i am a dropship,
so my answers are -
1. Multiple vendors, single store.
agree
2. Products from multiple vendors in one order.
my customer should see only one order.
3. What can vendors do and see?
i don't care, my vendors are not connecting to my store, i insert the products manually.
4. Payment processing.
the customer pays in one transaction, order is then manually distributed by store owner
but i would like to see a report - for order #123 i need to create 2 orders, one for vendor 1, one for vendor 2, these are the products for each vendor, this is the shipping address for this customer.
5. Shipping options and rates.
keeping this simple in first release
6. Email notification to vendor.
agree, actually this is the report i mentioned above
7. Vendor login/registration
i don't care
Thanks,
Shay
Multi-vendor roadmap. Let's discuss (UPDATE: done)
MVP
- 517
- 4709
- 2/28/2012
- United States
a.m. wrote:
1. Multiple vendors, single store. Products from multiple independent vendors appear in the common product catalog and your website visitors do shop at one web store even if your products are supplied by hundred of different vendors from all over the world.
Agree. One thing that might be nice is to list the vendor on the product details page maybe under the product name. You should be able to click on the vendor name and see ratings and all the products by that vendor. It could work something like a category with ratings. Also an about profile would be nice.
a.m. wrote:
2. Products from multiple vendors in one order. Your customers' shopping cart can contain products from several vendors, but they will still place one order and pay only once. Should a customer know whether his order contains product from several vendors? I personally think, no. A customer will see only one order. For proper tracking such order should be then automatically divided into several ones (sub-orders) depending on the number of vendors supplying the purchased goods – one order per each vendor. But I'm not sure whether it's possible to implement.
Agree - On the checkout side it should have the look and feel of one store.
a.m. wrote:
3. What can vendors do and see? Each vendor is provided with an admin panel access to manage products, see sales reports and order details with his products. Vendors will not interfere with each other's activity. Should a vendor see customer (order) details? Some store owners could say "no" because vendors could use customer (order) details to sell next time themselves. But vendors will know it anyway because they'll have to ship purchased products to customers.
I see the concern here, however I think that most people having vendors will want the vendor the ship the products.
Maybe you could have it hide the customer's email from the vendor? The vendor would then have to use your store to communicate with the customer. For example, to set as shipped and delivered. Otherwise, it could be an option that you could choose one way or the other from the "Multi Vendor Settings" page.
a.m. wrote:
4. Payment processing. The money goes to the merchant account of the root store administrator who then manually distributes funds among the vendors according to the history of orders, which is tracked and managed separately for each provider. This way the customer would only see one charge from the main company. Any other implementation will be too complex right now.
I think it is very important to have the customer only charged once by the root store administrator. Imagine if someone ordered from 10 different vendors but it had the look and feel of one store. They might think there was credit card fraud when they got charged by 10 different people!
I know it would be complex, however I think that for the multi vendor version the be successful on a large scale it would need to implement automatic payments for the vendors. I suggest creating one super payment plugin that would take care of this.
The person would pay for the order total, then when the plugin received this info, it would loop through all the vendors and use something like their email address to send them the payment. Think of how PayPal allows you to send payments by email. Could this work as an API? The vendor needs to know if payment was received so they can ship the order.
a.m. wrote:
5. Shipping options and rates. It would be good if each vendor can configure own shipping methods (options) and buyers whose orders contains items from several vendors could select vendor-specific shipping options at checkout. Maybe, it's better to implement warehouse support. This way a store owner could have several warehouse (and more accurate shipping rates) even when he does not have any vendors configured (a separate feature not related to vendor). But it could be quite complex to implement it right now. Most probably only a store owner will manage shipping options and rates in the first edition of multi-vendor support.
I am not sure about this, but could the shipping for vendors be by product? I don't think this would be the best solution but it might be simple. Something like the additional shipping on a product that nopcommerce has right now.
a.m. wrote:
6. Email notification to vendor. When an order is placed, an email should be sent to the supplier of each product in the order. The email will include the order details.
This would be great!
a.m. wrote:
7. Vendor login/registration. I think the easiest way will be to use the standard customer workflow. Just create a new "Vendor" entity and a new "Vendor" customer role for vendors. This way we'll be able to use the standard ACL support to grant/deny access to some admin area pages. Also a store owner will have to manually create a vendor record, assign some customer records to it (vendor managers) and add these customer records to the "Vendor" customer role.
Not all customers will want to become vendors, but for those who did it would be nice to have an easy signup page. Could we copy the same logic from the registration page to make a seller's signup page?
If not, we could have a checkbox on the registration page that said something like "Yes, I want to sell products on www.mystore.com"
A normal customer should have the option on their account page to upgrade to a vendor.
Also, it would be neat if the admin could set a percent markup for vendor products that would automatically be included in the price. When the vendor was paid, they would get whatever they set for the product price. The store owner would keep the markup.
1. Multiple vendors, single store. Products from multiple independent vendors appear in the common product catalog and your website visitors do shop at one web store even if your products are supplied by hundred of different vendors from all over the world.
Agree. One thing that might be nice is to list the vendor on the product details page maybe under the product name. You should be able to click on the vendor name and see ratings and all the products by that vendor. It could work something like a category with ratings. Also an about profile would be nice.
a.m. wrote:
2. Products from multiple vendors in one order. Your customers' shopping cart can contain products from several vendors, but they will still place one order and pay only once. Should a customer know whether his order contains product from several vendors? I personally think, no. A customer will see only one order. For proper tracking such order should be then automatically divided into several ones (sub-orders) depending on the number of vendors supplying the purchased goods – one order per each vendor. But I'm not sure whether it's possible to implement.
Agree - On the checkout side it should have the look and feel of one store.
a.m. wrote:
3. What can vendors do and see? Each vendor is provided with an admin panel access to manage products, see sales reports and order details with his products. Vendors will not interfere with each other's activity. Should a vendor see customer (order) details? Some store owners could say "no" because vendors could use customer (order) details to sell next time themselves. But vendors will know it anyway because they'll have to ship purchased products to customers.
I see the concern here, however I think that most people having vendors will want the vendor the ship the products.
Maybe you could have it hide the customer's email from the vendor? The vendor would then have to use your store to communicate with the customer. For example, to set as shipped and delivered. Otherwise, it could be an option that you could choose one way or the other from the "Multi Vendor Settings" page.
a.m. wrote:
4. Payment processing. The money goes to the merchant account of the root store administrator who then manually distributes funds among the vendors according to the history of orders, which is tracked and managed separately for each provider. This way the customer would only see one charge from the main company. Any other implementation will be too complex right now.
I think it is very important to have the customer only charged once by the root store administrator. Imagine if someone ordered from 10 different vendors but it had the look and feel of one store. They might think there was credit card fraud when they got charged by 10 different people!
I know it would be complex, however I think that for the multi vendor version the be successful on a large scale it would need to implement automatic payments for the vendors. I suggest creating one super payment plugin that would take care of this.
The person would pay for the order total, then when the plugin received this info, it would loop through all the vendors and use something like their email address to send them the payment. Think of how PayPal allows you to send payments by email. Could this work as an API? The vendor needs to know if payment was received so they can ship the order.
a.m. wrote:
5. Shipping options and rates. It would be good if each vendor can configure own shipping methods (options) and buyers whose orders contains items from several vendors could select vendor-specific shipping options at checkout. Maybe, it's better to implement warehouse support. This way a store owner could have several warehouse (and more accurate shipping rates) even when he does not have any vendors configured (a separate feature not related to vendor). But it could be quite complex to implement it right now. Most probably only a store owner will manage shipping options and rates in the first edition of multi-vendor support.
I am not sure about this, but could the shipping for vendors be by product? I don't think this would be the best solution but it might be simple. Something like the additional shipping on a product that nopcommerce has right now.
a.m. wrote:
6. Email notification to vendor. When an order is placed, an email should be sent to the supplier of each product in the order. The email will include the order details.
This would be great!
a.m. wrote:
7. Vendor login/registration. I think the easiest way will be to use the standard customer workflow. Just create a new "Vendor" entity and a new "Vendor" customer role for vendors. This way we'll be able to use the standard ACL support to grant/deny access to some admin area pages. Also a store owner will have to manually create a vendor record, assign some customer records to it (vendor managers) and add these customer records to the "Vendor" customer role.
Not all customers will want to become vendors, but for those who did it would be nice to have an easy signup page. Could we copy the same logic from the registration page to make a seller's signup page?
If not, we could have a checkbox on the registration page that said something like "Yes, I want to sell products on www.mystore.com"
A normal customer should have the option on their account page to upgrade to a vendor.
Also, it would be neat if the admin could set a percent markup for vendor products that would automatically be included in the price. When the vendor was paid, they would get whatever they set for the product price. The store owner would keep the markup.
Team Member
- 16612
- 155815
- 10/22/2008
- Armenia
Tim2376 wrote:
It won't be available out of the box. You'll have to customize the application in order to to get such specific functionality
What do you guys think of having an option to allow vendors to make news and blog posts? It could site them as the author, with a link to their profile page. Maybe you could allow customers to communicate with the vendors directly through the vendors profile page. Like a PM.
It won't be available out of the box. You'll have to customize the application in order to to get such specific functionality
- 11
- 123
- 12/1/2011
- United States
Payment processing as suggested is actually not legal. It's referred to as "factoring", and is specifically prohibited by the merchant account agreement. I think this process should be reconsidered for the sake of compliance. If people aren't aware of this issue, they will lose their merchant account if what they are doing is discovered. It would be safer to have one vendor per order and allow each vendor to configure their own payment methods.
MVP
- 517
- 4709
- 2/28/2012
- United States
HoosierDaddy wrote:
I don't think that what I suggested could be considered factoring.
For reference I quote ualr.edu
"Factoring involves ordering a second time with the credit card number. It is generally illegal in most states to collect a customer's credit card number and then re-enter that same number into another merchant's ordering system. This is a common mistake among small businesses that sell products which are drop shipped by a second business, such as a manufacturer or wholesaler."
Source: http://asbdc.ualr.edu/ecommerce/payment.asp
It seems to me that "factoring" is when you collect credit card info and then use that credit card number to pay for the cost of the goods from your vendor.
I have proposed a different solution. One that I am currently using in my business, so be sure to let know if this is wrong.
Basically the customer pays for the order with PayPal. The money is sent to my paypal account. Once the money is in my paypal account, I use my paypal debit card to pay my supplier. My supplier, or vendor if you will, is not the one charging my customers credit card. They are charging my credit card. In this way, I don't think it is factoring.
The same approach could be used for a multi vendor store.
Payment processing as suggested is actually not legal. It's referred to as "factoring", and is specifically prohibited by the merchant account agreement. I think this process should be reconsidered for the sake of compliance. If people aren't aware of this issue, they will lose their merchant account if what they are doing is discovered. It would be safer to have one vendor per order and allow each vendor to configure their own payment methods.
I don't think that what I suggested could be considered factoring.
For reference I quote ualr.edu
"Factoring involves ordering a second time with the credit card number. It is generally illegal in most states to collect a customer's credit card number and then re-enter that same number into another merchant's ordering system. This is a common mistake among small businesses that sell products which are drop shipped by a second business, such as a manufacturer or wholesaler."
Source: http://asbdc.ualr.edu/ecommerce/payment.asp
It seems to me that "factoring" is when you collect credit card info and then use that credit card number to pay for the cost of the goods from your vendor.
I have proposed a different solution. One that I am currently using in my business, so be sure to let know if this is wrong.
Basically the customer pays for the order with PayPal. The money is sent to my paypal account. Once the money is in my paypal account, I use my paypal debit card to pay my supplier. My supplier, or vendor if you will, is not the one charging my customers credit card. They are charging my credit card. In this way, I don't think it is factoring.
The same approach could be used for a multi vendor store.
MVP
- 517
- 4709
- 2/28/2012
- United States
nbrglobalinc wrote:
Nbrglobalinc, I think you just discovered the best way to implement the payments. PayPal chained payments follows the exact process that I was thinking about!
https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/documentation-tools/adaptive-payments/integration-guide/APIntro
"In a chained payment, the sender[customer] pays the primary receiver[store owner] an amount, from which the primary receiver[store owner] pays secondary receivers[the vendors]. The sender[customer] only knows about the primary receiver[store owner], not the secondary receivers[vendors]. The secondary receivers[vendors] only know about the primary receiver[store owner], not the sender[customer]."
The above quote with my [...] translations show exactly how this could work in a nopcommerce multi vendor scenario! It might be tough to develop, or take some time, but I think that the end result would be so amazing it would be worth the wait. Also, this would address the credit card factoring concern.
This could be the "super paypal payment plugin" that could come with nopcommerce for individuals that used the multi vendor option.
I can hardly imagine what a revolution Nopcommerce is going to cause in the e-commerce world once the multi vendor is integrated. Keep up the good work guys!
For payment processing, you could look into using PayPal Parallel Adaptive Payment, or the PayPal Chain Adaptive Payment. Good info on PayPal's Developer Site, www.x.com.
Nbrglobalinc, I think you just discovered the best way to implement the payments. PayPal chained payments follows the exact process that I was thinking about!
https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/documentation-tools/adaptive-payments/integration-guide/APIntro
"In a chained payment, the sender[customer] pays the primary receiver[store owner] an amount, from which the primary receiver[store owner] pays secondary receivers[the vendors]. The sender[customer] only knows about the primary receiver[store owner], not the secondary receivers[vendors]. The secondary receivers[vendors] only know about the primary receiver[store owner], not the sender[customer]."
The above quote with my [...] translations show exactly how this could work in a nopcommerce multi vendor scenario! It might be tough to develop, or take some time, but I think that the end result would be so amazing it would be worth the wait. Also, this would address the credit card factoring concern.
This could be the "super paypal payment plugin" that could come with nopcommerce for individuals that used the multi vendor option.
I can hardly imagine what a revolution Nopcommerce is going to cause in the e-commerce world once the multi vendor is integrated. Keep up the good work guys!