UK Handmade Marketplace with mini-stores on subdomains
experience of selling on Marketplace including 1+ year on Multi-Vendor
(still growing)
(still growing)
The business goal of the project is to sell handmade goods first in the UK, and then expand to the rest of Europe, and the US. The marketplace has two storefronts one of which is available only to vendors on a higher vendor plan. There, sellers can have their micro-stores looking as standalone mini-stores.
We helped the owners to set up vendor mini-stores on subdomains, integrate Royal Mail Service with the Click&Drop functionality, and enable the redirects for vendor subdomains. The project is hosted with us and uses our add-ons.
It was my husband Mark. He wanted to do a marketplace and he did a lot of research. He looked at CS-Cart and just felt that that was the best fit for it.
Challenges
Modification for “Vendor subdomain”
Redirect to vendor micro store
Integration with Royal Mail to Click&Drop accounts
Implementing the project
Vendor subdomains and redirecting to a vendor micro store
Our team implemented a script allowing the marketplace to redirect to a vendor micro-store. By clicking on the “Continue shopping“ button on the cart and wishlist pages, customers are now redirected to the vendor’s micro store page.
The script logic relies on the information about the last product added to the cart and to the wishlist. We replaced the link of the “Continue shopping“ button with the vendor micro store link on the cart page.
Now, the marketplace vendors can have their own subdomain or domain which can be accessed by the customers directly for purchasing products.
Royal Mail Integration
The Click & Drop service is a Royal Mail integration that allows creating orders in Click & Drop via API from any CMS. It allows downloading orders and importing an electronic order file to generate shipping labels for any other orders.
According to the developer, the solution is suitable for eCommerce websites that want to:
- Create one or more orders in Click & Drop
- Retrieve order information from Click & Drop
- Retrieve labels and other documents for OBA accounts after orders have been created
- Reset orders in Click & Drop
- Mark orders as ‘Despatched’
We are now developing an add-on to integrate the Royal Mail shipments with the Click&Drop functionality.
The developed add-on can set up :
- the default value of item weight
- default shipment status
The new functionality follows a workflow:
Step 1 – Customers create an order with a “custom” shipping method and the manual rate calculation.
Step 2 – Vendor admin selects a new “Carrier” – the Royal Mail – in the Shipping section and saves the order changes.
Step 3 – Order data is sent to Royal Mail service and a new Tracking ID is assigned.
Step 4 – A new shipment is created with the Tracking ID assigned by the Royal Mail Service.
The shipment details will be shown on the storefront in the Summary section.
Whether the administrator is posting one product or a hundred, Click & Drop allows printing all of the labels in a single batch, and instantly select and pay for the right postage options. The service is a convenient solution to purchase postage and print bar coded labels.
Results
A rapidly growing marketplace with vendor mini-stores on subdomains.
