BigCommerce MultiVendor Marketplace:
We all know about BigCommerce, as it is a hosted shopping cart software or basically an online store builder used to build an eCommerce store. Through BigCommerce, it becomes very easy to develop an eCommerce store by simply configuring some store settings. Therefore, to convert your BigCommerce to a full-fledged MultiVendor Marketplace, “BigCommerce MultiVendor Marketplace” is developed. It helps to convert a single admin online store to a multi-seller Marketplace..
How does it work?
This is basically a software application, that would convert your normal BigCommerce store into Marketplace so that not only the store admin but sellers can associate with your eCommerce store and sell their products. As a store admin, you have backend access and control on products, sellers, seller’s products. It also gives an option that without the admin’s approval seller’s product would not be visible at the front end.
An admin can create seller membership plans that the seller has to purchase at the time of registration. After that, a seller can start selling his products. And the admin will get the commission from each seller based on the seller’s membership plans.
BigCommerce MultiVendor Marketplace Features-
Admin End:
- An admin has complete access to the seller’s profile, seller’s products, and orders.
- Functionality to approve the seller’s products.
- The functionality to assign a product to any seller.
- Synchronize the products and categories available from BigCommerce store.
- Functionality to create seller’s admin.
- A seller’s admin can be “Active” or “Disable” by the admin.
- An admin can create the number of sellers based on the subscription plan.
- Admin can create the seller’s membership plan to get the commission.
- Once an order is completed, an admin can create a “Payout” for the seller.
- Ability to Approve or Disapprove the status of any transaction.
- Proper setup instruction is provided to add the seller’s login page at the storefront.
Seller End:
- A separate seller’s control panel is provided.
- A seller can view his order and can change the order’s status.
- The seller can add products from his panel.
- Functionality to add the seller’s admin.
- Option to activate or disable a seller’s admin at any time.
- Once an order is completed a seller can request a “Withdraw” from an admin.
Updated Features of BigCommerce MultiVendor Marketplace-
- Functionality to Import/Export products is provided.
- A seller can add custom fields to the products.
- Functionality to make any image as default from various product images.
Enhanced Features –
- Advance CSV Import/Export features for products are added.
- Admin/Sellers can also export their orders into CSV file.
Latest Features (Version 2.0)-
- The functionality of “Domain Mapping” is provided to the admin as per the plan opted.
- Advanced way of creating product options.
- Automatically create product’s SKU based on product’s option created.
- Admin can set customized identifier (seller ID, name) to the seller’s product name and SKU.
New Updates (Version 2.0) –
- Added a new feature for the admin to make seller Payout using PayPal.
- Seller Allowed categories option is added, with the help of which you can restrict the sellers to add products in particular categories only.
Note:
PAYOUT: Payout is the remaining amount that an admin can transfer to a seller after deducting his own commission when an order is completed.
WITHDRAW: It is the amount that a seller requests to admin to pay after an order is completed.
Video tutorial of BigCommerce MultiVendor Marketplace Admin Panel-Part I:
Video tutorial of BigCommerce MultiVendor Marketplace Admin Panel-Part II:
Video tutorial of BigCommerce MultiVendor Marketplace Admin Panel-Part III:
Video Tutorial of BigCommerce MultiVendor Marketplace Seller Panel:
Steps to installation and configuration
Step1:
Firstly, go to the control panel of your BigCommerce store and click “Apps”. Here you will find “BigCommerce Multi-Vendor Marketplace”. Secondly, click on install to install the application.
Step2:
After that, click Confirm to complete the installation.
Step3:
This is the Dashboard of “BigCommerce Multi-Vendor Marketplace”.
Now, we have added the option to change the theme color and filter the reports on Dashboard.
With the help of these, you can select any color and can apply it. Also, you can search the reports by applying filters like order status, seller and through dates, as shown in the given snapshots –
Functionality Of Admin Panel:
Given below various fields of “Multi-vendor Marketplace”:
My Subscription
Subscription Information:
In this section, an admin can find the details of the subscription plan he opted. Further, to establish the marketplace, a store owner can purchase the plan as per need. And, also upgrade the subscription whenever required. After successful installation of the application, first of all, you will be provided 10 days free trial.
When you want to take any other plan click on the “Upgrade Plan”. To get the functionality of Domain mapping, you must select the plan that has the option of Domain mapping to Yes.
Now, click on the plan you want to take, it will redirect to the page where you have to fill out your details and choose a payment option. There are two options for payment, offline payment, and PayPal payment. After your payment is done you will get the payment invoice.
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If you opted the PayPal payment option then you will redirect to the PayPal login page. After successful login, you can do your payment easily.
Transactions:
Once an admin has opted the plan and complete the payment, his invoice is generated. In this section, an admin can view the “list of transactions”.
My Company
There are two sections in this field as:
Company Profile:
Here an Admin can view the details about his company or store like name, store ID, Storefront URL, email Id of an owner, and many more.
Company Settings:
In this section, you can view various settings of your store. You can also change the settings as per your need from your BigCommerce store and click on the Sync button to synchronize settings to your marketplace.
Settings
There are four sections in the Setting field of our updated version of BigCommerce MultiVendor Marketplace. We have added the functionality of “Domain Mapping” in our updated version.
Setup Instruction:
This section guides how to add the seller’s registration and login page to the storefront.
- The Seller Registration URL: Provide URL to the seller’s registration form.
- Seller Login URL: Provide URL to seller’s login form.
- Seller Login & Register link at Homepage: Here the complete steps to add the “Seller Registration” and “Seller login” page at the front end is provided. You need to follow these steps to configure the seller registration and login page to the storefront.
For any kind of issue in installation, you can click “Need assistance for code integration” to get support.
Further, after completing the setup installation, your “Seller login” and “Seller Registration” page will get added to your storefront.
Embed Page: Clicking on “Embed Page”, You will see the list of sellers at the storefront.
Here is the view of marketplace sellers on frontend :
This is the detail page of the seller:
General :
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- In general settings, the admin needs to set the details of the Paypal for the payout system i.e., Client id, Secret Key and also needs to set the mode of the payment as sandbox or live.
- Admin can enable auto payment to the seller option, so that the payments will be transferred automatically to the seller’s paypal account for their orders, according to the order status for auto payment is set by the admin.
- After all the settings, click on save to save the settings.
How to get the client id and secret key –
In order to get these credentials, go to your Paypal account dashboard. Now click on My Apps & credentials,here you will get the client id and secret key for both sandbox and live mode as shown below –
In order to create the credentials, click on create app as shown below and enter the required details.
Seller setting:
- Product Setting: Admin can configure the settings for product approval when a seller adds a product to the store. Products will get automatically approved if set to “Yes”. If an admin wants to approve products manually then set to “No”.
- WYSIWYG: It refers to “What you see is what you get”. It can set to “Plain” for plain text description or “TinyMCE” for an editor.
- Show Location: Check this box to show the location to customer from where the products get shipped.
- Product Identifier: Admin can enable the product identifier to customize the product’s name of seller by adding suffix or prefix or add any custom value.
- SKU Identifier: Admin can enable the SKU identifier to customize the product’s SKU by adding suffix or prefix or any custom value as per choice.
Email: To know how to configure email settings, please visit the user guide and follow the required steps.
Note – The above settings are for Gmail, in case you are using any other email service then contact your email service provider for the following details.
Addons –
- We have integrated ShipStation Addon within MultiVendor Marketplace app so that your store sellers can get all order details into their ShipStation merchant accounts in real time.
To know how to install and setup the ShipStation Addon, visit User Guide For ShipStation Integration with BigCommerce MultiVendor Marketplace app
- We have integrated Seller Custom Registration Addon within MultiVendor Marketplace app so that you as an admin can add custom fields as per your needs to the seller registration form.
To know how to install and set up the Seller Custom Registration addon, visit User Guide For Seller Custom Registration App
Domain Settings:
This functionality will allow an admin to customize his marketplace domain name as per his requirement. This functionality will be provided on the selected subscription plan. An admin can enter the name of the domain for mapping to his BigCommerce marketplace store.
Note:
To use domain mapping, your domain must be mapped with http://bigcommerce.webkul.com . It means you need to create a new cname on DNS. For Example :
Record type: CNAME
cname: test.example.com (your chosen domain)
value: bigcommerce.webkul.com
ttl: 600 seconds
Step:1-
Step:2-
Step:3-
Step:4-
Seller Control
Seller Companies:
An admin can view the Seller’s details like Seller’s Name, email Id, Seller’s status and active date. Admin can also update status of a seller as per his need.
An admin can also add a seller by clicking the plus icon. Further, to add a seller you have to fill in the details of a seller and click save.
Now, the seller allowed categories option is added, with the help of which you can restrict the sellers to add products in particular categories only. For this you need to go to the seller control > seller companies then click on Seller Company to set the categories for the particular seller as shown below –
Seller Plan:
It covers various plans that an admin has created for sellers. To create a plan click on plus icon and fill out the details about your plan.
After clicking the plus icon enter various details and then save.
General:
- Plan Title: Enter the name of the plan.
- Status: Select the status of the plan to active.
- Code: Enter a code of your plan.
- Price: Select the price of the plan.
- Best choice: Option to set the plan as the best choice.
- Interval: Set the time interval of a plan in days, quarterly, half yearly and yearly.
- Interval value: Enter the value or number for the time interval selected.
- Description: Write the description of your plan.
Condition:
- Max Product: Enter the maximum limit of products that a seller is allowed to add for this plan.
- Commission: Select the commission to be gotten from the seller in %. For example, if a seller opted for a plan of 5% commission on order and the order is of $100. Then an admin will deduct $5 as his commission and the remaining $95 will transfer to the seller as a “Payout”.
Accounting:
From the accounting section, in case of manual payment to the seller, an admin can create a “Payout” to send the amount (after deducting his commision) to the seller for the sale of his product. After completing “Payout” an admin can change the status to “Approved”. Here you can find total sales, commission, total payout, and total withdrawal.
Note – The payout is only be created if the admin is paying manually to the sellers because if the admin will create a payout or if the vendor creates a withdraw and the admin approves it then the application will consider that payout to the seller has been made manually by the admin, not through the application so it will reflect the remaining payment only.
The accounting section manages the details of transactions done between admin and seller. In summary, the admin can view the overall accounting between admin and seller.
- Total Sale: This is the total amount of the sale done on the admin’s store.
- Commission: This is the total approved amount of the commission, that admin gets from sellers.
- Total payout: This is the total amount an admin can transfer to a seller, after deducting his own commission.
- Total Withdraw: This is the total amount that a seller requests an admin to pay after an order is completed.
Seller Commission:
Here the admin will find all the seller commission which he needs to pay to the seller in the seller commission tab, the admin needs to click on the pay now button to pay the seller through Paypal as shown below –
If the admin wants to enable the automatic payout system to pay the sellers then Admin can enable auto-payout to the seller option, so that the payments will be transferred automatically to the seller’s Paypal account for their orders, according to the order status for auto payment is set by the admin.
Note – The seller commission will be created after deducting the admin’s commission and the seller plan fee. And the seller commission will include approved and payment failed entries only from accounting.
Payout Transactions:
The payout transactions include all the transactions made for the seller’s payout.
Documents:
In our application, the admin can ask the seller to upload identity proof, address proof, or any documents at the time of registration. In this section, the admin can create new seller documents which he wants to show on the seller registration page.
After filling in all the details, click on Save. Your seller document will be created.
After clicking on save, your seller registration page will look like this.
If you want to see the documents of a particular seller which are uploaded by the seller at the time of registration. Follow the steps shown below –
Click on Documents >> Click on the download icons as shown below to download those documents which a particular seller has uploaded at the time of registration.
If you don’t want to show the document page to your sellers at the time of registration. Click on Setting>> Seller registration >> Select “No” and click on “Save” as shown below.
Users
Seller Admin:
This covers the details of the seller’s admin like name, email Id, and seller’s company. An admin can also set the status of any seller’s admin as “Active” or “Disabled”. Filter option is also provided to search seller’s admin quickly. The option to create a seller’s admin is also provided to an admin. The functionality of “Batch Action” helps to perform the action on a selected set of multiple items.
Customer:
This section provides a list of all customers.
Products
Category:
All the categories of the store are visible here. An admin can synchronize the categories from the BigCommerce store to “Multivendor Marketplace”.
Product:
An admin can add products to his store by clicking plus icon. Further, he can synchronize already existed products and search products through name, price, SKU, and status of products. An admin is also able to import/export products and assign any product to seller.
Product Synchronization:
Click on “Sync products” to synchronize the products from the BigCommerce store to Marketplace. This process will be performed as a batch task.
Product Assign to the seller:
An admin will also have the functionality to directly assign a product to a seller. An admin can assign a product to a seller, simply by clicking through the “Assign seller” button. After that, select the seller from the dropdown to which product will be assigned and click on assign.
Order:
The order section covers the view of all the orders associated with the sellers. To download the packing slips, select a particular order and click on the packaging Slip button as shown below. Your packaging slip of that particular order will get downloaded.
Admin/seller can also export their orders into CSV file as shown below.
Functionality at the seller’s end
Seller Registration Process:
To start selling products on “Marketplace”. Firstly, a seller has to do the registration. Further, fill in the details like seller name, a plan that the seller wants to opt for, email id, and contact details and click next.
Here seller has to upload the documents as Identity Proof. After uploading the documents click on Register.
After successful registration, a seller will receive an email to the mail id through which he had registered. Further, in that mail, a seller will find his Username and Password. So, he can log in to his “Dashboard” by using that Username and Password.
Dashboard:
This is the dashboard of a seller, after successful login, a seller can view his dashboard.
Category:
A seller can view all the categories available at the store.
Products:
It includes the list of products of a particular seller. A seller can also add a product by clicking plus icon. One can also search for a product by using the filter. This application has improved the ease of adding a product through a single page.
To add/edit a product fill the given tabs:
Basic Information: Firstly, enter the name, price, height, weight, and other details of the products. After that, select a category and shipping for a product, and then fill in other details to create the product.
Images: The seller can upload multiple images of the product from the system or through an image URL. The seller can make any of the images as default from various images.
Inventory: This field shows the number of products available at the store. You are having the option to track the inventory if you want to show the number of products to the customers. If you want to hide the number of products available at a store then you will have an option to do not track inventory.
Product Options: This section allow a seller to create various product’s options. A seller can enter the name and select the option type from the dropdown. It also allows for creating product variations based on product options. Functionality to add multiple color option variants or an image as a variation by selecting pattern variation.
After the product’s variants are created, you will find that the product SKU is automatically created under the “SKUs tab”. There is also an option to edit the product’s details and add product images for each variant.
Custom Fields: You can also add custom fields to your products to provide a better description of the product.
Extra Details: You can add extra details about the product like brand name, product UPC, warranty, availability, show as a featured product, visible at the store or not, maximum quantity and minimum quantity.
Front End View
Import Product:
A seller can import products from his product page as given in the below screenshot.
So, a seller needs to select Delimiter and also needs to browse the file from the system for the product import as shown below in the snapshot –
Format For the CSV File of Imported Products –
The CSV file which needs to be uploaded should have the following format.
For Category – Categories are separated by a semi-colon(;) and the child category is preceded by all parent categories and further joined by a forward-slash(/).
For example: Bath; Kitchen/Towel.
In the above example, Bath and Kitchen are the parent categories separated by the semi-colon and Towel is the child category joined by the forward slash.
For Custom Fields: Custom fields are used as key-value joined by colon (:) and separated by a semi-colon(;) .
For example: material:cotton; type:free-style
For images: Image URLs are separated by a semi-colon.
For example abc.png;def.png
For variants: We need to create a separate entry for each product variant in the CSV file and that should be placed just below the product.
SKU: SKU name must have a valid format.
Option : [Option Type]OptionName = OptionValue:valueData1|valueData2; [option type]OptionName=OptionValue:valueData1|valueData2;
Symbols for Option Type
CS – SWATCH
RB – RADIO BUTTON
RT – RECTANGLE LIST
S – DROP DOWN
Note- Item type needs to be set as product or SKU which defines whether an entry is the main product or a variant of the above product.
Export Product:
In export products, the seller can also export the product by simply configuring export settings. To export product, a seller needs to give a file name to export products. Choose output type and delimiter. And, select the other required fields in the file.
This is the exported file.
Order:
In the order section, a seller can view the list of his order.
When the sellers will click on the button to view the order details, they will also find the option to create shipment for the order as shown below –
To create shipment, sellers needs to enter the details as per shown –
Note – Any shipping method is not integrated in the application, so the sellers needs to ship the orders manually and then they can create the shipment from the seller panel.
Now after creating the shipment, the sellers can view the shipment and can download the packaging slip from there as shown below in the screenshot –
After clicking on print, the packaging slip will get downloaded.
*The same feature is available on Admin end also, to download the packaging slip.*
Seller’s admin:
The list of a seller’s admin will be displayed under seller’s admin tab. A seller can also create a seller’s admin simply by clicking plus icon and enter the various details of seller’s admin.
Seller:
The detail of a seller will be displayed in this section. So, from here you can also edit the seller’s details.
Accounting:
Management of account is done in this section. A seller can manage accounts of his store. And, can create a “Withdraw” for admin and can view his “Payout”. He can find the total sales, total commission, total payout, total withdraw. So, following are the fields of seller’s accounting.
- ID: This is the transaction Id of a seller.
- Status: This reflects the status of the transaction, i.e, “Approved”, “Declined”, “Payment Initiated” , “Payment Cancel” or “Complete”.
- Type: This is the transaction type, whether it is a “Withdraw”, “Payout” or “Order placement”.
- Seller: This reflects the name of a seller.
- Reference: It shows the reference to the transaction.
- Commission: This part covers the Commission of the admin.
- Transaction Amount: It shows the amount within a particular transaction.
- Date: This is the date and time of a particular transaction.
Note – When admin will pay to the sellers then the status of accounting will be reflected as Payment Initiated then after on the basis of the transaction the payment status will get changed further as Payment Cancelled or Complete .
Settings:
In settings, vendor can add the profile and paypal payout details as shown –
Frequently Asked Question(FAQs)
1. What to do if in Product View page, Product’s Seller name is displayed as HTML text? Refer to screenshot: http://prntscr.com/nh1a1c
Ans. This issue is occurring due to minor changes in BigCommerce catalog API. To resolve this issue you will be required to do some code changes in the template file. Please follow the following steps:
- Goto file ‘templates/components/products/product-view.html’
- search for below lines:
{{#each product.custom_fields}}<dtclass=”productView-info-name”>{{name}}:</dt><ddclass=”productView-info-value”>{{{value}}}</dd>{{/each}}
- Now replace above code with below updated code:
{{#each product.custom_fields}}
{{#if name ‘===’ ‘Seller’}}
<dt class=”productView-info-name”>{{name}}:</dt>
<dd class=”productView-info-value wk-seller-url” id=”wk-seller-url”>{{{value}}}</dd>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var seller_url_div3 = document.getElementById(“wk-seller-url”).textContent;
var str = seller_url_div3;
var str1 = document.createElement(‘str1’);
str1.innerHTML = str;
document.getElementById(“wk-seller-url”).innerHTML = str1.innerHTML;
</script>
{{else}}
<dt class=”productView-info-name”>{{name}}:</dt>
<dd class=”productView-info-value”>{{{value}}}</dd>
{{/if}}
{{/each}} - Now click on save and apply.
Please refer to the given below screenshot:
- Go to “Storefront” and “My Themes”. Under “Advanced” click “Edit Theme Files”.
2. Goto file ‘templates/components/products/product-view.html’
3. Replace the code with the new code as given in the below screenshot.
How to manage URL?
1. You can use the Domain Mapping, which will replace the domain (bigcommerce.webkul.com) with your site’s sub-domain(ex. marketplace.xyz.com)
2. The other option is, you can create a web page at the bigcommerce end and can add an iframe in it linking to seller login/registration.
WEBKUL SUPPORT
I hope this blog will help you to understand the complete process involved in the BigCommerce Multi-Vendor Marketplace Application. If in case you have any queries please generate a ticket http://webkul.uvdesk.com
Current Product Version - 2.0
Supported Framework Version - BigCommerce
6 comments
Please generate a ticket at – https://webkul.uvdesk.com/en/
We will surely assist you over the ticket.
Thank you!!
Please generate a ticket at http://webkul.uvdesk.com
Thanks!!
Thank you so much for your time and effort to go through our application. Our application covers all the basic functionality of the marketplace, keeping in mind the expectations of our customers. Meanwhile, we can also provide 10 days free trial on request of our existing clients to check the functionality of our application in a better way.
Click here to get 10 days free trial: https://www.bigcommerce.com/apps/multi-vendor-marketplace-by-webkul/
For any further query, you can raise a ticket at https://webkul.uvdesk.com/en/