Helping Others To Sell Online

Escrito por Matty Cohen on agosto 15, 2013 Blog, Product News.

Product Vendors for WooCommerce

When starting up a small business, there are many channels that need to be secured; sales, marketing and distribution are just a few. Ultimately, getting eyeballs on your product is the most direct channel towards making a sale (conversion). When gaining market share, new business owners sometimes use platforms such as eBay and Etsy to market their products and begin generating customers and sales.

What if your website could be that platform?

Today, we’re proud to announce the latest extension for WooCommerce; Product Vendors.

Meet Product Vendors for WooCommerce

Product Vendors enables your WooCommerce store to specify vendors for products in your store. Each vendor can have a specific commission percentage added, enabling you to pay your vendors for their efforts in creating their awesome products.

Gathering products- an alternative approach

You love WordPress, WooThemes and WooCommerce. You’re itching to set up an online store and get in on all the action, yet you don’t have a product or service to sell.

Let Product Vendors help to get your store off the ground.

Choose a product you’re passionate about. Lets use stylised candles as an example. You’d venture down to your local craft market or store, source a few vendors and pitch your idea; “lets get your candles online”.

Vendors - manage
Vendor management screen

A quick setup of WordPress, your favourite WooThemes theme, WooCommerce and Product Vendors and you’re ready to go. You’ve now both started a new business, as well as helping others to move their businesses into the digital age.

Collaborative sales

You and your good friends are all creative artists. You want to create a platform to sell your artworks online. Product Vendors enables you all to sell your artworks on a single store, each taking commission from the sales of your own artworks, with the remaining sale revenue being funnelled back into your new online business.

Vendor shop page
Vendor shop page

Buy Product Vendors Today

As you can see, the possible use cases for the Product Vendors extension for WooCommerce are virtually limitless, limited only by your imagination. Buy Product Vendors today, experiment with this new tool in your tool belt and get your ideas online, today.

Discount Coupon

Get this awesome plugin for 20% off when you use the coupon code PVLAUNCH at checkout, until August 21st, 2013.

cta-banner-10-product-page-v2_2x

108 Responses

  1. aky007
    agosto 15, 2013 at 3:31 pm #

    Dear Wootheme,

    Awesome!

    I think this is best move after all those bad news about Wootheme from price changing.

    I decide to stay with wootheme!

    WOO! WOOTHEME!

    Thanks!

    • Hugh Lashbrooke
      agosto 15, 2013 at 4:09 pm #

      Thanks for the support Adrian! 🙂

      • geng
        agosto 15, 2013 at 4:58 pm #

        wowo

    • Hanno Malmiste
      agosto 16, 2013 at 3:29 pm #

      I like it. Especially the “collaborative sales” bit. You can basically create and share a business with your friends.

  2. allmyhoney
    agosto 15, 2013 at 3:47 pm #

    May I ask if this works with the Subscriptions plugin? is there a dashboard in the account area that vendors can see what is owed to them? Is this a similar extension such as Commission king? I feel the power of this is immense so well done but I would like to hear more about it to be honest.

    • Hugh Lashbrooke
      agosto 15, 2013 at 4:08 pm #

      Product Vendors uses normal WooCommerce products, so it will work seamlessly with Subscriptions just like any product already does.

      For reporting, you can add a shortcode to your site that will show vendors how much they have earned each month – you can find out about all that (and more) in the extension docs here: http://docs.woocommerce.com/document/product-vendors/. That report appears on the front-end for vendors, but they do have access to the WordPress dashboard so they can manage their products.

      The interface for Product Vendors is different to Commission King, but you will still be able to assign multiple vendors to a single product so that they each earn commission from the sale. This effectively reproduces the same functionality that Commission King offers.

      • allmyhoney
        agosto 15, 2013 at 4:51 pm #

        Thanks Hugh, il do my extra reading in he extensions area. This seems a powerful extension if vendors can upload products and not see or change other products so that is really great. Thanks for the extra feedback here. Hopefully this extension sees some extra ideas in woo ideas and stays on a strong development path as I can see it being very powerful. Cheers

        • Hugh Lashbrooke
          agosto 15, 2013 at 4:55 pm #

          I’m glad you like it 🙂

          Security is very important to us, so in this extension we made it as tight as possible, so vendors can only edit their own products and no one else’s.

          We’ll be keeping a track of sales and will definitely devote more tie to expanding this extension as time goes on.

      • Syrehn
        agosto 16, 2013 at 3:54 am #

        This “effectively reproduces the same functionality that Commission King offers”…

        If that is the case it would be awesome of Woo if they upgraded purchasers of Commission King (via Woo) to this new extension. Similar to how you did for Notifications Pro -> Advanced Notifications; especially since Commission King itself got retired awhile back with no notification.

        • farrel
          agosto 16, 2013 at 9:07 am #

          You can still get updates to Commission King directly from the developers. Just google for the info.

  3. allmyhoney
    agosto 15, 2013 at 5:04 pm #

    @Hugh, one more question for you in relation to Sensei. Do you guys feel this could work into Sensei in the future? What I mean here is the problem right now with Sensei is that “teachers” cannot go in and mark their own courses and change their course quizes for example without seeing other people courses also? Obviously this is specific to WooCommerce here but I feel this type of plugin is key to Sensei also as well as its WooCommerce ability. For example I have 5 teachers on my site – and 5 courses that change alot. I would like to use this to pay each teacher their right commission but also I would like them to access only their own course. I think you get what I mean here but I thought I would bring this up because I would like to see something like this in Sensei also. Hopefully this is helpful – its already asked for in the woo ideas but the ability to pay out commissions also is key of course.

    • Matty Cohen
      agosto 15, 2013 at 5:39 pm #

      Teachers only being able to view/modify their own courses is something that is on the cards. It would be separate functionality to this extension (ie: most likely built into Sensei core) yet would compliment this extension nicely. 🙂

      • allmyhoney
        agosto 15, 2013 at 7:47 pm #

        Good to know Matty, look forward to it and I see how this extension would indeed compliment the function of this. Thanks for taking the time to come back to me.

  4. Sebastien
    agosto 15, 2013 at 6:03 pm #

    Not only is this a great extension, it would be a great collaboration with my auction plugin i’m currently finishing. Can you please tell me what the difference is between this extension and Matt Gates version?. http://shop.mgates.me/shop/wc-marketing/wc-product-vendor/

    • Syrehn
      agosto 15, 2013 at 10:35 pm #

      I’m curious about this as well; I was actually about to buy directly from Matt Gates (since he’s got the established version) and would like to know what the differences between the two are.

      • farrel
        agosto 15, 2013 at 11:16 pm #

        I was curious too because I have already bought the plugin from Matt Gates. This seems to be a copy of that.

        • aky007
          agosto 16, 2013 at 2:35 am #

          I have sent them a e-mail about this but they have no comment on this comparison.

          • farrel
            agosto 16, 2013 at 2:48 am #

            Sent who an email? Woo or Matt Gates?

    • Hugh Lashbrooke
      agosto 16, 2013 at 6:10 am #

      Matt’s extension has similar functionality, but it handles things completely differently. I can’t comment on specific functionality as I have not used his extension, but I can say that Product Vendors is certainly not a copy of it. The code for our extension is completely original and we didn’t take anything from Matt’s one.

      One thing that I can guarantee is different is that our extension (like with all of our products) comes with our world-class hands-on support that no one will be able to replicate 🙂

      • jdistad
        agosto 16, 2013 at 5:24 pm #

        Not to split hairs but there are plenty of other companies around that offer excellent customer support and with the crap you guys have pulled over the last year you most certainly are not the shining example you would like to be..

        Your comment here implies that Matt doesn’t provide quality support… also, I found his plugin quite some time ago so he obviously beat you to the punch here and to me it appears that his plugin has more features (like paypal adaptive payments) than yours does… but you have no comment on that??

      • fiddlerstudios
        agosto 16, 2013 at 6:50 pm #

        Matt’s plugin handles paying Vendors at each sale via PayPal’s split payments functionality. It’s built in so that each vendor gets paid their appropriate share, immediately and at checkout. I don’t see any mention of that with this plugin. Is it there and I just don’t see it? Or do you have to pay each vendor their share manually?

        • Sebastien
          agosto 16, 2013 at 8:10 pm #

          I think this plugin needs to be explained fully on what it does and possibly a table showing the differences this plugin has or doesn’t have against Matt Gates version. I also know that Matt’s plugin has been around for some time but I haven’t had the chance to sample it yet. There will always be competition when releasing a product. I personally would like to know if you provide support for 3rd party developers to add features of their own to this plugin.

  5. joeyrudi
    agosto 15, 2013 at 7:48 pm #

    This… this is awesome.

    As you continue development, please reduce the need for WP admin access for vendors.

    Way to go Woo.

    • Hugh Lashbrooke
      agosto 15, 2013 at 7:56 pm #

      If you would like a vendor to receive commissions, but you don’t want them to manage their products themselves then you can do that – you just don’t add any users as admins of that vendor. That way commissions are generated like normal, but only normal site admins can edit the products (just like is standard in WooCommerce).

      • joeyrudi
        agosto 15, 2013 at 8:05 pm #

        Yep – I missed that part on first read. Perfect and thanks.

        If/when you have a development roadmap for this product, I’d love to see it. Right now, vendor payments are a pain; vendor-to-customer (pre and post sale) is a pain.

        I think this is a home run.

        • joeyrudi
          agosto 15, 2013 at 8:07 pm #

          “vendor-to-customer *support* (pre and post sale) is a pain”

      • aky007
        agosto 16, 2013 at 2:37 am #

        How about frontend access? make a dashboard at the frontend. Any plan?

        • Hugh Lashbrooke
          agosto 16, 2013 at 6:04 am #

          It’s unlikely that we’ll be building a front-end for product management – there’s just too many variables involved.

          With regards to vendors having WP dashboard access though, it won’t be an issue – they’re restricted from accessing any pages other than their own products and their profile. We’ve made sure the security on that is as tight as possible.

          • Johnny
            agosto 16, 2013 at 8:14 am #

            Great! This extension is just awesome!!!

          • aky007
            agosto 16, 2013 at 9:32 am #

            Then, how about the vendor payments and vendor to customer support? Do the vendor only able to use paypal? Do the vendor able to use their own shipping method?

            I think we should make the vendor profile page more useful so customer can contact vendor directly. For Example, we can make a form there for them to contact the vendor or make the product enquiry work nicely with this plugin.

            Please advise

          • Sebastien
            agosto 16, 2013 at 5:15 pm #

            I’m developing a front-end product management extension my self.

          • Maria Scarpello
            agosto 16, 2013 at 9:21 pm #

            @aky007 – it is possible to send vendors an enquiry directly with this extension: http://woo.com/products/product-enquiry-form/

            Then you can follow Gerhard’s code snippet to integrate the two here: http://docs.woocommerce.com/document/product-enquiry-form-2/#section-4

  6. Pastie
    agosto 15, 2013 at 8:32 pm #

    This looks like a potentially interesting and powerful extension. Is the presumption that all products will be physically stocked and shipped by the website owner/operator or will vendors be able to fulfil orders placed through the website direct to customers?

    • daileycon
      agosto 15, 2013 at 9:09 pm #

      That’s what I was interested in. “will vendors be able to fulfil orders placed through the website direct to customers?” How is stock managed if you don’t give the vendor admin access? Does the site owner and the vendor get a New Customer Order after a sale is made?

    • Hugh Lashbrooke
      agosto 16, 2013 at 6:02 am #

      You can handle order fulfillments any way you like – if you give them access, vendors have complete control over all of their product data, which includes stock quantities. If you want the vendors to fulfil the orders then you must work that out with them – this extension gives you the power to choose 🙂

      • aky007
        agosto 16, 2013 at 9:33 am #

        Then, how about the vendor payments and vendor to customer support? Do the vendor only able to use paypal? Do the vendor able to use their own shipping method?

        I think we should make the vendor profile page more useful so customer can contact vendor directly. For Example, we can make a form there for them to contact the vendor or make the product enquiry work nicely with this plugin.

        Please advise

        • allmyhoney
          agosto 16, 2013 at 10:09 am #

          I think the shipping methods are the key here for physical stock. Basically how does a vendor choose there shipping supplier and price points? Can they do this independently of other products if they have access to the table rate shipping plugin?

        • Maria Scarpello
          agosto 16, 2013 at 9:24 pm #

          see my comment above for the enquiry part. 🙂

          • Adrian
            agosto 17, 2013 at 4:36 am #

            How about the shipping method and parallel payment problem? We can’t use the extension if seller can’t set there own shipping method. If the store owner collect the money first and pay the vendor later will also cost at least 4-6% of transaction fee which is not reasonable.

            Great extension with huge problem….Not reality.

      • Nathan Chia
        agosto 16, 2013 at 3:09 pm #

        Do vendors have access to the order to mark the item as shipped?

        • Dalton
          agosto 29, 2013 at 4:56 pm #

          I need to know about this too. Vendors need to receive the orders by email and be able to ship items as well.

  7. Victor
    agosto 16, 2013 at 12:36 am #

    With respect to using this extension with WC Subscriptions, there is a small problem. If you’re using subscriptions and groups for woocommerce, you need to create pages, right? These pages are then assigned to groups.

    Will product vendors allow each vendor create subscription products as well as create pages?

    Please let me know how this totally works with Subscriptions + Groups + Groups for woocommerce

    • Johnson
      agosto 16, 2013 at 2:14 pm #

      This is a very I portent question as it concerns me as well. Please, how does Product Vendors work with WC Subscriptions as well as Grouos for WC?

  8. Johnny
    agosto 16, 2013 at 8:21 am #

    Yes, yes, yes! This is the extension I’ve been waiting for!!! I’m hooked up and completely excited with possibilities.

    One thing that is important to mention, in my opinion, is the fact that if you use WooThemes products you can be completely sure they are no interoperability issues. So if you get for example WooCommerce + Sensei + This extension + WooThemes’ theme, then everything should play nicely together out of the box. That’s an added value of getting all the plugins from one developer.

    @Woo – you may want to delete this WooIdea submitted some time ago by me: http://ideas.woocommerce.com/forums/133476-woocommerce/suggestions/3980108-new-role-product-author

    Cheers and once more thanks for this nice surprise! 🙂

  9. NS
    agosto 16, 2013 at 11:28 am #

    Finally you guys have featured this awesome plugin! I discovered and purchased it from the main developer at the start of this year. It’s been a massive time saver and the customer service is kick ass amazing.

    • Hugh Lashbrooke
      agosto 29, 2013 at 8:39 am #

      Just to clarify once again – this is a completely different extension to Matt Gates’ Product Vendor extension. There are obviously a lot of similarities between the two, but this one is built entirely by WooThemes.

  10. NS
    agosto 16, 2013 at 11:32 am #

    There’s one thing you guys failed to mention, the stripe connect plugin that works with this awesome plugin – http://shop.mgates.me/shop/wc-payment-gateways/wc-stripe-connect

    Now that Stripe is fully available in the UK, my clients can finally receive instant commission.

  11. Craig
    agosto 16, 2013 at 11:43 am #

    Holy shit! This. Is. Huge!!!!

    Well done folks, well done : )

  12. Tanin
    agosto 16, 2013 at 1:10 pm #

    Super!!

  13. Zorem
    agosto 16, 2013 at 2:15 pm #

    Great direction but it does not give a full solution, what about shipping the product? This phase is not in the scoop, a customer as made an order, now what? Who will send them The shipping confirmation and tracking info? The vendor should be able to manage his orders,

    • daileycon
      agosto 16, 2013 at 2:26 pm #

      Good question, Zorem. I don’t see any orders tab in the Vendors Dashboard so they can add tracking or change the order status.

      http://docs.woocommerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Vendors-dashboard-view.png

      I’m guessing in the Vendors Profile they can describe what shipping method they use (if your vendors are shipping the product).

      Who gets the new customer order emails? Both the site owner and the vendor? How do notifications work?

  14. Candy
    agosto 16, 2013 at 3:34 pm #

    Great work Woo! Amazing! I’m wondering about the shipping / fulfillment too. In Matt Gate’s product vendor plugin, one of the biggest problems is that once the vendor ships the item, I (the admin) have no good way of knowing that it has been shipped other than emailing them and asking. If they were linked into the ability to mark an order as complete (which would auto generate an email to the customer and the administrator), that would be ideal. Does this plug-in do anything like that?? Also, I would love a way to contact the vendor directly about products.

    I heart Woocommerce!!

  15. Rob
    agosto 16, 2013 at 3:36 pm #

    Yesssss, finally I can let go of my Frankensteined multisite solution! Love it, though I’m curious about the issues mentioned above by Zorem & daileycon.

    Nevertheless, a great plugin with huge potential. Thanks!

  16. Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen
    agosto 16, 2013 at 4:40 pm #

    Excellent woo dudes! Exactly what I was looking for.

  17. Tony
    agosto 16, 2013 at 5:33 pm #

    This is awesome! Thank you guys for listening to the request for this.

    I would like to recommend a front end sign up option…so that you have the option of vendors setting up their own store instead of admin having to do it.

    Also, I’d second the thoughts above about more front-end input options (adding product, managing inventory, etc).

    I know it’s a lot involved, but it’s a great start!

    Thanks,
    Tony

  18. Leokoo
    agosto 16, 2013 at 8:37 pm #

    Ah, if only this was released before the new licensing came into place =(

  19. Pastie
    agosto 17, 2013 at 1:34 am #

    Tried to buy yesterday but kept getting error message “Nothing has been added to your cart”. Today I can buy the extension but the 20% coupon reports as expired. Was this a 24 hour deal?

    • daileycon
      agosto 17, 2013 at 3:05 pm #

      I bought mine yesterday with no problem. You might want to submit a support ticket. Woo is very helpful. I bought an extension one time and got an email for 20% discount an hour later and they credited my account!

      Has anyone got any answers to the questions above, it seams we have lost our question and answer session?

    • daileycon
      agosto 17, 2013 at 3:22 pm #

      Have you submitted a support ticket? Woo will hook you up. I bought an extension one time and an hour later got a 20% off coupon in my email. I submitted a ticket and they refunded me the 20% the next day!

      Has anyone got any answers to the questions above?

  20. daileycon
    agosto 17, 2013 at 4:10 pm #

    I have another question, I read this in the documentation:

    Vendors do not have access to these reports. However, you can make sales stats available to your vendors by using the following shortcodes:

    [product_vendors_total_earnings]
    [product_vendors_month_earnings]

    My question is “How do I make these stats available to my vendors?” Am I supposed to create a page for each vendor that includes these shortcodes? Is there somewhere in the Vendor Dashboard that when they login they could see these stats?
    To me there should be a Reports tab in the Vendors Dashboard with these stats.

    • Hugh Lashbrooke
      agosto 19, 2013 at 8:18 am #

      Those shortcodes work like any other WordPress shortcode – simply add them to any page on your site and the reports will show on that page for each vendor. If non-vendors go to the page then they will see nothing.

  21. Steve
    agosto 18, 2013 at 12:18 pm #

    Great ideas to be considered.

  22. Kola
    agosto 18, 2013 at 8:18 pm #

    I hope you Woo guys build an auction plugin too.

  23. Kola
    agosto 18, 2013 at 8:25 pm #

    PS: What about Vendor Feedback with Feedback profile (Positive, Negative, Neutral) ?

    • daileycon
      agosto 18, 2013 at 8:51 pm #

      You could build it into the ratings system since their products will be using the same star ratings system (I assume). Make it so you can rate vendors and show the star ratings and total ratings underneath their title for the profile:

      http://docs.woocommerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Product-tab-single-vendor.png

      • Kola
        agosto 19, 2013 at 9:38 am #

        This can be done how you said, but it’s complicated because only those who bought an item should post a feedback.

  24. Hugh Lashbrooke
    agosto 19, 2013 at 8:13 am #

    Hey everyone,

    To reply to the various comments about the differences between this extension and Matt Gates’ one: These are two completely different extensions – Product Vendors is all our own work and we did not copy any code or functionality from Matt. Our plugin will have some features that his does not have and his will have some that our’s does not have – many of which are on the roadmap for future versions of Product Vendors.

    Thanks for the comments and feature suggestions on here – we will definitely be taking some of them into consideration and will work on making the next version of this extension even more feature-packed. 🙂

  25. Maire
    agosto 19, 2013 at 9:51 am #

    Is it possible to individually customise vendor product pages so each vendor can have a different look?

    • Hugh Lashbrooke
      agosto 19, 2013 at 11:14 am #

      This snippet will add the vendor’s slug as a class to the BODY tag of the vendor product page: https://gist.github.com/hlashbrooke/6267088 – you can use that class to style each one differently. 🙂

      • visitonweb
        septiembre 22, 2013 at 12:33 pm #

        Hi Hugh,
        Custom class is a good solution for the site admin.
        I’d love to allow vendor to customize their page by themselves in their admin page.
        – upload logo
        – colors
        – etc…

        Is this feature in your development list?

        I’d love to see this extension live somewhere. Where can I see and test this extension ?

        Thanks
        Dimitri

  26. allmyhoney
    agosto 19, 2013 at 12:15 pm #

    I have got a question I hope can be answered here and il try to give a very simple example. The example I am going to use is for physical shipped products from the vendors warehouse and not of course from a central location like Amazon would because I assume not many Amazon like stores are about the place with those kind of resources so I am sure my example below is pretty typical!! 😉

    I have my WooCommerce store with this plugin running. I have 3 vendors who are selling 3 products through my store and use this plugin. My Store is in UK, Vendor A is giving me products from UK and using my site to sell them. The item will be shipped from Vendor A Warehouse – does he set his shipping prices and products details using this plugin?

    Vendor B is in France and will ship from France – does he set his shipping rates from France?

    Vendor C is from South Africa and will ship from South Africa – does he set his own shipping rates?

    Custom A (from UK) comes along and buys all three products – are 3 emails just with the appropriate items in them sent to each Vendor so they can fulfil the order?

    Does Custom A pay a pretty heavy shipping cost as a result of the 3 shipping prices accumulating coming from different places? (The answer is probably yes which is fine of course as this is just the way it is!!) but my point here is does the custom know this and is notified like on amazon that it will be shipped from different places and this is the reason for the costs?

    Does the plugin handle returns easily? As in if Custom A does not like the product from Vendor B in France – is there some place the user can easily see that he/she should return it to the Vendor where it came from? Or is this outside the scope of the plugin.

    When it comes to shipping I think all these questions are valid as this is quite a complex plugin in reality and needs extensive functionality for it not to be a nightmare to run and manage which physical products. For virtual products its absolutely great of course as the commission is the key piece of functionality. Hopefully there can be more extensive examples of how this plugin can work in this 3 Vendor shipping scenario for physical products. Maybe someone can shed some light on this. Cheers for your time

    • aky007
      agosto 19, 2013 at 3:07 pm #

      Hi allmyhoney,

      Let me answer your question. I have start discuss with them about this extension one day before they launch it in a support ticket.

      The situation now is the extension is only first release version and only have the function to list product using different vendor account, and calculate commission for each of the vendor.

      Both payment and shipping method are still cant be divided which mean only one payment reciever and one shipping method can be used. Sorry, It is really not reality but according to them in order to make it work that involve a lot of technical issue ( need to change the woocommerce framework).

      Anyway, looking forward to their next version.

      • daileycon
        agosto 19, 2013 at 3:51 pm #

        Now I am really confused “Both payment and shipping method are still cant be divided which mean only one payment receiver and one shipping method can be used.”

        So, if I am using 3 vendors and someone buys something from each vendor. How do the 3 vendors get paid? How are email order notifications handled?

        It should treat each vendor as a separate order right?

        • allmyhoney
          agosto 19, 2013 at 4:52 pm #

          @daileycon I have pretty much asked your questions in my initial post so hopefully woo can clarify on this. I would assume there is three notifications sent out to each vendor if their products are part of an order but not sure until woo clarify! also I would assume the commissions are divided at a product level and not at an order level so you should be fine on this one.

          @aky007 I assume this right now until a version 2.0 of this plugin it is mostly suited to virtual products as it seems ideal for this task.

        • aky007
          agosto 19, 2013 at 4:52 pm #

          Hi daileycon,

          Good question but according to their staff it is currently not possible to get every vendor to use their own payment method. The method for now is Customer PAY to the store owner and the owner PAY the vendor. Actually this mean the store owner will become the middle man like paypal to collect the money and send them to the final vendor. From my imagination, you can do it in 3 way.

          1. Buyer –> Merchant Account ( 3% fee) –> Store owner–> Paypal (2.9% fee) –> Final Vendor = Total of 5.9% fee
          2. Buyer –> Paypal ( 2.9% fee) –> Store owner–> Paypal (2.9% fee) –> Final Vendor = Total of 5.8% fee
          3. Buyer –> Merchant Account ( 3% fee) –> Store owner–> Bank Transfer (0% fee) –> Final Vendor = Total of 3% fee but takes forever and need work in manual.

          Paypal parallel is a good function to solve this problem without doing huge modification but vendor will force to use paypal as the own payment method and there are limit to 10 payment item in one time checkout. However, the current version of extension still no include this option.

          For now, Shipping method can only use store owner shipping method. From my imagination, there is 4 cases.
          1. It is a local online store and all user use most popular shipping method like in US for USPS and Australia for AusPost. Both woocommerce have extension calculator.
          2. All vendor agree a flat shipping rate like $10 for each shipment
          3. Store owner is a big company with great connection with one of the shipping company like DHL which give special price for all vendor. So they all use DHL.
          4. Store owner is doing drop ship. So he/she can use he/she personalize shipping method.

          There are still got some demanding feature beside the separate billing and shipping such as vendor can personalize their own shop page or adding their logo/media kit on their profile, Vendor Feedback with Feedback profile, VENDOR ORDER ADMIN PAGE (don’t know why Wootheme can miss this), auction feature( like ebay), vendor frontend management (too many variable so not reality), vendor support page (pretty cool function if can make it.).

          I have summarize all comment and suggestion. Hope wootheme work some of them out as soon as possible!

          Brought the plug-in for support future development.

          Thanks

          • daileycon
            agosto 19, 2013 at 5:09 pm #

            Just so I follow. If I have 3 vendors and they each have a paypal account setup with their vendor account. When someone buys something with one order from each vendor it can’t split the payment into the separate paypal accounts?
            That’s crazy if this extension doesn’t have the functionality. It must be able to split the orders and send separate payments or its useless. Why even have a paypal setup for the vendor? Are you supposed to tell your customers to only order from one vendor at a time? haha

    • Hugh Lashbrooke
      agosto 20, 2013 at 7:04 am #

      Hi guys – there’s quite a few questions here about payments, shipping and order fulfilment, so let me clarify a few things:

      1) Vendors can edit ALL aspects of a product – they have complete control over everything about the product (except the commission percentage that they’ll receive obviously). This means that they’ll be able to select the shipping class of the product. However, they will not be able to add new shipping classes – only the site admins can do that at this stage.

      2) You can choose to fulfil orders in any way you like – vendors can ship the products or the store owner can ship the products. That being said, vendors do not have access to the order info in the WordPress dashboard, so they cannot see where to ship the orders and they cannot change the order status. Also, vendors are not currently notified when one of their products is ordered – that is on the roadmap for a future version of the plugin.

      3) Commissions are generated per product, so one order can contain orders from 10 different vendors and the commissions will all be worked out correctly.

      4) At the moment, Product Vendors does not process commission payments automatically. All orders are paid for by the customer in the same way that your site currently handles those payments, so you don’t need to worry about that. You can pay your commissions in any manual way you choose, but the extension allows you to export all of your currently unpaid commissions to a CSV file that you can import into PayPal’s Mass Payments tool. This is currently the easiest way to handle your payments with this extension, but we do plan on supporting more direct payment methods in the future.

      5) allmyhoney is correct – Product Vendors is currently mostly suited to virtual products. In future version we plan on supporting physical products much more smoothly, so keep an eye out for that.

      I hope that helps clear some things up for you 🙂

      • Johnny
        agosto 20, 2013 at 8:37 am #

        One question Hugh – If I have a product that costs 100 euro netto (so e.g. 120 euro with VAT) and the vendor commission is set to be 50%, what amount will be reported to the vendor? 50 or 60 euro?

        • Hugh Lashbrooke
          agosto 29, 2013 at 8:23 am #

          The commission is calculated as a percentage of the line item total in the order as it appears in the invoice.

          • Johnny
            agosto 29, 2013 at 2:03 pm #

            Thanks Hugh but it’s still unclear to me what amount will be reported to the vendor. I hope it’d be 50 euro (please see the example above), so the VAT stays with me and I remit it to the tax office.

            Thanks in advance for your clarification on that.

      • aky007
        agosto 21, 2013 at 3:47 am #

        Hi Hugh lashbrooke,

        When the next version will be available? ( just a brief idea, no need to be accurate)

        What features are likely to be available in next version?

        Thanks

      • allmyhoney
        agosto 21, 2013 at 9:56 am #

        @Hugh, thank you for the explainattion and descriptions here – very helpful as the initial blog post and documentation did not really cover physical product scenarios comprehensively so it’s obviously hard to just jump in and test it out and purchase. I look forward to the next release as this plugin really needs to be very comprehensive to be honest and is ambitious. Notifications are simply a must and this would require a large emailing piece of functionality also so this plugin potentially needs a version 2 and even 3 but it seems to be off to a good start.

      • campbelltown
        septiembre 8, 2013 at 3:08 pm #

        Hi Hugh

        I am building a multi vendor site but I only want to host for other vendors and don’t want to collect the payment for each sale. How do I make the payment Gateway available to the third party vendors? I would then manually invoice each vendor for my percentage of the sale value. Is this not how EBay works?

  27. aky007
    agosto 20, 2013 at 1:57 am #

    Hi daileycon,

    The reason on why we need the vendor PayPal address is to pay him/her the commission. In this extension you can set the commission to pay immediately in a auto mode which mean when you reciece the payment from the buyer then you can set to be automatic pay the vendor immediately.

    In order to make you easier to understand I make a diagram:

    Buyer cerdit card or PayPal —> Your merchant account or PayPal –> Your vendor PayPal

    Currently, it is immposible for the buyer to pay directly to the vendor.

    Hope you catch the point.

    Thanks

  28. RobThijs
    agosto 20, 2013 at 12:30 pm #

    Worth noting. I got an email from Woocommerce promoting the plugin which states that it: “includes the functionality previously found in the Commission King extension”

    I still see a huge advantage for commission king and that is that a commission can be assigned to any recipient or user. Because not everybody has a vendor role within a site. Maybe nice to increase developments in that direction. (I use both plugins now)

    Next to that commission king has multiple payment possibilities, but I understand that there are some developments for that already.

    Good luck with developments, I’m curious what you guys will come up with!

    • Hugh Lashbrooke
      agosto 22, 2013 at 6:03 pm #

      Hi Rob,

      Product Vendors doesn’t use user roles at all, so you don’t need to worry about that kind of thing. When you create a vendor you can optionally assign a user to it – the only reason you would assign a user (or multiple users) to a vendor is if you want them to manage their own products and see their sales reports. You can assign multiple vendors to the same product and set a different commission percentage per vendor – this pretty much reproduces the functionality of Commission King, but in a very different way. 🙂

      • RobThijs
        agosto 22, 2013 at 10:33 pm #

        Hey Hugh,

        Thanks for your reply. I’m talking in terms of photographers and content-writers but I guess the vendor title has to do. It’s a different way, but I understand what you say. It’s the most practical way and I can explain the difference in roles in the description of the vendor page.

        Is it possible to make a searchbox inside the product vendors list instead of scrolling down a list of checkboxes on the add product page? That would be great!

        PS.

        I think there is a small bug when adding a new vendor from the add product page: http://i.imgur.com/PEM4l7q.png

        When adding it multiplies the other vendors in the list. When you refresh the page everything goes back to normal but I thought I’d let you know!

        • Hugh Lashbrooke
          agosto 23, 2013 at 6:14 am #

          Thanks Rob. I’ve noticed that bug pop up on some servers – I’ll see what I can do to sort it out!

      • Rob
        agosto 28, 2013 at 12:09 pm #

        Cool! One more question:

        Is it possible to have variable percentages of commission in the future? I’m working with vendors and creatives. A larger percentage of the amount needs to go to the vendor. Now i can only commit only one percentage per vendor.

        Thanks for the update btw!

        • Rob
          agosto 28, 2013 at 2:09 pm #

          Pff, nevermind. I kind of answered my own question. I still have to switch to the non-commission king situation!

  29. bobbyb
    agosto 21, 2013 at 12:31 pm #

    Big +1 from me for needing vendors to get sent order notifications.

    Customer feedback system for verified purchases would also be great, but I guess that can be achieved via compatibility another plugin.

    Q: Could a vendor upload via CSV?
    Or can the master admin upload products but assign them to specific vendor(s)?

    One other feature request – pay per listing option (vendor pays X per product uploaded – possibly recurring monthly fee and products get delisted if listing not renewed)

    • Hugh Lashbrooke
      agosto 29, 2013 at 8:20 am #

      Vendors will not be able to upload via CSV, but store owners can do that as normal and any product can be assigned to any vendor.

      As for the pay per listing feature you requested – we’ll look into that and if we decide it’s a viable option it will be included in a future release of Product Vendors.

  30. Pastie
    agosto 24, 2013 at 8:27 pm #

    With regard to the numerous comments about shipping/handling could the Per Product Shipping extension be deployed alongside Product Vendors to facilitate vendors customising their own shipping solution

    • Hugh Lashbrooke
      agosto 26, 2013 at 8:53 am #

      Yip – that should work out perfectly. Vendors can edit all data about a product, so if you have the Per Product Shipping extension installed then vendors will be able to manage the shipping classes right on the product page. 🙂

  31. cheey2003
    agosto 26, 2013 at 8:46 am #

    May I know whether the coupon code still valid since there is no indication of any expiry date? I have tried to apply it to the cart but it said it has expired.

    On the other hand, I have submitted a ticket on this matter yesterday but until now there is no response from WooThemes.

  32. techmonk
    agosto 27, 2013 at 6:57 pm #

    Sorry for asking this question here. Is it possible to use a different term than “vendor” in all visible places (like the title of the vendor tab).?

    • Hugh Lashbrooke
      agosto 28, 2013 at 8:42 am #

      All the text in those areas is translatable – we recommend the Codestyling Localization plugin to handle translatable text like that.

  33. Johnny
    agosto 29, 2013 at 2:09 pm #

    After reading the comments, I see huge potential in this plugin and I foresee it becoming one of the flagship plugins for Woo (like Sensei). With the right functionality included, the are possibilities for building market places, auction sites, etc opening up! Good job and thanks for this very promising plugin!

  34. Faraz Ahmad
    septiembre 7, 2013 at 4:41 pm #

    Great Plugin, I will buy it soon.

  35. cheey2003
    septiembre 10, 2013 at 8:48 am #

    May I know is there a way to set a minimum order for one vendor?

  36. Gabidimartino
    septiembre 18, 2013 at 12:59 am #

    Where can I see a demo of this plugin ?

  37. Rodrigo
    septiembre 25, 2013 at 5:30 am #

    How can the user choose the vendor email from the seller in the plugin Product Enquiry. It is posible?
    like a select o multiple choise? i dont want to send the email to every vendors, only the user select in the form.

    Thanks!!!!

  38. Sam
    septiembre 29, 2013 at 11:25 am #

    Hey,

    Is it possible for the vendors to make a vendor account straight from the website, so they don’t have to contact u personally.
    So something like this : create shop > then they enter there shop details > u get to review this and except > they can start selling

    Thanks

  39. spirit
    octubre 2, 2013 at 4:44 pm #

    Wondering if you have any ETA for a next release with exciting features ?

  40. bml13
    octubre 8, 2013 at 10:06 pm #

    Please setup a demo site for this and let us test it first.

  41. Michael
    octubre 10, 2013 at 4:50 am #

    Any woothemes that are suggested for use with this extension?