Nowadays, there are many different ways you can participate in eCommerce and take advantage of creating an online store. The first thing that comes to mind is opening your webshop, either with products you make yourself or as a distributor for other brands. Both of these have some obvious drawbacks – the former requires you to monitor your stock carefully and constantly be on top of your production capabilities. In contrast, the latter requires coordination with outside sources, contract renewals, price changes, etc.
While not obvious at first glance, sooner or later, you’ll realize you can be a facilitator, i.e., create a platform others will use to sell their products. Congratulations, you’re now thinking along the lines of an online multivendor marketplace.
You’re probably thinking that creating a whole marketplace with dozens or even hundreds of vendors is some massive undertaking that requires, at the very least, a whole team of people dedicated to the cause. We’re here to tell you that it isn’t so much beyond reach and that everything you’d need can be found within one single plugin – MarketKing.
What Is MarketKing
As we’ve mentioned, MarketKing is a WordPress plugin designed to change your regular WooCommerce webshop into a WooCommerce multivendor marketplace. Creating a platform such as this will enable you to bring in various vendors, hence WooCommerce multi vendor, into the fold and sell their products either to individuals or even to other vendors with wholesale prices – we’ll get into more details for both options down the line.
The benefit of using WordPress and WooCommerce in tandem to create a specific WooCommerce marketplace is the familiar surroundings potential vendors will appreciate. You must consider that not all vendors come from a tech background, so backend operation could prove troublesome.
If you’re running your webshop or are working with only one vendor, it isn’t such an issue, but since you’ll be offering up your services to a wide range of users, a universal solution is required. WordPress and WooCommerce are so widespread, especially among novices. Having a familiar user interface means you can maximize your potential user pool.
In addition to vendors selling their products to the general user base on your marketplace, they’ll also be able to sell products wholesale to other businesses. As you would expect, the differences between the two are palpable – on the one hand, you have the cart as your be-all-end-all conversion tool; on the other, there are quotations, proformas, variable prices, and discounts based on quantity, etc. We’ll get more into all the wholesale, and B2B features shortly.
What You Can Do With MarketKing
Before reaching out to vendors to share your WooCommerce marketplace, it’s important to know what you’ll need to do and what you can do on your end. As the admin, you’ll have access to a special dashboard that gives you an overview of everything on the site, like sales reports,
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This article was written by Matej Milohnoja and originally published on WP Newsify.