Are you looking to set up a multivendor marketplace with WooCommerce? While it's no easy feat, there are a number of plugins and solutions that can help you get it done quickly, effectively and with a great design.

WooCommerce itself is powerful and flexible, but designed and featured to suit regular online stores. A number of significant changes must be done in order to allow each user to become a vendor and sell their own products.

The fastest and best way to achieve this would be to use a dedicated multivendor plugin such as MarketKing - The Ultimate Multivendor Marketplace Solution.

MarketKing is an all-in-one marketplace solution with over 100+ features, that will completely transform your store: from a regular WooCommerce shop, to a marketplace capable of supporting thousands of individual vendors, each handling their own products, orders, customer support, invoices, etc.

Let's take a look at the most important features you'll need when developing a WooCommerce marketplace platform:

1) Vendors have their own front-end dashboard

Vendors need a panel / interface where they can manage products, orders, coupons, etc. Some plugins will give vendors access to the site backend, but this can be problematic and lead to security concerns.

MarketKing creates a front-end vendor dashboard, where each vendor can login and manage their own products, orders, etc.

This dashboard has dozens of panels, integrating many important features:

• Store Overview
• Messages (communication with customers / inquiries)
• Coupons (each vendor can discount their own products)
• My Team (vendors create employee accounts that assist them with managing the store)
• Announcements
• Earnings
• Payouts
• Reviews
• Refunds
• and much more...

2) Track Commissions, Earnings and Payouts

There are 2 main models of earning revenues from operating a marketplace: either charge vendors a subscription fee for membership, or charge a commission from each order.

With MarketKing you can do both. If you decide to charge a commission, MarketKing has a complex commission system that allows you to set different commission values, and percentages for each order - you can even charge different commissions for each product.

Each vendor can track their earnings and commissions via the Earnings panel - and they can also track payouts via the Payouts tab.

It's possible to send payouts manually to your vendors, but you can also configure automatic payments. If you use MarketKing's Stripe Split Pay System , each vendor will be paid automatically. In case a customer purchases from multiple vendors at once, the order will be split and each vendor will receive their share - the admin also receiving a commission automatically.

3) Sales Reports and Analytics

Another important part of operating a multivendor marketplace is keeping track of sales, orders and commissions, and getting insights into how your store is developing and progressing.

MarketKing has a built-in admin sales reports feature, where you can see useful charts of this data, either for the marketplace or for any specific individual store.

4) Memberships and Subscriptions

It is also possible to charge vendors a monthly or yearly subscription, through MarketKing's integration with popular subscription plugins.

You can configure subscription packages and set an image or icon for each package. Vendors can then choose from these in the vendor dashboard.

5) Split Cart By Vendor

An important marketplace feature is the ability to split the cart by vendor, so customers can easily understand what packages they will receive from each vendor and for what value.

MarketKing not only shows the vendor for each product, but it completely splits the cart - this is the best option with the highest conversion rate, which many popular stores today use.

6) Vendors Handle Their Own Products & Orders

Each vendor can create and manage products, and will also receive orders directly so they can fulfil them.

Vendors can update orders, add order notes, change order status, etc.

7) Multiple Vendors Selling the Same Products

A powerful feature that most multi vendor marketplaces have is the ability for multiple vendors to sell the same product. MarketKing implements this and introduces several helpful options:

• Only a single product will be displayed on the marketplace frontend - the top ranked product.
• Products can be ranked and sorted based on vendor rating, stock status or price

8) Unique Vendor Stores

Each vendor will have their own storefront, with panels such as products, vendor details, reviews, policies, etc.

This will adapt to each theme, but it can also be designed by using the Elementor builder.

9) Coupons and Discounts

Each vendor can create and manage discount coupons for their own products. Many aspects can be configured such as discount type, export date, usage limits, usage restrictions, etc.

10) Invoices for Each Vendor

MarketKing is compatible with multiple invoice plugins. Each vendor can configure invoice details and invoices will be automatically generated. The vendor, as well as each customer can then download invoices for their orders.

MarketKing has many other features and options. For more details, read on...