the intricacies of your target market, geographical location and culture – what works great in one region, may not turn out so well somewhere else
In most cases, I'd recommend starting your monetization journey with exploring sign up fees, product listing fees, selling fees and featured listings going deeper into advanced monetization.
Last week, I shared this screenshot on Facebook. This is our team working together in RealtimeBoard to discuss and plan improvements to MultiMerch marketplace administrator's and sellers' dashboards.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Here's a little story behind this.
Dashboards have become available in MultiMerch this summer – as part of the MultiMerch 8.9 release. However, little thought was put into design back then.
So, while MultiMerch does display a whole lot of data for admins and sellers in their dashboards, it doesn't look too pretty.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
So much text! Boring.
OpenCart's default dashboard looks way nicer in comparison, even though it provides less useful info.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Fortunately, I've recently gotten to realize that implementing rich functionality is only one part of building a great product – appealing design and usability is at least as important.
Thus, we'll now be devoting much more time to doing user experience studies and focusing on design and usability when implementing new features and updating the existing ones.
And we're not limiting this to MultiMerch features – OpenCart has a lot of bad interfaces that need improvement. We'll fix them, too.
While we're at it, here's an updated screenshot with a bit more going on with MultiMerch dashboards.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
That's all I can share for today, but stay tuned – it won't be long now!
OpenCart 3 was released in 2017 almost a year ago – back then, we gave it a try concluded it doesn't offer much in terms of tangible benefits to store owners compared to OpenCart 2.
Today, we're giving OpenCart 3 another try to see if something has changed and if it makes sense to switch to OpenCart 3 – or stick with the proven and stable OpenCart 2.
This is an April, 2018 update to the original blog post published in June, 2017.
New features in OpenCart 3? Not too many.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Generally, OpenCart's team is known for publishing new releases without much fuss and without much information except for the release blog posts.
We've went ahead and assembled the details about the new features introduced in OpenCart 3 – as well as about the ones we expected that didn't get introduced.
Extensions can now be installed via the in-app extension marketplace
OpenCart 3 comes with an in-app extension marketplace, which will make it possible for store owners to download and purchase OpenCart extensions directly from the administration area.
While this sounds good in theory, OpenCart still lacks a unified standard for third party extension developers.
Most popular extensions come with OCMOD/vQmod code, custom setup procedures and possible conflicts with OpenCart core, third party themes and other plugins – which means a high chance of ending up with a broken store after installing a custom plugin.
OpenCart now supports Crowdin translation integration
OpenCart 3 now includes a new section in the admin area that allows looking for and installing translations from Crowdin, a crowdsourcing translation project.
This should make it easier for store owners to contribute to and install new translations directly from Crowdin.
So, to run a decent OpenCart-based store in most languages store owners will still need to turn to professional third party translations available elsewhere.
Theme and language editors let store owners edit the files directly
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
OpenCart 3 makes it possible to edit theme and language files via Theme and Language editors.
On one hand, this means it will now be easier for OpenCart store owners to modify their stores without having to resort to file editing via FTP.
On the other hand, modifying template and language files is still a technical process and doing this without any technical knowledge will often lead to – again – a broken store.
Multilingual SEO, but no microdata
OpenCart 3 has added an option to specify SEO slugs in multiple languages – as well as a handy SEO keyword editor for the store's administration.
However, a few crucial SEO features are still missing from OpenCart 3, such as microdata support for rich snippets and social media sharing and support for URL prefixes.
This means OpenCart 3 store owners still depend on third party extensions if they're intending to run search engine friendly online stores with OpenCart.
This also means MultiMerch's default SEO system with support for Schema.org, Open Graph and product URL prefixes would still be a better option out of the box.
Still, OpenCart 3 comes with its regular 5 step checkout.
This means OpenCart store owners still rely on third party theme and extension developers to implement a dozen different quick checkout versions – with all of the support and compatibility consequences.
Still no analytics and marketing tools
If you're a store owner running an OpenCart online store, you're out of luck when it comes to sales and marketing tools to track and enhance your performance.
As of 2018, OpenCart out of the box still offers no support for:
Google Analytics' Ecommerce Tracking
Abandoned cart reminders
Automated coupon generation
A convenient way to generate promotional campaigns
While these aren't deal-breakers since you can always find a third party extension to do it for you, it would be great if OpenCart itself could step up their game – it's an e-commerce platform, after all.
From my first tests, it looks like OC 3.0.0.0 is visible slower than OC 2.x.
I haven't had time to analyze it (maybe in the next days), but is it because of the twig?
everything goes to the crapper for speed.
stupid move!
OpenCart 3.0 is noticeably slower that OpenCart 2.3. Has any profiling been done to determine the areas that should be targeted for improvement?
It is currently not clear whether this is due to Twig or something else, but store owners with larger stores will need to keep an eye on performance.
Unfortunately, OpenCart 3 still doesn't offer much in terms of performance optimization out of the box – you'll have to rely on third party extensions for your CDN integrations, style and script minification and advanced caching.
Still no proper update process – one year later, there's no sure-fire way of updating to OpenCart 3
Still, even when the upgrade script is updated, the issue with third party themes, extensions and modifications remains open:
Upgrades, especially from 2.x to 3.x are the equivalent of buying a new car. Your existing paint job, wheels, mods, etc are not carried over to your new car. They have to be rebuilt. Keep this in mind before you think about upgrading. It is also recommended that you use an upgrade service by someone who is familiar with the upgrade process as they can save you time and money in the long run.
It appears that live store OpenCart 2 to OpenCart 3 upgrade will again be a tedious manual process, pretty much like upgrading OpenCart 1 to OpenCart 2.
What about the design and usability in OpenCart 3? Nothing new.
Not much has changed in terms of design in OpenCart 3 compared to OpenCart 2:
The administration panel has received a slight color scheme facelift
Most admin-area interfaces have remained the same
There's nothing new for customers, either
We've compared the design of OpenCart 3 interfaces to OpenCart 2 to see if OpenCart 3 offers something worth upgrading in terms of usability.
The administration panel has a new color scheme, but not much more
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
The OpenCart administration panel has received a minor facelift – mostly the new color scheme and the sidebar filter panel (although we'd prefer it at the top to leave more space for the data tables).
Apart from the color scheme and the filters, the admin-area interfaces haven't changed much:
there's still no dynamic table sorting without refreshing the page
there's still no one page order or product editing so you'll have to click through tabs
the default OpenCart 3 admin dashboard hasn't changed compared to OpenCart 2
While you can always use third party extensions for custom admin-area features, it would be great if OpenCart kept up with the times in terms of its interfaces.
Nothing new for customers – same old default theme, same old demo data
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
According to OpenCart's GitHub commits, a new 2018 theme was considered at some point, but was apparently scrapped.
Thus, OpenCart 3 comes with pretty much no front store design changes, with the exception of the h1 tag with store's name added to the page header for some reason.
Finally – and most importantly, in my opinion – there are no interface improvements to customer accounts.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
This means, OpenCart 3 still offers store owners:
the same boring customer account navigation
the same order listing with no product details
the same quirks with account pages containing a single element
While you can argue that the default theme and the demo products don't matter much since no one's gonna use them anyway, the customer account interfaces look really sad.
Turns out, only 11 of the 30 best selling OpenCart themes support OpenCart 3, while OpenCart 2.x and 1.x is at 19.
In addition to this, only 4 of the 30 bestsellers support all three OpenCart versions.
The technical things – what's changed for OpenCart 3 developers?
Since neither the features nor the designs have changed much in OpenCart 3, only the technical part remains – and it's the one that has most of the changes (for good or bad).
Twig is the new PHP template language
This one's mostly intended for developers, but OpenCart now makes Twig the default template language instead of pure phtml.
This means third party extensions and templates will need to be rewritten into Twig before they can be used with OpenCart 3.
While many developers have been working on this since early OpenCart 3 alpha versions, it may still take months before most third party extensions and themes are available for OpenCart 3 in Twig.
A few minor changes for developers
In addition to the major Twig change, OpenCart 3 has also introduced a number of smaller changes that affect developers:
Third party extension developers are only allowed to keep files in a few specified locations, compared to the whole file system in OpenCart 2
Language files are now being loaded implicitly, so you don't have to do hundreds of manual variable assignments each time
Emails are now being sent via OpenCart Events
Admin reports are now extensions, which opens up the possibility of third party reporting extensions
I'll have to agree that most of these changes are good for most developers – it's also good to see OpenCart starting to enforce at least some rules for third party extensions.
While most of them seem to have been fixed in the current development version, there were no official OpenCart releases published since July 2017.
If you're a store owner starting out with OpenCart 3.x, you'll have to pull the bugfixes from GitHub or OpenCart Forums comments manually, which doesn't always work out:
I tried to apply both fixes suggested, and it did not seem to fix the problem. There was no change. Without this fix, I am dead in the water. It is impossible to setup a payment plan of any kind.
This bug means that anyone trying to install opencart for the first time will be unable to complete the install and setup a simple payment gateway. :( :( :(
It seems this bug has been around for a while. Has anyone figured out a way around this issue???
Unfortunately, the OpenCart 3 roadmap is still unclear.
It seems that active development of OpenCart 3.1 is underway on GitHub apparently with support for Bootstrap 4, but there are no official release dates or an official roadmap.
Conclusion: OpenCart 3 vs OpenCart 2 in 2018?
When it comes to major OpenCart releases, we recommend not to upgrade right away and wait until the new version matures and becomes stable enough.
With all this in mind – should you be using OpenCart 3 in 2018?
For the store owners, OpenCart 3 looks pretty bleak:
there's no way to easily upgrade from OpenCart 2
there are no new features in OpenCart 3 with tangible benefits compared to OpenCart 2
no major usability improvements in either store front or administration area
no performance improvements, some reports on decreased performance
no official bugfix releases since July 2017, the future is still unclear
For the developers, OpenCart 3 has a few major downsides in addition to a few minor improvements:
Twig is a pain to switch to, especially for developers behind larger extensions
OpenCart 3 is yet another version to maintain compatibility with, considering that OpenCart 2 is still widely used
Implicit language loading is a good thing while the extension folder restrictions should make creating poor code more difficult
If the upcoming OpenCart 3.1 does introduce Bootstrap 4, it will be another major change for theme and extension developers to adapt to
In 2018, just shy of one year later after the official OpenCart 3.0 release, our verdict for OpenCart store owners is – stick with OpenCart 2.3.0.2 and you'll save yourself a great deal of headache!
Meanwhile, let's wait for OpenCart 3.1 and see what it brings.
While we've been introducing MultiMerch updates on a regular basis, the overall design and features of seller accounts, stores and profiles dates back to early MultiMerch 6 versions.
To bring MultiMerch up to date with the current standards, we're working on the following improvements for sellers:
New designs for seller account navigation
Improved design of seller lists, profiles and stores
Therefore, we'll be focusing on improving marketing and promotion tools as part of MultiMerch 9:
Paid sponsored products and seller stores
Automated product recommendations to increase sales
Better discount campaign management for sellers
Advertising tools for marketplace owners
Improvements to badge and discount coupon systems
Wishlists, favorite sellers and following seller accounts
Implementing advanced product publishing features
OpenCart handles regular product publishing well enough, but we want to take product management in MultiMerch to the next level through some of the following improvements:
Multiple sellers and prices per product
Additional product fields and restrictions
A possibility to save unfinished product drafts and create product templates
Different types of products (services, bookings, classifieds, licenses, auctions)
Integration with cloud storage services (AWS)
Upgrading the payment system and order management
Payments are the heart of every online marketplace.
More reports and support for the export of reports
Improving marketplace performance and optimization
The MultiMerch SEO system has been originally designed to make MultiMerch search engine friendly out of the box.
As part of MultiMerch 9, we'll continue our work on improving our SEO and performance tools:
More SEO improvements (microdata on all pages, meta templates etc.)
SEO tools for marketplace owners
Performance improvement tools
Upgrading the multi vendor shipping system
Last but not least, we have our marketplace owners in mind who run MultiMerch marketplaces dealing with shipping of tangible products by sellers or by the marketplace.
Some of the additional features we're considering are automated backups, improvements to our import/export system and more support for great OpenCart themes.
I'll be publishing more detailed roadmaps and in-depth insights into specific features in the near future.
Meanwhile, drop by our feedback portal, comment on features and suggest your own improvements to MultiMerch – whether you're a current marketplace owner or just looking around, we appreciate all of the feedback!
Displaying seller's information on product cards was one of the most commonly requested features.
I'm now happy to share the news – MultiMerch will now display seller names on product cards throughout the marketplace.
Here's how we came to this.
Receiving your invaluable feedback
The idea of displaying seller's information on product cards isn't something new.
We've been asked for a way to do this in MultiMerch for quite a while.
However, since there's no universal way of modifying product cards across different OpenCart versions and themes, we let the idea rest... until recently.
A while ago, one of our clients running a third party OpenCart theme with custom product cards sent me the following feedback:
Hey, we just switched from our custom theme to MoneyMaker for better compatibility and it's been great – except for one thing.
Seller information on product cards is absolutely a must!
We had this before and the response from visitors was overwhelming – more than 60% of new seller signups came after questions like "Can anyone sell products on your marketplace?" and "Will my name be displayed on my products in the same way?". Amazing free marketing!
Without this feature, our marketplace looks like a plain old regular online store, not a marketplace.
Obviously, it was time to get this implemented.
The challenge of improving product cards
There were three things we had to keep in mind when displaying seller information on product cards:
performance
theme compatibility
design
First, performance is a crucial factor in the success of an online marketplace.
There are two ways of fetching seller data for a product in MultiMerch – either as a separate database request, or by modifying the original OpenCart request that fetches the product.
The former way is much easier, but can lead to a massive performance hit when you have lots of products. The latter one doesn't affect performance as much, but is more difficult to implement.
In addition to this, there are different types and locations of product cards throughout a regular OpenCart store – category listings, search results, featured and related products, various sliders, banners and whatnot. Modifying each of these requires work.
Finally, it comes to design.
There's not much sense in displaying seller information in such a manner that will drive customers away – for one reason or another.
So, we first had to do a quick research on how it's usually done.
We did a research of the popular online marketplaces
To make sure we really understand what we're doing, I spent some time exploring the popular online marketplaces to see what we can learn from them.
I chose a few popular online marketplaces you all know of:
Amazon
Aliexpress
Ebay
Etsy
Here's what the results look like.
eBay doesn't display any seller information on product cards
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Amazon doesn't display individual sellers, but does link to used products from third party sellers
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
AliExpress displays seller's name and store link on product cards when you hover over them Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Etsy always displays seller names and store links on product cards
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
What does this leave us?
For Amazon, it makes sense not to feature seller details as Amazon doesn't position itself as seller-centric with multiple sellers selling the same products. You buy from Amazon, even if you technically don't.
AliExpress is a "one seller one product" type marketplace so you're primarily purchasing products from sellers – and they do let you know that, although only on hover.
Etsy is a truly seller-focused marketplace with individuals offering their own handmade (even if that's not always true) products for sale.
eBay for some reason chose not to display seller data on product cards, although it's there in the same boat with Ali with each product belonging to a specific seller.
The overall idea is clear, though. If you decide to show seller details to your customers on product cards, go for it – but do it unobtrusively.
Note how when seller names are displayed on product cards, they're displayed in a minimalist way – nothing more than seller's name and a store link.
Getting the idea from concept to reality
Solving the first two issues (performance and theme integration) was pretty straight forward.
The new seller info calls are incorporated into the main OpenCart product requests and won't affect performance while we'll deal with theme integrations as part of our theme compatibility packages.
However, before proceeding with the release, we wanted to test a few different designs first.
So, we created these few neat concepts that I sent to some of you beta testers:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
The feedback we got confirmed the findings of our online marketplace research – here are some of the things we uncovered:
the main idea is great and we're on the right track!
the amount of seller information on product cards should be kept to a minimum (although images are neat)
displaying seller information near the cart button might lead to misclicks (I'll publish a separate study of cart buttons later)
Armed with this encouraging data, we got to work – and here's the result.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Most importantly – we styled the new seller parts in such a way that you could customize them via CSS if needed, in case you decided to hide the avatars.
Since the new seller block is inserted into product cards via a separate vQmod xml file, you can turn it off if needed (but why would you do that?)
In any case, enough for today – the new MultiMerch version with the new product cards and a set of bugfixes is now available in your accounts!
When you have your platform account ready, you can proceed to configuring Stripe in MultiMerch.
Enable Stripe Connect in MultiMerch
The upcoming version of MultiMerch introduces Stripe Connect payment plugin, which handles all Stripe payments in your marketplace.
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Here, you'll specify a few of your basic Stripe account details – such as the API keys and signing secrets.
You can also assign specific Stripe payment statuses to your custom order statuses if needed.
Your sellers can now connect their Stripe accounts to your marketplace
When all's ready, your sellers can connect their Stripe accounts to your marketplace platform via their payment settings.
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Connecting a Stripe account allows your sellers to receive customer payments through your Stripe platform account automatically.
MultiMerch uses Stripe Checkout to process customer payments
At checkout, your customers will now be able to place orders and instantly pay using their credit and debit cards through Stripe.
We use Stripe Checkout for a simplified payment experience.
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This saves you the trouble of going through a manual PCI compliance (who likes going through PCI compliance processes anyway?)
Sellers instantly receive their earnings while you retain the commissions
All customer payments in your marketplace are instantly transferred to your sellers – and you retain the sales fees.
MultiMerch will display all Stripe Connect payments in your admin area so you can browse them and run all of the regular reports.Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
You and your sellers can also view and manage all of the payments via your Stripe Dashboards.
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Your sellers will also see all of their Stripe orders in their MultiMerch Dashboards – as usual!
What's next?
The new MultiMerch 8.15 with Stripe support will be available for download in your accounts shortly (really soon).
Now, our next steps for Stripe and MultiMerch are:
allow manual payouts to sellers with no Stripe account at the time of purchase
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Launching a multi vendor marketplace is a bit more complex than your old regular online store.
That's because you'll be dealing not only with customers, but also with multiple sellers doing business on your platform.
So, choosing the right multi vendor software is extremely important – it will make or break your business!
In this guide, we've assembled the list of online marketplace software you can choose from when starting a multi vendor marketplace.
Let's see what software is available to you, the marketplace owner, in 2018.
First, you'll want to consider these three things when deciding what marketplace software to go with for your platform:
Ease of use. Do you have a technical team to build and manage your marketplace? If not, you'll want to go with the simplest possible solution.
Features, scalability and reliability. You're building the next Amazon killer, right? Gotta make sure your software can handle it as you grow.
Customization opportunities. If you want to be in control of your marketplace and make it truly yours, you want to be able to customize it.
Ideally, you want something that's:
powerful enough to handle everything you throw at it
flexible enough to adapt to your branding and marketing needs
simple, straight forward and reliable – spend time running your business, not dealing with issues and customer support
So, where do you start?
Well, most multi vendor marketplace solutions fall into one of these categories:
Cloud or hosted marketplace platforms. These will get your marketplace up and running in no time with little to no technical knowledge required from your part, but will usually be limited in customization.
Standalone marketplace software. These give you way more customization and control, but you or your technical team will also have a lot of work to deal with.
Multi vendor extensions for shopping cart software. These will get you all of the benefits of free and open source shopping cart systems or CMS's and the multi vendor features of third party marketplace extensions.
Now, let's see the full list!
1. Cloud platforms and hosted marketplace solutions
Going with a popular multi vendor SaaS is the first thing you'll usually consider as a marketplace owner.
Hosted marketplace platforms are great for beginners and non-technical marketplace owners as they take the technical burden away and let you get started quickly and easily.
This usually means less options for customization and less control over your marketplace, but this is often an acceptable tradeoff.
There are a few popular hosted online marketplace solutions that you'll want to check out.
Sharetribe Marketplace
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Sharetribe was built in Finland in 2011 and is currently one of the most popular online marketplace solutions – Shopify for marketplaces, if you wish.Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
The platform offers features suitable for regular marketplaces, as well as rentals and bookings.
Sharetribe offers payment processing via Stripe and PayPal, as well as a number of translations.
Pros
Extremely intuitive and easy to set up - it's very hard to make a mistake using Sharetribe, whether you're an admin or a user
Market leading customer support
Cons
Lacks customization capability in marketplace design (especially with branding, implementing your logo, customizing outgoing emails, etc.)
Limited functionality on the seller's side (can't set different commission rates for separate customer segments, limited shipping options, limited product feature options - especially important for clothing brands)
Pricing based on number of users rather than number of transactions, creating a steep barrier to smaller marketplaces
Due to functional shortcomings, it's somewhat difficult to scale your marketplace on Sharetribe
Price
Ranges from $79/mo to $239/mo
Free 30-day trial available
Marketplacer Online Marketplace Platform
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Born from a first-hand experience building a global marketplace with millions of users worldwide, Marketplacer seeks to ‘transform the global e-commerce market with its plug-and-play solution.Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
The idea behind Marketplacer was to create a platform where managing thousands of sellers and buyers would be as easy as building your own one-man online store.
Did the founders succeed? Let's find out.
Pros
Ease of use and intuitiveness
Extremely responsive and helpful staff
Highly customizable for your business needs
Cons
Setting up back-end aspects of your marketplace can get tedious
Lacks micro design-related customization (e.g. setting the length of your search bar)
Price
No standard rates - each new marketplace is quoted individually
Near Me Multivendor
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
NearMe was founded as a marketplace solution for sharing economy businesses.
As a result, the platform supports a number of sharing-related transactions, like swaps, rents, resells and direct trades.
Pros
A number of transaction types available, enabling sharing economy marketplaces
Built-in SEO functionality will help your marketplace pages appear higher on search engines' results listings
A strong emphasis on analytics, a built-in administrator dashboard available
Cons
The marketplace software seems unfinished, as if it's still in the beta stages
No easy-to-watch demo; you have to enter your contact details before you're shown the demo
Price
No standard rates - each new marketplace is quoted individually
Arcadier Marketplaces
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Much like its competitors, Arcadier position themselves as the easy-to-setup, ready to go, off-the-shelf marketplace solution.
Without clearly stating the industries they're focusing on, Arcadier communicate the message of a universal marketplace that can support trade, service and rent-based transactions.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Pros
With UX being its cornerstone value offer, Arcadier truly does a great job at making the platform easy to use and intuitive - both for the marketplace admins (you) and its users (buyers and sellers)
Supports online booking transactions
Tons of ready-to-go templates to kickstart your marketplace
Cons
While Arcadier's template solutions are highly universal, they're difficult to customize once you try to make the marketplace truly yours
No auto updates
No drag & drop marketplace builder feature
Price
Very competitive: standard packages start at $34/mo (and offer lots of good stuff, relative to their competitors), and go as high as $340/mo
Individual enterprise quotes available
Has a 30-day free trial
2. Self Hosted Standalone Multi Vendor Software
If you're looking for something a bit more customized than what hosted platforms offer, you might want to consider going with self hosted standalone marketplace software.
These give you more control over your online marketplace, but also require at least some technical knowledge or a developer on your team before you can start processing orders.
In this section, we're looking at some of the popular standalone multi vendor solutions – this does not include third party multi vendor extensions for open source shopping carts, which we'll look into separately in the next chapter.
CS-Cart Multi-Vendor Software
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When it comes to standalone multi vendor software, Cs-Cart Multivendor Module is one of the first ones to look into.
Designed Simtech in Russia, Cs-Cart was initially built as a regular shopping cart solution in 2005, with Cs-Cart Multivendor having been added later.
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As of 2018, Cs-Cart offers two different types of shopping cart software – Cs-Cart for regular stores and Cs-Cart Multivendor for marketplaces.
Pros
200+ unique store-front design templates and tons of marketplace layouts to choose from
Real-time store editor
More than 50 payment systems available on the platform, together with a real-time shipping rate feature
Cons
Page load times tend to be slow-ish
Price
Three options available: $385, $865 and $1450 one-time fees
X-Cart MultivendorImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Not unlike Cs-Cart, X-Cart was initially built in Russia in 2001 as a regular shopping cart system.
As of today, X-Cart is also offered in two different editions – X-Cart and X-Cart Multivendor specifically for marketplaces.
Pros
X-cart have made layout editing so easy even a child could do it, thanks to their new built-in tool
More than 200 store-front templates to choose from for your sellers
Powerful built-in SEO capabilities and lots of customization options
Cons
Much like other X-Cart products, the software can get a bit technical and require development expertise on your team
Steep price point
Price
$1450 one-time payment
Yo!Kart Multivendor SystemImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
YoKart was built in 2015 as a multi vendor marketplace solution by FATbit Technologies in India.
Today, YoKart is offered both as a self hosted standalone solution as well as a hosted platform. Their solution and pricing plans are particularly aimed at startups.
Pros
Extremely easy to use - most of the available features work flawlessly
Cons
The lack of customization option makes using open-source multivendor platforms like Magento an attractive alternative
Customization prices are unreasonably high
Each upgraded version of the software needs to be purchased separately, the software doesn't update automatically
Price
Ranges from $999 to $5,999 one-time payments
3. WordPress Multi Vendor Plugins
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This combines the popularity of free and open source e-commerce software with the power of multi vendor through third party extensions.
While still being one of the most popular platforms to power online stores, WordPress isn't tailored to e-commerce by default.
Therefore, to build a marketplace with WordPress, you need to additional things – an e-commerce plugin for WordPress and a multi vendor extension on top (or both at once).
There are two commonly used e-commerce plugins for WordPress – WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.
Dokan Multivendor for WooCommerce
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Dokan by weDevs is one of the more popular WordPress + WooCommerce multi vendor plugins, having been released in 2015.
It's also really well designed!
Like most other WordPress vendor plugins, Dokan comes with both Free and Premium versions available.
As of 2018, Dokan Lite (the Free version) has over 10,000 active WordPress installs and 167 reviews, most of them positive.
The Free version of Dokan comes with a decent set of multi vendor features, such as:
storefront seller dashboards and stores
simple product publishing
order management and notifications
However, it lacks some of the crucial features like publishing products into multiple categories, vendor management interfaces and reports.
There are also 4 paid tiers for Dokan:
Starter at $149/year
Professional at $249/year
Business at $499/year
Enterprise at $999/year
The main difference is in the number of unlocked features and premium modules, support level and domain restrictions.
The WC Vendors marketplace plugin for WordPress is another one designed to be used with WooCommerce.
It was released in 2014 and is available as a free WordPress plugin in addition to the paid Pro version.
As of 2018, the free WC Vendors version has accumulated over 20,000 installs according to WordPress Plugins and has mixed reviews.Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
The main difference between the Free and the Pro seems to be in how vendors manage their stores and what features are available to them.
WC Vendors Pro lets vendors access their own management dashboards while the Free version uses WordPress' default admin dashboard.
The Free version is also missing most of the non-basic features, such as shipping management, order management, store configuration and others.
Pros
Free version availabl
Cons
Mixed reviews
Price
Free plan available
Paid plans starting at $199 year
YITH Multi Vendor Plugin for WooCommerceImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
YITH Multi Vendor is a marketplace plugin for WordPress and WooCommerce by the Italian team YITHemes.
Just like WC Vendors, the plugin by YITH offers both Free and Premium versions.
The free version of YITH Multi Vendor was released back in 2015 and has over 2000 active installations with mixed feedback on WordPress Plugins.
Most of the reviews on WordPress Plugins are more than one year old and the support section isn't too active, so it's hard to tell how good or bad the free version is:Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
In contrast, reviews of YITH Multi Vendor Premium on their official website are mostly positive.
What about the features?
According to plugin's WordPress listing, the Free version offers most of the basic features while the Premium version adds advanced features on top.
It's not clear whether vendors have their own dashboards with YITH Multi Vendor Free, which would be a crucial free feature missing.
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Apart from that, the Premium version allows for much more customization, more notifications and advanced payment, shipping and commission setup features.
Pros
Free version available
Cons
Mixed reviews
Price
Free plan available
Paid plans starting at $199 year
4. Magento Multi Vendor Extensions
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Magento is an obvious choice to consider, being one of the top open source e-commerce solutions, especially for larger online stores.
The main reason why entrepreneurs choose Magento to run their e-commerce multivendor platforms on is scalability. While non-techies will enjoy the template-based Magento management interface, it's the strong source code, high customizability and developer access that sets the platform apart from others.
Webkul Marketplace Extension for Magento
Webkul is a large and well known team of 200+ people based in India.
In addition to many other platforms, they offer two Magento marketplace extensions – for Magento and Magento 2.
Since Webkul reviews are only offered through their own website, it's not possible to verify if they're real:Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Both Webkul extensions for Magento 1 and Magento 2 come at $349 (+ renewals) and provide the core feature set:
front end vendor dashboards
product and order management for vendors
seller profiles and store fronts
These can be further extended with addons.
While the initial price of $349 isn't too bad, the final cost can get quite steep.
Addons to Webkul Marketplace range in price anywhere between $35 and $700:
You won't need all of them, but some of the basic features come as addons, such as:
Seller List addon to list sellers: $59.00 + renewals
Seller Product Search addon to allow search in seller products: $99.00 + renewals
Price Comparison: $99.00 + renewals
You can see how this can get expensive pretty fast.
Pros
Lots of extensions available
Great customer support
Strong development team
Cons
No free version available
Costly extensions
Price
Starting at $349 + renewals
NextBits Multi Vendor Marketplace for MagentoImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
NextBits Multi Vendor is a Magento/Magento2 extensions created by the NextBits team.
There's not much information available about the NextBits company itself – the Team page returns a 404 errors and there are no new blogs posts since 2014.
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The extension comes as a single paid package at $399 ($99 at a discount) per domain with an extra $49 installation fee.
According to the public demo, NextBits Multi Vendor offers a standard marketplace core feature set:
vendor registration and product publishing
order and product management for vendors
sales commissions and admin payouts
No online documentation seems to be available and there are no public reviews or links to client marketplaces.
Pros
Affordable at a discount
Public demo available
Cons
No online documentation
No reviews or case studies
Live stores
N/A
Price
$399 per domain ($99 at a discount)
CreativeMinds Marketplace Extension for MagentoImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
CreativeMinds is an Israeli-Polish team of WordPress and Magento developers specializing in WordPress plugins and Magento extensions.
The company offers over 100 WordPress plugins and 40+ Magento extensions, many of which are well-reviewed on their website.
Unlike the rest of extensions, the Multi Vendor Marketplace extension has no ratings, reviews or links to live stores available – so, we'll have to trust the "656 sales" badge on their Magento 2 listing:Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
The pricing of CreativeMinds Marketplace extension is a bit of a mess:
the marketplace extension comes with a price tag of $349/$399 for Magento CE and $499/$599 for Magento EE
the same extension costs $699 with 6/12 addons included for M1/M2 respectively
additional features are available as addons, such as front end product management for vendors at $149/$299 for CE/EE
All prices are per live host, including the prices of addons.
So, you might need to think twice before deciding which package to go with.
As to features – CreativeMinds Marketplace offers most of the core marketplace features:
seller stores and profiles
product and order management
commissions and reporting
The paid addons include subscriptions, payouts via PayPal, questions and answers and RMA.
CreativeMinds Marketplace has online documentation available for both Magento 1 and Magento 2.
Pros
Online documentation
Company with a track record
Cons
Interfaces could look cleaner
No reviews or live stores available
Complex pricing structure
Price
starting at $349/$399 per domain
Apptha Magento Multi VendorImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Apptha is a Magento multi vendor script that allows you to setup your marketplace in your favorite CMS (Content Management System) within hours.
Apptha was created and developed by Contus, a 130-man India-based company with over 500 e-commerce and CMS projects under its belt. We're highly excited to see Apptha succeed, given the expertise and experience of its founders.
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The script also has versions for Joomla and WordPress.
As far as pricing is concerned, currently both Apptha's scripts for Magento - the 1.0 and the updated 2.0 - are priced at $999. They do offer three marketplace demos to see the script in action.
Pros
High compatibility with digital products
Great technical customer support for non-developers
Provides a ready-made marketplace solution, with customizability options
Cons
The sales team is known to misguide new users into buying outdated solutions, only to give you a completely opposite recommendation after a month
Some scripts are full of coding errors (e.g. the Airhotels)
Shady confidentiality standards - your project might be used as a case study without your consent
Price
For both Magento scripts, the price is a $999 one-time fee.
5. OpenCart Multi Vendor Extensions
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OpenCart is the cheaper, friendlier, more lightweight alternative to Magento.
OpenCart's core features, including hosting, low cost, the easy-to-use template interface, SEO capabilities and the quality and scale of its customer support, all make it a perfect choice for small-to-medium sized marketplaces that are looking to get their marketplaces up, quickly, without getting their hands dirty with the technicalities.
PurpleTree Software Multivendor for OpenCartImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Being one of the most high-quality multi vendor addons for OpenCart available today, Purpletree really does seem to do it all - from easy-to-setup interface to an intuitive, but in-depth analytics dashboard.
While the website seems to be a bit unfinished, the reviews say that the customer support and the coding of the website are top-of-the-line. Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
The multivendor OpenCart addon costs a $79 one-time fee (normal price shown: $199)
Pros
Supports many OpenCart versions (all 3.x and 2.x versions supported)
High attention to detail, pristine source code
Responsive and patient support team
Cons
Can be difficult to set up without developer expertise
Theme customization options unknown
Waabay Multivendor/Dropshipper for OpenCartImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Originally published in 2011, the Waabay OpenCart Multi-vendor extension has made a name for itself as one of the go-to multi vendor solutions for the platform.
Currently, Waabay supports OpenCart versions from 1.5.0 to 1.5.6.4 and from 2.0 to 2.3.0.2.
Waabay was specifically designed to accommodate dropshipping-focused e-commerce marketplaces.
While this provides a whole bunch of additional functionality for dropshippers, it does mean that if you're looking for a traditional e-commerce, you'll probably be better off going with one of the alternatives, as there are several fundamental in how your marketing will be structured. One of them is that vendors will have highly individualized pages, and there won't be an option for your vendors to create store front pages that match the platforms design.
Pros
Lots of dropshipping-oriented functionality
Vendors can see their shipping status real time - from the moment the products leave the supplier
In-depth shipping options and presentation settings
Cons
Storefront accounts have no standardized style/design
Price
Currently priced at $55
Demo version available (you have to create an account, though)
MultiMerch Marketplace for OpenCartImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Ever since MultiMerch was founded in 2012, it put priority on user experience, reliability and security - both for your vendors and their customers.
Today, MultiMerch has grown to become one of the most trusted marketplace solutions out there. Through continuous innovation, the OpenCart extension has become the go-to choice for entrepreneurs who care about a smooth and secure experience for their vendors and buyers.
The Developer package, priced at $485, is aimed at companies who have strong development teams in place and can handle the technical side of things. Most recent version of the extension (8.5) supports only OpenCart 2.3.0.2.
The Business package, priced at $1,475, provides the same access you'd be getting with the Developer package, but it also includes having the MultiMerch team at your disposal. The guys will listen to your needs, deliver results, and guide you through the whole process.
The Enterprise package is priced individually for each project, and is only meant for unique cases where highly customized marketplace solutions are needed.
Pros
Flexible pricing plans
Possibility to have a team of developers at your disposal
Class-leading user experience for both ends of the marketplace
Emphasis on security and data analysis
Cons
Only OpenCart v.2.3.0.2 supported
The price point can be a little steep for small/medium businesses
Price
Ranges from $485 to $1475
Custom projects priced individually
PrestaShop Multi Vendor Addons
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Compared to Magento and OpenCart, PrestaShop is much closer to the latter platform than it is to the former. It is easy to set up, intuitive and lightweight. The maintenance costs are lower than Magento's - basically non-existent.
However, PrestaShop shares flaws with OpenCart - once your marketplace gets going, the platform provides limited functionality to scale, customize, and manage large operations.
Knowband Marketplace for PrestaShopImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Knowband Marketplace is one of the most popular PrestaShop multi vendor marketplace addons. Simply by installing an addon, you can transform your simple one-vendor PrestaShop e-commerce store to a full-on multi vendor marketplace.
The addon offers a lot of features crucial to successfully running a marketplace, like seller registration account controls, global commision rates, product controls, voucher/discount coupon controls, analytics dashboards, and more.Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Currently, there is only one pricing plan available at Knowband: a one-time $170 fee.
Pros
Lots of control options available - monitor control your seller accounts, their products, discounts, and more
Sophisticated product suggestion and rating systems, creating good UX for the buyers
Extremely easy registration for sellers and convenient order management
Cons
Some can find the design customization options lacking
Price
One-time $170 fee including taxes
Demo available
Advanced Marketplace Addon for PrestaShopImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
If we had to put Advanced Marketplace's unique value proposition into one word, it would be customization. With Advanced Marketplace, you're in charge - there's an exhaustive list of seller controls and store front customization options available with the addon.
From terms and conditions for the sellers, to controlling whether your sellers can update their orders - Advanced Marketplace gives you a dashboard of instruments to control every aspect of your marketplace.Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Advanced Marketplace is considerably more expensive than the Knowband Marketplace, standing at a tall $285. Is it worth it? Let's take a deeper look.
Pros
Extremely in-depth control settings, allowing you to control every single buyer-seller interaction
Technical and feature support available for 90 days for free
Cons
Can get a little overwhelming once you're in
Price
One-time $285 fee (including taxes)
7. Joomla Multi Vendor Extensions
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Established in 2005, Joomla is one of the oldest names in the game, and it still gives Magento a run for its money.
While Joomla isn't primarily an e-commerce platform, and is more frequently compared to universal CMS'es like WordPress, it's still frequently used for e-commerce purposed, and with a touch of an addon can turn into a powerful marketplace engine.
HikaShop Multi Vendor for Joomla
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
If you're using Joomla and are looking to build a fully functional, robust marketplace, HikaShop should be your number one consideration. Founded in 2014, this lightweight extension has already found a base of loyal users through its outstanding user experience and market-leading coding.Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Rich with plugins and applications, HikaShop is one of the most customizable multi vendor extensions out there, let alone among selections available for Joomla.
Pros
Customer support is proven to be reliable and responsive (e.g. when you need a snippet of code added quickly to your version of HikaShop, the technical team will help you out in no time)
Great front dashboard makes adding and managing products a breeze for the vendors
Clear and intuitive structure of the tool
Cons
No up-to-date documentation
Email template interface can be confusing to use
Price
One-time $175 fee
Live demo and case studies available
Sellacious Marketplace for Joomla
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Sellacious is one of the few multi vendor marketplace extensions that emphasize B2B purchases, instead of just B2C ones. Through a myriad of additional B2B-oriented functionality and customization options, Sellacious have made it clear that it can handle B2B e-commerce marketplaces.
Unlike many other multi vendor solutions out there, sellacious offers a fully capable version free of charge, and three additional paid plans to suit most different business needs. All of their plans, however, only support one website - a single marketplace.
Let's take a look at what makes Sellacious a great B2B marketplace choice.
Pros
Vendors can upload their tax certificates and manage customer taxes on the platform
You can receive purchase order receipts from all of your vendors' sales
Allows vendors to connect third party logistics partners, e.g. suppliers and shipping companies
Cons
Only supports one marketplace
Price
Free basic plan available
Three paid plans available: $29 per month starter pack, $249/year business plan, and a one-time $749 enterprise-oriented fee
Conclusion
There are many ways you can go about creating a marketplace. In this article, we didn't talk about creating a marketplace from scratch, and only covered ways of building a marketplace using one of the existing multi vendor solutions out there.
Whatever your choice will be after this brief rundown, make sure you test as many different alternatives as possible before making a decision. Evaluate how well does a platform suit your particular needs, because switching to another solution after already establishing a marketplace can be a costly endeavour.
The process is similar for Subscriptions with one exception – you don't really need a Connect account, a regular Stripe platform account will do.
Create one or more Stripe pricing plans
MultiMerch lets you tie your Stripe plans to vendor groups to create different payment schedules for sellers signing up for different plans.
First, you'll need to create at least one pricing plan via Billing > Products > Pricing plans.
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MultiMerch currently supports Stripe's fixed and per-seat (per-product) pricing plans.
Configure Stripe Subscriptions in MultiMerch
Now, you'll need to specify your Stripe API credentials in Admin > Extensions > Payments > Stripe Connect (see my previous blog post for more details about the configuration).
Starting with MultiMerch 8.16, you'll see a new section called Subscriptions in your MultiMerch Stripe settings.
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Here, you'll need to specify your Stripe product ID – now, you can retrieve your plans via Stripe using the Retrieve button.
Link Stripe plans to MultiMerch seller groups
After you've linked your Stripe product and retrieved the plans, you'll be able to link the plans to seller groups via Admin > MultiMerch > Seller groups > Edit.
Now, you'll see the new Stripe Subscriptions tab when creating or editing a seller group.
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This lets you assign a base and a per-seat plan to each seller group – you're all set now!
Create a landing page to let your sellers choose a plan when signing up
If you'll be using multiple different seller plans, you can create a landing page with a pricing table to let your sellers choose a plan when signing up.
We've created a basic landing page template for you via OpenCart's Information module.
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You can use it as a template for your own landing page or design a completely custom page.
MultiMerch now lets you create "Sign up" links or buttons for individual seller plans by passing the seller group identifier to the sign up URL.
Start generating recurring revenues with MultiMerch and Stripe Subscriptions
We're done – your sellers can now sign up for specific seller plans!
During the final registration step, MultiMerch will use Stripe's Checkout form to collect seller's payment information and create a Stripe subscription for the seller.
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Sellers will be able to access their subscription details via their Settings area.
The best thing – all payment data is processed by Stripe, which means no tedious PCI compliance processes.
What's next?
Subscriptions don't end here!
In the future MultiMerch versions, we'll implement:
support for more complex Stripe Subscription plans in addition to fixed and per-seat pricing
more subscription management options for sellers – such as upgrades and downgrades
manual subscriptions (recurring payment invoices) for third party gateways that don't support recurring payments natively
Meanwhile, MultiMerch 8.16 is now available for download in your accounts – go grab it!
That's right – last year, the global e-retail sales amounted to $2.3 trillion and are expected to grow to more than $4 trillion by 2021.
But there's much more to online marketplaces than your regular Amazon and eBay.
In this blog post we'll look at 42 popular online marketplaces of 19 different types to show you what's going on in the industry today.
There's lots of stuff you can sell through online marketplaces.
We organized our big marketplace list into these 5 big groups and a number of subcategories – like this:
Large scale online malls
The "everything" marketplaces
Marketplaces that specialize in electronics
Auctions
Traditional retailers going online
Vintage and handmade goods
Digital marketplaces
Themes and templates
Graphics and visual assets
Code – software, plugins and extensions
Mobile apps
Games
Music and audio
Photos and stock photography
Courses and classes
Reservations, rentals and bookings
Lodging
Travel planning
Events and tickets
Services
Online services
Offline services
B2B-specific marketplaces
You can click each heading to jump to the corresponding section or join us in exploring each of them.
Let's go:
1. Traditional Large Scale Online Malls
This is the type of website that comes to everyone’s mind when you say ‘marketplace’ - a large platform where you can find thousands of products from hundreds of categories.
The "everything" marketplaces
Amazon
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Founded in 1994, Amazon’s grown to become the world’s most dominant online marketplace today. It sells an extremely wide range of physical products and also supports several digital product types. The marketplace allows both used and new items to be sold.
EbayImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Established a year after Amazon, eBay is the world’s largest used item marketplace.
While many people and businesses sell brand new, out-of-the-box merchandise here, eBay is best known as the go-to place to quickly list your items without extensive verification procedures.
Here, you can buy anything from fashion wear to consumer electronics.
Originally an auction website, today Souq is a more modest version of Amazon, tweaked for a specific market.
FlipkartImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Founded as a hardware store in 2007 in India, Flipkart has gradually expanded to become a dominant force in global consumer electronics market.
Today, it goes beyond electronics - offering merchandise types like clothes, furniture and books.
Electronics Marketplaces
NewEggImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
NewEgg was founded in 2000 - during the heat of the Internet bubble - and has proven to be one of the strongest commercial forces in the computer hardware and consumer electronics hardware.
RakutenImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Rakuten, founded in 1997, is the NewEgg’s equivalent for the Japanese market.
After eBay pivoted towards a more traditional e-commerce approach, eBid has become one of the most trusted auction-based marketplaces in the world.
Operating in more than 100 countries globally, eBid supports a number of currencies and payment options, including PayPal and Skrill to facilitate auction bids.
BonanzaImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Although you can virtually find most any kind of merchandise on Bonanza, it is famous for being the digital equivalent of a flea market.
Here, you can expect to find rare, unique and/or used items that you would never even think of.
Traditional Retailers Going Online
Walmart MarketplaceImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
With the digital revolution causing massive disruption in traditional retail industry, nationwide brand names like Walmart are fighting for their spot under the sun by trying to capture their piece of the digital pie.
The result? A weird attempt to copy Amazon.
Sell on SearsImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Same story with another U.S. retail giant - Sears. On their current online version of the mall, you can find anything from yoga pants to iPhones.
Vintage & Handmade Marketplaces
RubyLaneImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Antiques, collectibles, dolls, vintage art - you name it - RubyLane is the go-to marketplace to buy and sell cute, cozy details for your dream interior.
EtsyImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
For all things handmade, Etsy is the ultimate go-to platform.
For the crafty, Etsy provides an opportunity to turn their hobby into a source of income.
For people of more refined taste, Etsy is the secret chest of hidden treasures.
2. Digital Marketplaces
Some marketplaces operate exclusively with digital products, like eBooks, software, or online courses.
Creators of these products can enjoy incredible scaling opportunities, and the buyers get instant access to their purchases.
Themes and Templates
ThemeForestImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
If you’re creating a WordPress website, you’ll most likely come across the name of ThemeForest.
Here, web designers across the world offer their templates for sale, giving website owners thousands of high-end theme options to choose from.
TemplateMonsterImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
If you’re creating a website outside of WordPress, TemplateMonster is the first stop you want to make. Magento, WooCommerce, PrestaShop - they’ve got you covered for all of the world’s most popular Content Management Systems.
Graphics and Visual Assets
GraphicRiverImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
There are times when you need a small graphical element on your website. An icon.
That’s when you go to a platform like GraphicRiver and choose from millions of options.
Besides icons, their contributors also offer fonts, logos and other subtle graphic elements.
Creative MarketImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Like the name suggests, on Creative Market you can buy and sell all digital things related to graphic design. Landscape photos, object illustrations, magazine templates, 3D models and unique fonts - Creative Market is a one-stop shop for those looking to bring their website to life.
Software: Plugins, Extensions, Scripts
CodeCanyonImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
What happens if you need an automated chat responder, or a contact form on your website quickly?
You go to CodeCanyon, purchase a code snippet, and put it into your website’s code.
Developers from all over the world are solving the software shortcomings of the world on a daily basis, and are charging upwards of $2 for a snippet.
Magento MarketplaceImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Many major Content Management Systems have built a separate marketplace by their side to enable developers across the world to recognize the shortcomings and possibilities of their platforms. For website owners, however, it’s just a way to get things done easier and faster.
OpenCart MarketplaceImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
OpenCart, one of the world’s most popular CMSs, also has a marketplace of its own.
For developers, these marketplaces provide an opportunity so solve some of OpenCart’s shortcomings and make an extra buck.
As a result, website owners and creators can enjoy a variety of extensions, ranging from GDPR compliance packages to sophisticated analytics dashboards.
Mobile App Marketplaces
Google PlayImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
App Marketplaces barely need introducing. Most smartphone users download apps like the Facebook Messenger or Gmail to their devices, and for there are companies who specialize solely in developing and publishing mobile apps.
App StoreImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
The equivalent of Google Play for the Apple mobile devices, Apple Store is the world’s largest app marketplace. Some apps are free to use, and others cost upwards of $0.99.
Gaming Marketplaces
Steam StoreImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Steam has revolutionized the way people buy video games. 20 years ago, the only way to purchase a video game was to go to a store, buy a CD, and install the game to your computer. Today, it’s as easy as clicking a button on the Steam Store.
Humble BundleImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Humble Bundle is a gaming marketplace that differentiates through offering interesting gaming bundles for a good price. Besides video games, people also buy and sell other gaming-related merchandise here - like comics. And, on top of all that, the company is actively raising cash for charity by selling more games.
Music and Audio
SpotifyImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Few people think of Spotify as a marketplace, but musicians (or, rather, the copyright holders) are getting paid on a per-audio-stream basis on the platform.
According to CNBC, Spotify currently pays musicians from $0.006 to $0.0084 per audio stream.
Apple MusicImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
The distant #2 in audio streaming game, Apple Music, also pays an undisclosed amount to its musicians, only on a project-based model.
Chance the Rapper, for example, was paid $500,000 for a two-week exclusive with Apple Music.
Stock Photography
ShutterstockImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
With millions of talented photographers across the globe selling the rights to their pictures every day on the platform, Shutterstock has become the go-to website to get high-quality stock pictures for your website.
Unsplash
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While you can download and use pictures for free on Unsplash, there’s an option to donate money to the author to support their work.
Education and Courses
UdemyImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Since it was founded, Udemy has grown to become one of the world’s largest online course platforms.
Experts from most unexpected niches create and publish courses here - from gardening to management consulting - sharing their expertise with millions of students.
MasterclassImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Positioning as an exclusive course platform, Masterclass partners with the world’s brightest stars - from poker master Daniel Negreanu to Hollywood screenwriter Aaron Sorkin - to produce courses of highest quality in all relevant aspects.
3. Reservation, Rental and Bookings
The digital revolution and accessible marketplace technology has changed the way people travel forever.
Today, most of travel planning and booking happens through specialized online marketplaces.
Lodging
AirBnBImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Before AirBnB, couchsurfing was pretty much the only way to go about finding a stay abroad while staying away from hotels and hostels.
AirBnB has created a worldwide-trusted platform where tenants and travelers can easily connect.
Tripping.comImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Similarly to AirBnB, Tripping.com provides travelers an opportunity to rent a house or an apartment abroad with the ease and credibility of booking a hotel room.
Travel Planning
TripAdvisorImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Connecting hotel deals with travelers, TripAdvisor have revolutionized the way people plan their trips.
Today, it’s no longer going to the travel agents.
You simply open up your laptop, look for deals available on TripAdvisor, and take a pick.
For hotels and hostels, marketplaces like TripAdvisor are a great way to promote their deals and services.
MomondoImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Analogous to TripAdvisor, Momondo helps travelers find the best flight deals for their journeys.
On one side of the platform you have travelers planning their trips, on the other - you have airlines, looking to promote their flight destinations and deals.
Events and Tickets
TicketMasterImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Not only most event organizers sell their tickets through ticket platforms like TicketMaster due to their payment processing systems and reliability, they’re also getting a ton of exposure.
Many people go to marketplaces like TicketMaster without a specific event in mind.
EventBriteImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Similar to TicketMaster, EventBrite strongly emphasizes its capability to offer events in the specific locations of their users.
4. Service Marketplaces
One of the most disrupted markets today is the job market.
The way companies hire employees and find contractors has expanded companies’ ability to hire tremendously.
Today, you can hire a developer in Australia while delivering your project to a client in China – and not experience any turbulence in communication.
Online Services
UpworkImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
With the rise of businesses embedded in the digital world, came the rise in demand of digitally provided services.
There’s hardly a business today that doesn’t need a developer, a graphic designed, or a copywriter. Upwork provides opportunities for freelancers to connect with potential clients all over the world.
FiverrImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Fiverr is a digital services marketplace in the purest sense of the word.
Specialists from all corners of the world offer most various digital services - from copywriting to graphic design - for the notorious $5 price tag (hence the name of the platform.)
Offline Services
DogVacayImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
With 36% of U.S. households owning a dog, the pet care business is a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs - hence the uprising of DogVacay, a dog sitting marketplace.
People who leave on trips can easily find a dog sitter for the time being here, and for service providers, it’s an easy opportunity to make an extra buck.
Rated PeopleImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
For anything related to your house - “from light fittings to loft conversions” - Rated People is a platform where skilled tradesmen can connect with house owners in need.
5. B2B Marketplaces
Bulk orders.
Discount prices.
Long-term partnerships.
If you need a reliable supplier, no longer you have to go through the yellow pages.
Today, it’s as easy as shopping - just open a B2B marketplace related to your industry and find the right company for your business.
AlibabaImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Founded in 1999, on the brink of the Internet revolution, Alibaba today is one of the most dominant forces among global marketplaces for Chinese production.
Unlike its subsidiary AliExpress, Alibaba mostly connects companies across the world with wholesale local suppliers.
ThomasNetImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
With more than half a million suppliers registered on the network, ThomasNet is the go-to marketplace for high-end suppliers for businesses with very specific needs.
Some of the industries ThomasNet covers include Chemicals, Automation & Electronics and Process Equipment.
Now that's what I call the online marketplace industry!
Did I forget an important one? Let me know in the comments!
This summer, we've been working round the clock to improve the marketplace experience for you, your vendors and your customers alike.
Some of the exciting things I'll cover in this update are:
the new notifications
holiday mode for vendors
customer complaint/reporting system
automated product filters
and the one page vendor signup
Here's how it all works:
Multichannel notifications for stores and marketplace staff
The sooner you and your store owners get notified about new events happening in the marketplace, the better the experience of everyone involved.
Getting notified lets your vendors dispatch orders and respond to customer feedback more quickly and also lets your marketplace staff stay in control of the marketplace.
The upcoming version of MultiMerch introduces a brand new notification system – we'll begin with onsite notifications and add more channels in the future:
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Right now, MultiMerch will notify vendors about new orders and order status changes, new unpaid invoices and payouts received, as well as about new feedback from the customers and new private messages.
Additionally, you and your marketplace staff will receive new notifications about the most important events in the marketplace, such as new orders, customers and vendors, new products published by vendors, new invoices paid and new messages in conversations you're part of:
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At the moment MultiMerch supports onsite notifications, but we'll be expanding the system with the new and improved emails, browser, text and in-app mobile notifications.
Holiday mode for sellers
You can't work 24/7 – and neither can your vendors.
MultiMerch now lets your sellers put their stores in holiday mode to temporarily stop accepting new orders.
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When a store is placed in holiday mode, customers can't purchase products from this seller:
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We don't disable the products. This ensures the store doesn't lose its search engine rankings and can instantly get back to selling as soon as the store owner is ready.
Customer complaint management
As a marketplace owner, you can't always keep an eye on everyone and everything in your marketplace.
MultiMerch now makes it possible for customers to flag/report individual products or sellers for offensive content or marketplace rule violations.
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You and your marketplace staff will have an overview of all the reports to review and act upon them if necessary.
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In the near future, the complaints will be tied into the notification and messaging systems for instant notifications about new complaints and a quick way to get in touch with store owners.
Also, in case you've missed this, here are some of the things we've implemented recently that are already available in MultiMerch:
Automated faceted category filters
Product filters are crucial for a great shopping experience for your customers.
We've recently introduced an Ajax category filtering system with support for product options, attributes and custom fields into MultiMerch.
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The filters are fully automated with no configuration or controls required from your side.
MultiMerch will pick up all options, attributes and custom fields available in the current category and only display the filters that are available to customers right now.
In the near future, we will be extending our filters to also support store pages and search results, as well as introduce filtering by individual stores and custom SEO URLs for individual filter pages.
One page seller registration with field selection
You want your new sellers to sign up with your marketplace as seamlessly as possible.
To make it happen, we've recently introduced a one-page seller signup in MultiMerch – and a way for you to choose the fields you want your sellers to fill out:
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This lets you design your registration flow with as many or as few fields you need for your marketplace type:
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In some of the next updates, we will also make it possible to add a set of custom fields to your vendor sign up forms.
Will share more exciting news shortly – meanwhile, stay tuned for the upcoming release!
P.S. If you're an existing MultiMerch user, we've extended our offer to upgrade your yearly license to a lifetime license for one more month – get in touch with me for more about the deal.
This summer, we've introduced support for Stripe Connect and Stripe Subscriptions in MultiMerch.
Today, we're releasing MultiMerch 8.20 that extends Stripe Connect capabilities to support Direct and Destination charges.
Considering automating your online marketplace with Stripe? Here's what you can do with MultiMerch 8.20 and Stripe:
Automatically transfer customer payments to vendors' Stripe accounts
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When you're running a multi vendor marketplace, processing customer payments and paying your vendors is one of the more complex processes you'll deal with.
The reason is simple – Stripe Connect lets your vendors connect their accounts to your platforms' account and start receiving order payments automatically:
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With MultiMerch 8.20, we extend our Stripe Connect system to support 3 types of payment processing and distribution:
separate charges/transfers
direct charges
destination charges
Here's how each of these payment flows works:
Payment distribution via separate charges & transfers
For platforms that desire more flexibility in how funds move, a more manual option is to create the charge on your platform account and separately transfer funds to the connected account. Using this approach, the platform is responsible for the cost of the Stripe fees, refunds, and chargebacks by default.
In short:
The customer makes a single payment to your platform
Your platform is responsible for distributing the funds between the vendors
The benefit of this payment flow is that you get to decide how and when to distribute customer's payment to your vendors.
The drawback is that this mode is only supported if your marketplace, your customers and your vendors are located within the US or the EU (which isn't too useful for international marketplaces).
Right now, MultiMerch will automatically distribute customer's payment between your vendors as soon as it is received while retaining your selling fee.
It works in a similar manner to Destination charges, but with one major difference: customer's funds go directly to vendors' Stripe accounts and not through your platform.
Here's how Destination charges work:
The customer goes through a single checkout – even when ordering products from multiple vendors
Stripe splits customer's order into multiple individual payments from the customer to each respective vendor
Stripe then makes a separate payment to your Stripe account consisting of your selling fees
Of course, if you don't have any selling fees specified in MultiMerch, you won't be receiving any payments at all – less headache for you.
Destination charges are a great way to run a fully-automated online marketplace with customers paying your vendors directly without your involvement.
In this case, you will most likely monetize through sign up and listing fees or vendor subscriptions.
Use Stripe for vendor subscriptions
Don't want to force Stripe on your vendors? No problem!
Managing shipping in a two-sided marketplace can be a challenge for you as a new marketplace owner.
With MultiMerch vendor shipping, we've tried to make the process as straightforward as possible.
The upcoming MultiMerch 8.22 release introduces 4 different vendor shipping modes you can use in your marketplace:
flat rate vendor shipping
shipping rates based on cart total
shipping rates based on cart weight
per-product shipping rates
In this blog post, I'll cover how vendor shipping works in MultiMerch and what the new modes look like:
How shipping works in MultiMerch
As an online marketplace owner using MultiMerch, you can use our multi vendor shipping system to manage your delivery operations.
MultiMerch allows your vendors to specify their own shipping rates to different locations and keep the customer updated on the status of their order.
This lets you run a two-sided online marketplace where your customers purchase products from multiple vendors at once and have them delivered by each vendor individually.
Understanding the MultiMerch shipping configuration
When building a marketplace with MultiMerch, you'll be able to select the primary marketplace shipping mode and the additional features you want to offer your vendors and customers.
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By default, your vendors will be able to use the following shipping fields when setting up their delivery rules:
Destination is the primary field used to match vendor's delivery rules to customer's address at checkout
Carriers allow for different shipping rates to the same destination (e.g. via DHL and UPS)
Delivery time indicates the vendor-estimated average delivery time that is displayed to customers after completing their order
Shipping cost is the amount the customer pays for shipping when selecting a particular shipping option
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You may also enable a few additional delivery features depending on mode you'll use:
Shipping from lets vendors define their shipping origin that is displayed to the customer
Processing time lets vendors specify the average time it takes them to process and dispatch the order after it's been received
Total cart weight (range) is used with weight-based shipping and allows for different shipping rates based on customer's cart weight
Total cart value (range) works in a similar manner, but uses the value of customer's cart instead
Cost per weight unit can be used to define shipping costs per weight when using weight-based shipping (e.g. per kg)
Cost per product allows vendors to specify different shipping rates for individual products
Cost per additional product additionally lets vendors specify a different shipping cost per each next item of the same type
In most cases, we recommend starting with the flat rate vendor shipping mode for smaller marketplaces or per-product shipping for marketplaces dealing with unique items.
How customers select shipping options at checkout
At checkout, MultiMerch will use customer's cart and delivery address to automatically determine what shipping options are available for this cart.
When ordering products from multiple vendors, your customers will be able to select a different shipping option for each vendor or product:
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If no matching delivery options are available, MultiMerch will ask the customer to change their delivery address or remove the products that can't be delivered from their cart before completing the order.
Different vendor shipping modes in MultiMerch
With vendor shipping enabled in MultiMerch, your sellers can configure their delivery rules through the Shipping section in their seller accounts.
Here's how the different vendor delivery modes work:
Flat rate vendor shipping
Flat rate vendor shipping is the simplest delivery mode you can use in your MultiMerch marketplace. This mode lets your sellers specify different flat delivery rates to different destinations:
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For example, your vendors could set up a following set of delivery rules using flat rate shipping:
Delivery to Europe: $15 via DHL, $20 via UPS
Delivery within the US: $5
Delivery to everywhere else: $35
You can also disable shipping carriers altogether to simplify the configuration for your vendors even further:
Delivery to Europe: $15
Delivery within the US: $5
Delivery to everywhere else: $35
Depending on your marketplace type, this delivery mode might be your first choice due to its simplicity.
Shipping rates based on cart total
If you're looking to give your vendors a bit more control over their delivery rates, you can enable shipping based on cart total.
This allows your vendors to specify different shipping rates based on the total value of customer's cart with this vendor:
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Price-based shipping would allow for a following set of delivery rules:
Delivery to Europe for orders under $50: $15 via DHL, $20 via UPS
Delivery to Europe for orders over $50: Free
Delivery to everywhere else: $25
Again, you can disable shipping carriers for a simplified configuration.
Since price-based shipping uses the value of customer's cart, your vendors can use it to define the minimum value of the order they're willing to process or free shipping for orders over a certain amount.
Shipping rates based on cart weight
Alternatively, you can use weight-based delivery rates instead.
This mode is similar to price-based shipping, but vendors specify shipping rates based on the total weight (not the total cost) of customer's cart for this vendor:
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Using weight-based shipping, your vendors can define a set of weight ranges and apply different rates to each range:
Delivery to Europe for carts under 10kg: Free via DHL, $20 via UPS
Delivery to Europe for carts over 10kg: $50 via DHL, $75 via UPS
Just like with price-based shipping, this mode lets your vendors specify the minimum (or the maximum) weight of carts they're willing to process.
Note that this mode requires your vendors to accurately specify the weight of the product when listing items in your marketplace.
Per-product shipping rates
With some online marketplace types, global combined shipping rules might be an overkill or unfeasible for various reasons.
For example, per-product shipping may work well in marketplaces that offer unique, exclusive or one-off products.
In this case, you can offer your vendors a way to define shipping on a per-product basis:
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This mode lets vendors specify shipping options for a particular item as they're listing it, which makes a following configuration possible:
Delivery of MacBook Pro to Europe: $75 via DHL, $95 via UPS
Delivery of MacBook Pro within the US: Free
Delivery of MagSafe Power Adapter to Europe: Free
Per-product shipping allows for a pretty granular configuration of delivery rates, but can overwhelm vendors with large product catalogs – make sure it's feasible for your marketplace type!
Alternatives to vendor shipping
MultiMerch offers a few shipping system alternatives for specific marketplace types, such as purely digital marketplace and platforms that process shipping themselves:
Alternative 1: run a digital marketplace with no shipping
Not many today know this, but MultiMerch was initially designed as a digital marketplace software solution aimed at marketplaces selling software, music and photography.
Today, you can still run a MultiMerch-powered digital marketplace like ThemeForest by disabling shipping altogether:Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Disabling shipping will treat all products as digital downloads.
You can also use this mode to run a marketplace of intangible products that don't require delivery, such as services.
Alternative 2: use the OpenCart shipping fallback
If you're looking to charge for and process deliveries yourself, you can use the OC Fallback mode, which disables vendor shipping completely and uses OpenCart's shipping system instead.
Since this system only supports one shipping rate per cart, your vendors will have no access to any shipping features and shipping costs collected from the customer will be transferred to your platform.
The new shipping modes are introduced as part of MultiMerch 8.22 and are available to all MultiMerch marketplace owners.
In one of the next upcoming updates, we will also be adding support for shipping tracking numbers to make managing deliveries for customers and vendors even easier.
Today’s e-commerce has changed dramatically from even a few years ago. Modern customers aren’t delighted by fast or free shipping – they expect it.
This is a shift largely driven by Amazon and its huge pushes to deliver products more quickly and cheaply, but it impacts e-commerce as an industry.
Understanding how shipping costs for the customer and total fulfillment speed affects conversion and sales across marketplaces will give you a better basis to understand how, where, and why you should be investing in faster and cheaper shipping.
Shipping costs have always been one of the largest factors behind abandoned shopping carts and missed sales, which is evident in studies as well as customer product reviews, where shipping speed directly correlates to customer satisfaction with the product.
As a result, most e-commerce platforms are using shipping cost and speed as factors in ranking and Buy Box algorithms, as each marketplace attempts to deliver a faster and better customer experience.
Many e-commerce platforms have also begun to integrate fast-shipping programs like Guaranteed Delivery, Free 2-Day Shipping, Next Day Delivery, Prime, and more – all of which boost product ranking and conversion across sites.
We’ll cover several top marketplace options, starting with Walmart.com.
Walmart: Walmart Free 2-Day Delivery
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Walmart entered the e-commerce game relatively late, but is taking massive strides to keep up. At the same time, Walmart’s third-party merchant policy is largely to offer fast shipping and a total low-cost for the product. Walmart cares about being the fastest and cheapest, which is their only real hope at beating Amazon.
In 2017, the retail giant launched Free 2-Day Shipping for all customers, which any Walmart seller can enroll in through Walmart’s fulfillment partner, Deliverr.
Walmart highlights fast and free shipping in several ways, starting with search. Walmart’s search algorithm heavily factors shipping speed, so sellers with faster fulfillment rates do eventually receive higher placement. However, Walmart’s highest consideration in search is cost, so their free shipping component could boost results higher than faster solutions.
This holds true with the Walmart Buy Box, which primarily considers total product cost (Shipping + Product Price). Here, you likely can’t compete with Walmart itself, but you can win the Buy Box by offering fast and free shipping without changing your product price.
Similarly, opting into Walmart’s 2-Day Free Shipping will help you to boost conversion through increased product placement in categories, highlights across the site, and in-search filtering – enabling customers to remove all products that don’t qualify for Free 2-Day Shipping. Opting into the program also means customers can return products to any Walmart retail center, which will boost confidence in purchase.
Tip: Walmart also has performance ads, which are PPC ads across the marketplace that sellers only need to pay for if someone clicks through to your listings.
eBay: eBay Guaranteed Delivery
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eBay has begun leaning toward fast shipping in their marketplace, with the introduction of eBay Guaranteed Delivery. They feature their fast shipping tags in search and across the marketplace, and have increasingly strict account health requirements for sellers.
The most obvious effect here is that eBay’s Cassini search algorithm highlights fast and/or free shipping options in search. The algorithm takes other factors such as value, total cost, seller feedback, and ranking into account as well, but getting on eBay Guaranteed Delivery is likely to result in higher placement in search.
eBay's Guaranteed Delivery Program claims up to 146% increase in sales. Since customers can filter for Guaranteed Delivery products in search, it also helps you reduce competition when shoppers are looking for quick delivery.
Shipping speed and cost affect your seller account in other ways. For example, both will affect your long-term seller feedback, which greatly affects conversion. Both are also included as metric requirements for eBay programs like Top Rated Seller and Best Match, which can help you to boost conversions.
Selling through your own store can help you to take control of your brand and drive more repeat sales, but unless you have a brand following, it’ll be hard to match your own store’s sales with your marketplace sales.
Offering competitive shipping costs and speed is one way to boost customer trust in your products, even if you aren’t selling on a trusted marketplace.
At the same time, many people increasingly expect fast shipping (1-4 days) as a minimum standard rather than as a luxury. Some will pay for faster shipping, but most expect it. Offering fast shipping can help to increase trust as well, because customers won’t have to wait to see if your product is what they expected.
Like with other channels, offering fast and free or low-cost shipping will improve your reviews and online feedback and increase customer satisfaction, which will pay off in the long-run.
Amazon: Amazon Prime
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Amazon was one of the first online marketplaces to focus on fast and free shipping, with offerings through Prime over a decade old. Today, Prime has more than 100 million subscribers.
Most experts believe Amazon has shaped how consumers view e-commerce today, and it is undoubtedly the primary reason many consumers expect fast shipping.
Delivering quickly with Amazon FBA can boost conversions in several ways, the most significant of which is that Amazon’s search algorithm strongly favors shipping speed. Shipping speed is also part of the Buy Box algorithm (although cost and account health metrics are also a big consideration).
Similarly, Amazon’s account health metrics contribute to your ability to rank in search and on product categories. Delivering products quickly and for a low price is a large contributing factor.
Amazon also highlights shipping speeds on products, in product search, and allows consumers to filter based on search options. Prime users (who pay a subscription fee) can also filter based on Prime Free Shipping, so that they benefit from Free 2-Day or Next Day shipping.
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Overall, shipping costs and speed have a huge influence on conversions across e-commerce platforms:
in front-end, where customers actively make a purchase decision based on shipping speed and cost
and in back-end, where platform algorithms highlight products with a better value or experience, which results in better placement and increased competitiveness
Fast, free shipping boosts conversions and helps sellers provide a good customer experience. This will create a positive impact, generate reviews and eventually result in more loyal customers.
If you want to remain competitive across any marketplace, including your own platforms, you will have to keep up.
Having a hard time monetizing your marketplace platform?
We're almost ready to release MultiMerch 8.23 that supports four different fee types:
selling fees
signup fees
product listing or insertion fees
vendor subscriptions
In this post, I'll tell you exactly how you can use different MultiMerch fees and generate revenues from your platform.
Marketplace platform selling fees
Selling fees are really straight forward. A selling fee is charged by the platform when a vendor's product is sold.
You can specify a selling fee in 4 different ways:
for vendor groups (plans), e.g. Standard vs Premium
for individual vendors, e.g. a lower selling fee for John Doe
for categories, e.g. 5% on all Electronics sales
for individual products, e.g. $50 for every iPhone Xr sold
This lets you create a flexible fee structure to make your marketplace platform more attractive to merchants.
Note: Starting with 8.23, vendor-level selling fees are collected once per order. Specifying a $10 vendor selling fee will produce a single $10 fee charge when the vendor receives a new order (no matter how many individual products have been sold).
Specifying selling fees for vendor groups (or plans)
By default, you'll have one Default vendor group in your marketplace.
The easiest way to start collecting selling fees is to enable them for the Default group via Seller groups > Edit:
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Doing so will automatically apply it to all vendors in your marketplace (since all new vendors are part of the default group).
This way, you can create as many different vendor plans as you want and charge different selling fees based on your own business model.
Rewarding sellers with individual selling fees
Let's say one of your vendors, John Doe, is really good at selling. Or maybe he's just a good friend of yours.
In any case, you can reward John Doe by applying a personalized selling fee rate via Sellers > Edit:
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This will apply a custom selling fee just for this individual merchant without affecting anyone else.
You can use this to reward hand-picked vendors with lower selling fees (or punish an annoying store owner with a higher fee?) without creating a separate plan.
Using category-based selling fees
Another way you can define selling fees is to apply them to whole categories, e.g.:
5% on Electronics
10% on Clothing
30% + $10 on Jewelry
This is especially useful if you're running an "everything store" like Amazon with lots of different product types.
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Specifying a category fee will charge vendors a fee for each product unit sold as part of this category or subcategories.
Need a more flexible configuration? You can also define a different rate for subcategories, e.g.:
5% on Electronics
15% on Electronics > Cellphones
20% on Electronics > Cellphones > Apple
(Although we recommend keeping the fee structure as simple as possible, at least at first).
Specifying individual selling fees for products
Still not flexible enough? Well, you can also use individual selling fee rates for individual products.
For example, here's how you charge a flat $50 fee just for iPhone Xr sales:
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Probably don't use it for regular products, though. A good use case for individual product fees would be one of a kind or high-margin products like high end jewelry or real estate.
P.S. Starting with v8.23 if both vendor and product/category selling fees are specified, the resulting amount will be the sum of vendor and product fees.
Product listing or insertion fees
I know, selling fees can get complex. They also may not work with your payment flow or payment gateway.
A simpler alternative to selling fees are product listing (or insertion) fees. Listing fees are collected once – when your vendors list products for sale.
Insertion fees can be flat or depend on product's price and are collected in one of the two ways:
via an invoice paid by the vendor manually
by automatically deducting the fee from vendor's balance
If a listing fee is enabled, your sellers will see a notification when listing a product:
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Product insertion fees can be specified on three different levels – for seller groups, individual sellers and marketplace categories.
Specifying listing fees for vendors and vendor groups
Here, listing fees are similar to selling fees – you can specify a listing fee the whole vendor group/plan, like the Default one:
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This will apply a listing fee of $5 + 5% from product's price and deduct it from vendor's balance for all vendors in the default group.
Similarly, if you want to reward John Doe with a lower insertion fee, you can override the group fee when editing John Doe's vendor account:
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Again, I recommend keeping the fee structure as simple as possible at first. You can always make it more complex later.
Using category-based product listing fees
Just like with the selling fees, you can specify different listing fees for the whole product categories, e.g. Electronics:
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Applying an insertion fee to a parent category will automatically apply the same fee to all products listed in the child categories.
Starting with MultiMerch 8.23, if both vendor and category insertion fees are specified, the resulting amount will be the sum of vendor and category fees.
Seller signup or registration fees
Want to make your platform even simpler?
Signup fees are a great way to simplify the fee structure – these are charged only once during registration.
As usual, MultiMerch lets you specify different signup fees for different seller groups (or plans):
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Just like insertion fees, signup fees can be paid either via invoices or by deducting the amount from vendor's balance.
Vendor plans and subscription fees
For recurring revenues, MultiMerch also supports vendor subscriptions.
At the moment, vendor subscriptions can only be charged via Stripe:
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With Stripe, you can create mixed seller plans and tiers and charge either flat subscription fees or per-product (per-seat) fees.
