WP BASE addon Marketplace allows creating multi vendor and multi store service marketplaces where independent providers are offering their services and clients hire them for certain hours of their choice. Website owner takes a commission for providing the marketplace.
When multi store setting is enabled, vendors are assigned as store managers and they can employ their own providers, manage their working hours, bookings and adjust some of the store’s booking behaviour. They can further allow their providers manage their own bookings.
Marketplace addon manages vendor registration, email validation, approval, commission handling, integration with 3rd party plugins and many other related functions.
With appropriate settings it is possible to create a mostly autonomous website with minimum admin intervention.
A vendor registration form with configurable fields can be created. Vendor candidates who applied using this form have to verify their e-mails. Non verified submissions are saved in a separate database table, therefore frequent writing to WordPress users table is prevented. Vendor application approval can be selected to be automatic or upon admin approval.
A bio page/post with selectable custom post type can to be automatically created when application is approved. This page by default includes booking calendar and if allowed so, vendors can edit title, content and excerpt of this post/page.
Vendors can:
- Set their working hours and holidays.
- Define their own services, including duration, price, security deposit, padding, category defined by admin, capacity to accept more than one client at a time and delete the service if allowed so.
- Confirm own bookings if they require confirmation or prefer not to accept.
- Edit/manage own bookings either just to reschedule them or every aspect of the booking, including price.
Payments from the clients are collected by website using existing payment methods. Commission, a percentage from the earnings will be calculated for each booking and listed in a table. This list can be corrected and total commission to be paid to vendors can be exported for PayPal Mass payments.
Service Providers addon is mandatory for this addon to function properly.
Marketplace addon integrates seamlessly with the following addons:
- BuddyPress: Vendors can accept bookings from their profile pages. Includes support for BuddyBoss.
- Front End Edit: Vendors can reschedule own bookings and change client field data submitted during booking
- Front End Booking Management: Vendors can manage every aspect of their bookings as if they are the admin
- Google Calendar: Vendors can add their Google Calendar account to WP BASE to block their busy hours in their booking schedules. Also their bookings are recorded to their calendar.
- Group Bookings: Vendors can select if each service that they give will allow more than person per booking and maximum number of persons to apply per booking (in addition to total capacity of each time slot).
- Online Meetings: Vendors can have online video/audio meeting with their clients at the appointment time using their own Zoom or website’s Jitsi (or 8×8) account.
- Recurring Appointments: Vendor can set their services to be recurring and number of sessions and frequency of the bookings can be selected by the client.
- Shopping Cart: Clients can select multiple slots from the same vendor and make a single payment for total cost of the appointments.
- User Defined Fields: Any UDF fields can be used as registration field. Submitted vendor fields of vendor candidate can be edited by admin. Submitted field values can be used for customization using WordPress action/filter hooks.
- Variable Durations: Vendors can allow duration of their services to be selected by the client during booking.
- WooCommerce Integration: Any vendor bio page CPT can be used to add time slots to WooCommerce Cart. Therefore all payment gateways of WooCommerce and some of its extensions can be used, for example for invoicing, multiple currency display, installment payment, etc.
Marketplace addon can be used in combination with MemberPress, Restrict Content Pro, Paid Memberships Pro, Ultimate Membership Pro membership plugins so that joining to selected membership level automatically assigns member as vendor. If it is a paid level and when their membership expires, vendors are demoted to regular WordPress user role and clients can no longer hire them.
Any other membership plugin which can assign and unassign a custom user role at membership level change can also directly be used.
Marketplace addon integrates with GeoDirectory, Listeo and Listing Pro listing themes to create a complete multi vendor website with advanced booking functionality. When integrated with one of these themes, owner of the listing automatically becomes a vendor.
Marketplace addon can be used in combination with UsersWP and Ultimate Member user profile manager plugins. Vendors can be booked on their profile pages. Also WP BASE user account integrates with UsersWP and Ultimate Member account pages.
Marketplace addon integrates with Better Messages plugin. Users can send private messages to vendors, for example to ask pre-sales questions. Vendors and clients can communicate with each other after booking in their profile and online meeting pages. Admin and vendors can communicate each other as well.
