Best eCommerce platforms for starting a multi-vendor marketplace

Joe Parker

7 years ago

The eCommerce world has started shifting its base towards the multi-vendor model in the past few years. Being mutually beneficial and inclusive in nature, it not only caters to the demand of sellers, but also brings delight to the customers by providing a wide range to choose from. The best thing is most of these platforms are open-source and you don’t have to pay a penny for using them to build your eCommerce site.

A ready-made eCommerce site, what could be better than this?-a ready-made marketplace site, perhaps?

As a result, the developers around the globe have come up with various solutions that allow the inventory model website owners to convert their site to a multi-vendor marketplace.

Top eCommerce platforms that can be easily used for developing a marketplace by a simple module installation.

1. Magento

With currently more than 251,287 live eCommerce stores running on the Magento platform, it is one of the top-most eCommerce platforms worldwide. With almost 25% of the total market share of eCommerce platforms, Magento is a popular brand that powers many other top brands like Burger King, Huawei, Pepe Jeans & Liverpool F.C etc.

Despite Magento poses a number of suitable features built-in for B2B eCommerce, it cannot be used as a multi-vendor platform in its default form.Fortunately, because of high-end flexibility and massive scalability, Magento can be introduced to the multi-vendor features by installing the Marketplace extension.

The Magento Multi-vendor marketplace extension is a custom solution developed by certified Magento developers. By simply installing this extension you can convert your existing inventory based Magento store to a ready-made marketplace site. It introduces some new features to the Magento platform which facilitate the operation of a marketplace site. These extra features include the:

Management for seller account registration
Management for seller account approval and declination
Management for different shops by different sellers
Management for Product upload by sellers
Management for Seller product approval or declination
Management for Marketplace Commissions, and much more.

2. PrestaShop

PrestaShop is one of the top eCommerce platforms in European nations, which is also getting popular across the globe these days. If you are a PrestaShop store owner, and thinking about owning a Marketplace site, you are on the right path. With the extraordinary flexibility and superb community support PrestaShop is always the best choice for developing a marketplace site. Like Magento, PrestaShop does not support the multi-vendor feature by default. However, with the highly active PrestaShop community, nothing is impossible on this platform. The PrestaShop Marketplace Module developed by the expert community developers makes the conversion of a PrestaShop store into a marketplace site so easy. You just need to spare a minute to install the Marketplace module on your store, and bingo, you own a marketplace site now.

Here is the detailed account of some excellent functionalities that are offered by this PrestaShop module:

Provides better control over seller accounts
Authority to accept/reject the seller’s request
Manages the commission rates for the multiple vendors
Ability to restrict product categories for multiple sellers
Easy management of the seller’s account on front

3. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is definitely the solution for all the business minds around who are planning to have their own marketplace. WooCommerce, however, is a plugin that converts a WordPress powered site into an eCommerce store. While this platform has powers over 4,00,000+ sites, WooCommerce is ideal for creating a multi-vendor site as well.

Here are some of the key features this platforms that can take your business to new heights:

It has reduced the cost of inventory management. Thus, managing the digital and physical stock becomes effortless.
The CMS platform comes with a bundle of payment methods like COD, PayPal, BACS, and others.
The multiple shipping methods enables you to manage the logistics with greater ease.
You can run complex marketing strategies with this intuitive interface. Moreover, WooCommerce can even be used to sell affiliate products.
Other than this, it supports all types of products, simple, bundled, virtual, configurable, and others. Your third-party sellers can effortlessly list their products on your sites.

In the quest of choosing the best CMS platform for creating a multi-vendor marketplace, WooCommerce is definitely a prominent name for you. However, Magento and WooCommerce are having a cut-throat competition in the egg-and-spoon race. If you are over the edge in picking up one, then, here are some points that can help you out in making a decision.

WooCommerce is user-friendly and easy-to-use. For a non-techie who is planning to make it big in the eCommerce industry, WooCommerce can definitely be a solution. On the other hand, Magento requires advanced coding skills. Managing the store might become difficult without delving into code changes.
Magento allows you to operate multiple stores from a single back-end. However, WooCommerce doesn’t offer the multi-store functionality.
Magento is specifically designed for eCommerce, so, it is ideal for large enterprises. While WooCommerce is perfect for all size of the organization. Hence, in the long run, Magento definitely has an edge over the other platforms.

4. OpenCart

Opencart is another open-source CMS platform that may do wonders for you while creating a standard online marketplace. OpenCart offers a feature-rich interface along with powerful catalog functionality. OpenCart offers an enormous range of plugins to optimize the UI and UX of your site.

The user-friendly and easy-to-use interface makes OpenCart the best CMS platform for creating a marketplace, especially, for the store owners who do not have much technical knowledge.
Additionally, upgrading the OpenCart store into an online marketplace with the OpenCart marketplace plugin is effortless as well.
The vendors get an easy way of registering as a seller of the site and manage their profile. They can list the products from the dashboard and track/manage the inventory at a single button-click.
The store admin can manage every single seller and their products from the back-end of the OpenCart multi-vendor marketplace extension.
The ease of tracking is coupled with effective commission management. The admin can fix the commission to be charged to the sellers. The amount fixed will be automatically deducted from the total earning of the sellers.

5. Magento 2

Online business is growing every day so to match it more efficient and structured platforms are required.
Magento 2, the upgraded version, is a suitable platform for both medium and large-sized eCommerce stores.
It can work well with both HHVM and PHP7 that make eCommerce user friendly.
Magento 2 offers a more seamless and effortless user experience as the catalog and web pages open more quickly.
Moreover, Magento 2 offers more flexibility and adaptability to meet all types of customers requirements.
Magento 2 offers more flexibility in terms of secure checkout procedure.
Customers can easily log out in guest mode without being concerned about passwords.
With Magento 2, videos can be added on the main page just by adding the video link, title, and a short description.

Final Words

The choice of the CMS platforms should depend on your business requirement. No matter what you choose, make sure that the multi-vendor marketplace extensions makes the management and tracking effortless for you.