How to Launch Your Marketplace Using WordPress

If you purchase through a link on our site, we may earn a commission. Learn more.

Shopping online is quite common today, and why not? You can purchase anything now using your laptop or mobile device. Online marketplaces brings that much convenience to you and also maintain their quality, that's how this business is done. In this article, we will show you how easy it is for you to have your own market and how quick you can build it.
Table of Contents
WP Engine High Performance Hosting
BionicWP Hosting

Shopping online is quite common today, and why not? You can purchase anything now using your laptop or mobile device. Online marketplaces brings that much convenience to you and also maintain their quality, that’s how this business is done. In this article, we will show you how easy it is for you to have your own market and how quick you can build it.

A Market of My Own?

Have you ever thought of yourself as the vendor, or the site owner rather than the customer? You might reply “I didn’t because it’s probably too much”. You are right and wrong. It was once complicated, but those days are gone. Now, with the help of a little WordPress plugin, you can create and manage an entire marketplace filled with thousands of products from your laptop or mobile, just like you used to shop. The plugin manages everything on its own after you just tell it what to do.

The Solution is Ready for You!

There are still very few solutions out there which can help you. The WC Vendor plugin, WooCommerce (through the Vendor plugin), Shopify (through a third party extension) can merely do the job, but not entirely. Dokan Multivendor plugin is the solution you need to truly become a market owner, created for you by weDevs and powered by WooCommerce.

Dokan Landing

Dokan has been specially thought out from the user’s perspective with features and design so perfect that regular users never need to worry. It is our goal to open up opportunities for everyone to be able to use it without much know how and make them operate on their own. Advanced power users get their ball play too with development features. Dokan has also been made Frontend for a unique user experience, the only one of its kind.

Dokan Storefront

Getting Started

Our Support staff will be glad to configure your market for a quick start. Dokan has been documented in detail, so that if you ever get stuck, you have a solution ready. We always try to solve your troubles. When you are the market admin, you already have a store of your own. So you can start selling even before you have any vendor.

After you have installed Dokan, the first thing you should be doing is creating one or more subscription packs. You see, in Dokan you can earn when a vendor signs up and also earn with sales commission. A Dokan subscription can limit product numbers, can limit product publish validity and these packs can even be set to be recurring.

Dokan also has its own shipping system and uses WooCommerce engine to generate tax rates.

A Peek Inside

Let’s see how Dokan works from a new vendor’s point of view.

Signup

This is how a vendor signs up! Vendor gets to set store name, url and choose subscription pack – already speeding things up.

Buying Subcription

In the next step the vendor gets billed for the subscription pack. Thus completes his/her billing information for the rest of the future transactions (editable later)

Dashboard

Done! The vendor can now configure his store. This is how the vendor dashboard looks like when its active. A frontend solution for all the things a vendor needs.

Manage and Adding Products

The next stop is the products tab. From here vendors are able to edit, remove or add new products including variants.

Adding a New Product

Creating a new product has never been so smooth and elaborate like Dokan. Here is how new products are created from the vendor dashboard.

Orders Management

From the Orders tab, the vendor can check the orders are made to the store with detailed status. Orders can be edited, invoices generated and notes can be added too.

Coupons for Customers

From this tab, vendors will be able to send out special coupons for customers who will avail special benefits from the vendor only if they have the code. This is an exclusive feature of Dokan.

Selling – Earning Report

This is the interesting part. From here the vendor can check all the smallest details of the store and its sales with date to date filters and many more.

Product Reviews

Did you know your customers can give you reviews on your products. Positive reviews increase sale tenfold. The reviews tab enable you to manage these. Well, let me tell you a little secret, Dokan lets you hide some reviews.

Withdrawing Earnings

You get to request your market admin to cashout your earnings from here. No other marketplace has a dedicated interface for withdrawal like this, they mostly leave it to the payment gateway to an external site.

Store Settings

Probably the largest settings panel on the Dashboard. Configure how your store looks from here. Not all options are enabled here for making it appear shorter.

Payment Settings

This is where the vendor sets up his payment gateways. All the needed fields are here.

Shipping

The vendor configures the store’s shipping policies here.

Store SEO

Its a special feature for Dokan stores that they can be optimized for search engine results.

Prerequisites

The requirements are quite simple and installation takes only several minutes. We follow the WordPress philosophy of easy installation, to get started, all you need is:

  1. A Domain and Hosting (If you don’t have them yet)
  2. WordPress Installed
  3. WooCommerce plugin
  4. Dokan plugin (with bundled free theme)
  5. Add-ons for more features (Optional)

If you already have your hosting and domain, it will take you only several minutes to get everything installed.

Benefits of Dokan

Why choose a market over a shop? And especially, why choose Dokan? Here are the answers:

    1. Quickly deploys under 3 minutes. Even the vendors can sign up and start selling in just 5 minutes!
    2. Powered by the world famous business engine – WooCommerce.
    3. Compatible with almost all themes from WooThemes.
    4. A versatile gallery of pro grade add-ons to extend features as you like. This saves you from going to a developer.
    5. The only complete Frontend based marketplace with individual dashboard for vendors. So, site backend stays neat and secure.
    6. Multiple revenue generation opportunities (Selling subscriptions to your vendors, selling your own products and much more)
    7. SEO friendly.
    8. Earning through commission. The more vendors you have, the more you earn.
    9. Being in control of everything from design, feature and permissions. Whereas in a store you only control your products.
    10. Pro looking customizeable store front for everyone.
    11. Vendors can manage everything while you can minimize your efforts to monitoring and handle verification.
    12. Able to do deep customization to the market by taking advantage of the open source code. Take the advantage of your flexible coding.
    13. Escrow based payment and multiple payment gateways. Take and distribute market income anyway you want.
    14. Automatic Tax calculation and state based shipping.
    15. The best variable product creating interface.
    16. Opensource customization. Bend it the way you like it.
    17.  Ready for product scheduling, Variable and Downloadable products will allow you to create an array of interesting inventory.
    18. You can migrate your currently existing store from any site into Dokan without disrupting anything. Import – export products anytime.

We have created the tool for you, but like all business, it will take you a little study to plan on how you will run it. It’s not complicated either.

What more can you expect from Dokan? Please let us know. We have been listening and improving it from the feedback from more than 1500 active users.

You can try Dokan

We love the Freemium philosophy. So, try Dokan Lite, the Free version of our flagship solution. It’s a little bomb that makes a loud noise.

Get Dokan

If you like what you see, you can buy a subscription of Dokan and start making money yourself!

Ranan Rahim

Ranan is a Photographer, Graphics Designer by passion. A creative Writer at weDevs by profession.

Discover more from our archives ↓

Popular articles ↓

9 Responses

  1. Hi Fairy,
    1. A good thing about Dokan is that if you have default product status set to “pending review”, when you review you can point out these kind of mistakes to the vendor so that a product with faulty detail never gets published. However, if an admin notices that a product has been published using a wrong category, he/she can either ask the vendor or edit the category from the wp backend himself. For multiple products, admins will be able to bulk edit the products as well.
    2. Vendors cannot edit their store url, they can only choose an url during registration.

  2. Hi, I have recently created my own marketplace, but I am struggling the understand if a vendor adds products under incorrect category, how can I being an admin make the changes.
    Also if a vendor updates a direct link to their page, I am not sure how I can edit to remove those details.
    Any help in this regard will be highly appreciated.

    Thanks and Regards

    1. Hello Fairy,

      You can set the default status of new products as pending. Each time a new product is created, you will receive a notification via email and none of the products will be published without your permission.

  3. Hey Steve,
    Great news for you! We do have add-ons for PayPal Adaptive Payments and Stripe Connect to pay the vendors instantly.

    You can read about our PayPal Adaptive Payments add-on here
    And the details about Stripe Connect add-on can be found here

  4. Will you ever have the capability to use Stripe or Paypal gateway payments so that the vendor gets paid directly (minus the marketplace owner’s commission)? I was considering using Dokan to create a marketplace but I do not want my vendors to have to request payment (withdraw). You list the vendor withdrawal request as a benefit but for me it is a deal breaker- I want vendors to be paid directly. Why would I or the vendor want to have the withdrawal request/approval requirement instead of direct payment? That seems like a hassle for both the marketplace owner and the vendor.

  5. Hello Zino,
    Currently we are building an add-on to integrate WooCommerce Subscriptions to sell services using Dokan. We already have a messaging system.

    If you already have WooCommerce Subscription plugin, I can help you to test the system.

  6. how can we make woocommerce marketplace for virtual only like sell services only, no shipping, no products and buyer can also message to seller

  7. Hello James,

    I am replying here on behalf of weDevs.

    I apologize for the inconvenient support experience. Please mail me the issues you had with us at sekander[at]wedevs.com. I will personally look into those issues and get them resolved ASAP.

    Thank you for your honest response ?

  8. I was looking at whether to use Dokan or WC Vendors. Don’t waste your money with Dokan. Where do I begin? Really dodgy Chinese code! Very unreliable! Crap support. Just to name a few.

    WC Vendors Pro is lacking a few features but I’ve been happy with their support. They have been working non stop to bring new versions out fairly often. There is even a offical plugin make by the buddyboss people.

    Stay away from Dokan!

Share Your Thoughts

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Claim Your Free Website Tip 👇

Leave your name, email and website URL below to receive one actionable improvement tip tailored for your website within the next 24 hours.

"They identified areas for improvement that we had not previously considered." - Elliot

By providing your information, you'll also be subscribing to our weekly newsletter packed with exclusive content and insights. You can unsubscribe at any time with just one click.