Multi vendor marketplace

User avatar
elecplus

28 Dec 2018, 20:11

I have been working on this for some time. Magento is my preference, since ecomm attached to Joomla or Word Press seems to require doing everything twice.

http://www.medma.net/knowledge-base/Mag ... odule/2-14 This one is on sale for $99 right now, but there is a problem. A product can only be sold by ONE seller. So if you have multiple people that want to sell 1391472, then there would be multiple listings, and each seller must use a different SKU for it. Only 1 seller would be able to list 1391472 as the SKU, but you can use it in the title and descriptions. You could use 1391472_Joe and 1391472_Sam and the SKU, but again, this created multiple lists, and will get messy very quickly.

https://cedcommerce.com/magento-2-exten ... um-package This one is currently $300, but will require a couple of add-ons for shipping extensions, and possibly a few other things. The basic package is $60, but does not offer enough features. This one DOES allow multiple sellers to sell the same item, using the same SKU. So you get a site more like Amazon, that lists the product once, and then you can choose the seller and condition, price and country, etc that you want from the available listings.

Let me be clear that this will not happen before mid-Jan at the soonest. We will not be collecting commissions from the sales. Each seller is responsible for their own listings, and each seller will receive an email when you have an order. You will be paid directly through PayPal, and will not have to wait for your payments. PayPal does charge something like 4% of the sale, but that is the cost of doing business. A business PayPal account is not required for individual sellers.

Financing is what is holding up this project, but Matt3o said there might be an answer for that. Time is the 2nd constraint, especially over the holidays.

Speak up, what are your opinions?

User avatar
matt3o
-[°_°]-

29 Dec 2018, 09:52

As soon as I'm finished updating the current software, I'll put my head on this (maybe more than a couple of weeks).

What I know is that magento is a very power hungry software and requires a lot of resources. After a quick google-fu it turns out that it eats 8GB of ram and 4Cores@3.5Ghz even in the smallest scenario (under 1000 products).

Even if you can get away with a smaller server, the priority is of course Deskthority and I don't want to steal resources from that.

There's a forum software called WolLab Suite that integrates an ecommerce, that would be ideal as you don't need multiple logins. But switching would be gargantuan effort and I'd like to know what is the actual interest around this project.

User avatar
elecplus

29 Dec 2018, 10:05

Mine runs fine on a shared server that costs me $36/yr. They did have to give me a little more RAM. There is nothing mentioned about proc speed. https://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.2 ... -tech.html

User avatar
matt3o
-[°_°]-

29 Dec 2018, 10:13

source: https://magento.stackexchange.com/quest ... quirements

the answer is from a host, so clearly they exaggerated by an order of magnitude, but still they give a pretty good scenario.

JBert

29 Dec 2018, 13:42

Are DeskThority club members supposed to be giving feedback on this? If so, maybe we should move this topic to the DT Talk forum?

User avatar
matt3o
-[°_°]-

29 Dec 2018, 13:47

club is no more

User avatar
Muirium
µ

29 Dec 2018, 16:15

matt3o wrote: But switching would be gargantuan effort and I'd like to know what is the actual interest around this project.
Well, as you ask, I’ll tell. With all respect to Cindy, I personally have no interest in an integrated e-commerce forum at all. I see the downsides (development work, external commercial software dependencies, risk of compromising on the forum design) but not the upsides. None of us are such big sellers we need an Amazon marketplace sales interface. Indeed, if PayPal gets a tasty cut in any case, what advantage is there to selling through commercial DT than straight up eBay?

As with so many of the forum regulars, what I come for is the chit-chat and the rare finds getting well documented. Trades aren’t high on my list any more, and even when they were I didn’t find PM the least bit onerous for haggling and exchanging addresses and payment details. This thread is about functionality that is not for me. It could well be for someone, but I’ve no interest in it, or willingness to sacrifice for it, myself.

User avatar
elecplus

29 Dec 2018, 18:29

There are advantages to both sides, as well as disadvantages.
In a forum setting, you can never be certain if the person just forgot to mark the post as sold. In an ecommerce, there is no doubt, since it will say out of stock. In a forum, people will say "keep me in mind if you find more". In an ecommerce, they can sign up to be notified when items are back in stock, price changes, etc. There are quite a few people on here that sell more than 10 items per year. I can think of Mike, Orihalcon, Wodan, E3E, Matt, myself, and several others. The 4% charge from PayPal is no more than you would pay for credit card processing for a small business.Stripe is another payment option, but the charge works out to about the same. It is just a cost of doing business. Yes, ebay has a huge following, but also some weird rules, and they even charge a 10% commission on the shipping costs!

User avatar
snacksthecat
✶✶✶✶

03 Jan 2019, 18:21

elecplus wrote: http://www.medma.net/knowledge-base/Mag ... odule/2-14 This one is on sale for $99 right now...
elecplus wrote: https://cedcommerce.com/magento-2-exten ... um-package This one is currently $300, but will require a couple of add-ons for shipping extensions, and possibly a few other things...
Are these one time costs for the ecommerce software package or are these subscription services that charge on a per year/month basis? If it's just one time charges, then both of those seem very reasonable. I'd be interested to check out some of their customers' sites to see what the platforms look like.

I don't have much experience in this area so I probably can't help with the selection process. But I was wondering about a few things:
  • Would the intention be to replace the DT marketplace sub-forum or would that still exist?
  • Right now the rules for market posts are pretty relaxed. Would this multi-vendor market place have stricter posting rules / moderation? I might be interested in helping out in that area if you're looking for people for that
  • Are these platforms tailored more to single-item or multi-item listings? For instance, I'm typically just selling an item at a time whilst other people have an inventory of product that they're selling a bunch of (e.g. Soarer's converters)
One big pain point I foresee is with shipping. Selling classified-style on the forum makes it pretty flexible; sellers can choose whether they want to sell internationally or keep it local, and they can negotiate shipping costs directly with buyers based on what it's going to cost. I think whichever platform we went with would need to be flexible in this area and at least allow sellers to set multiple shipping costs. For example, if I was selling something I'd want to be able to say "shipping within the US is $10, shipping to the rest of the world is $30".

User avatar
elecplus

15 Jan 2019, 07:18

This is the Magento download page https://magento.com/tech-resources/download
On the same page, under Resources tab, you can find the User Guide and Requirements.

The goal is to provide a means for multiple sellers to sell the same or different products.
The video on this page shows that this extension from Creative Minds does exactly that. https://www.cminds.com/same-product-different-vendors/
Sellers can choose the countries they want to ship to, and set their own rates.
Buyers can purchase products from multiple sellers, and check out with one cart.
With the paypal extension, all payments are split amongst the multiple sellers, and they are paid automatically when the products ship.

A full overviw is available here https://www.cminds.com/magento-extensi ... tiveminds/

The total cost would be about $560, including installation.

User avatar
snacksthecat
✶✶✶✶

03 Feb 2019, 01:58

Any update on progress?

User avatar
elecplus

03 Feb 2019, 17:49

Maybe. I found a different solution but have not had any time to test it.

Post Reply

Return to “Vendors”