Possible to make it feel like a marketplace?
Working on a site idea to sell products from different creators. But I don't want it be like a marketplace, where each creator has their own store. I just want it to appear like they have their own store (which I assume I can do by creating a Brand for them & showing just their products on their page).
What I'm having trouble with is what approach to take to give them something like a Home page. Use a custom content type, or a content template?
Don't you think there is the payment challenge as well ....splitting up the payment with the creators?
arjun arjun Yes but that's not something I'm concerned about, otherwise I would have mentioned it.
Sounds like a job for Crocoblocks JetEngine plugins
Nicolai Care to explain?
Arp Laszlo I've just started using it, so I'm no expert, but Jetengine has a lot of ways to create custom post types and filter the posts in archive pages.
I'm using it to hide or display various custom posts based on the user's logged in status, membership status + post metadata like tags, categories as well as custom meta data.
The user can also further filter the results by other criteria thanks to Jetengine's Jetfilters. The possibilities are endless.
Nicolai Thanks for clarifying. I use GeneratePress/GenerateBlocks and can do the same stuff, along with ACF.
It's a massive add-on work. Each user/vendor/creator must be able to add/edit their own product, their own sales tracking, if no immediate payment split then wallet balance and transfer to vendor's bank account log.
He said he's not worried about that part Alexander Sugianto but its an interesting challenge to think about anyway. I wonder if a hack approach would be to register vendors as affiliates to the website, and pay out an affiliate commission automatically whenever any of their products are sold.
Nicolai was thinking about that when reading this. If you could attach their affiliate link to all of their submitted products with a 90% payout (or 100%-whatever your percentage is). Basically using it as a reverse affiliate scheme taking a commission from others sales rather than them getting a commission from yours.
Nicolai This is a good idea.
Alexander Sugianto Did you notice "I don't want it be like a marketplace, where each creator has their own store" or did you just want to spout for clout?
Exactly Ross FCA It would also incentivise all the vendors to promote the marketplace. It's an interesting idea and could probably be adapted to any online business, and potentially automated somewhat.
Lots of interesting possibilities. Maybe you sell a customisable product that can be duplicated with the user's customisations.
Printables for a school team for example, or a manual for a Driving School, SOPs for a Barber college, etc.
They duplicate the product with their branded info and get a listing in your shop, their customers purchase it and you split the profits automatically.
Arp Laszlo geez, why are you so negative? I said it because I have explored the idea before and understand how difficult it is to make fluent products multi admin front end. Ross FCA probably can tell you the challenges of creating user role for event, otherwise the event add-on can allow user or has user role to create event front end. How is it you want them to feel like they have their own store but they actually don't? You create products for them, you set their affiliate commissions? All these require vendor's panel.
Arp Laszlo I was just trying to be helpful. Is calling someone trying to help you a**hole what you do when you don't get the help you want? Simply ignore whatever is not relevant to you and you will feel better. You are not even moderator here - you don't get to tell me what to say.
Arp Laszlo really don't know why you're being so rude. This is a community of users. It's a discussion space. It's not your personal space. Often questions are asked that then spur on further questions and discussions. It's good you initiated a broader discussion, there's no reason to jump on people expanding on it. It might not be useful for you but it might be for other users in the community.
You're welcome to take the answers relevant to you and ignore the rest and let others freely discuss what they like.
Alexander Sugianto Do better.
This is also interesting to me, I’ve achieved the same with woocommerce without the need for an expensive and complicated vendor plug-in. All creators have their own brand and submit new products via a submission form so details are completed.
For each sale, I export the data to a Google sheet, which does the heavy lifting with regards to commissions, et cetera
Each product has an ACF field stating that developers email address, this is the utilised to send individual sales emails for each sale as it happens.
The end of each month the script his run to export their sales data to individual PDFs within a folder I shared to them individually on Google Drive
All payments are made via Wize and their batch option with the upload of a CSV file per currency.
i’m looking forward to the day. I can achieve this with fluent cart!
Darren Cowley I'm a the point where some integrations just aren't worth it, like creating a multi-vendor marketplace when most people have no interest in running a their own store. I'm also thinking in terms of MVP (minimum viable product) so if the idea works, then I can consider whether an actual multi-vendor solution would be beneficial or not.
Like you, using custom fields to identify 'creators' and working with csvs is part of the MVP.
Arp Laszlo MVP for me is also about reducing the time it takes to do things adminstratively. Creating 80+ sales reports and payng people indiviudally used to take a day or more. It's now under twenty minutes.
Also agree, many people have no interest in running their own store, case in point - each developer has their own Google Sheet to show sales in the absence of being able to log in and see their own dashboard. I made a mistake with one column in the master sheet that broke all of them last year, i only had 6 people report the issue out of 80...
Darren Cowley I like the way you think.
Darren Cowley This is so intuitive! What are the current barriers preventing this in FluentCart?
Shani Cipro at the moment I’m stalled on multi Currency and brand, I’m sure that there’ll be developments in this area, having breakdance elements has pushed me a long way forwards along with Vibe Code plugging. For me I’m happier with a waiting game before parity arrives…
Arp Laszlo, just wondering, how do you plan to handle the multi-vendor payments part?
Taking payments, splitting payments, paying out commissions, etc. I've been using WCVendors in the past, but that only supports Woocommerce of course.
What Darren Cowley suggests with the spreadsheets sounds like an awful lot of work. So how are you planning to go about it, if you don't mind me asking?
Ross FCA does it require buyer to key in code in order for the vendor to receive commission?
Ross FCA Not if you're already using Fluent Affiliates for it's intended purpose....
Yann O Really no work at all, in comparison to trying to find a Multi Vendor plugin that's not bloated, handles multi currency, includes double, treble and quadruple splits, with deductions for affiliate payments...
1, Export Data to Google Sheet
2, Import data from master Google Sheet, filtered by developer
3, ummm, that's really it...
Yann O The affiliate plugin makes sense but I think a csv like Darren mentioned is most likely. Paypal still has a bulk payment via csv option, iirc.