Turning a live art and fashion store into a multi-seller marketplace

The challenge

An Indian design business ran its own online store selling art and fashion products on OpenCart, with a third-party theme and several existing extensions. It wanted to open the store to other sellers and run it as a marketplace, keeping its existing theme.

That meant fitting a multi-seller system into a live store that already carried customisations, then growing it with the features an Indian marketplace needed at the time: SMS updates for customers, correct VAT handling and an easier way to manage large product catalogues. Introducing a seller layer also exposed conflicts with existing code that had to be resolved.

What we did

• Marketplace conversion. We installed our own multi-seller extension on the live store using vQmod and adapted it to the client's theme, including seller URL and username handling, seller image and sorting fixes, and price display tweaks.
• Order email fix. Order emails stopped after the extension was enabled. We traced and fixed the problem, then confirmed it with around ten test orders.
• SMS module. A custom module connected to the client's chosen SMS gateway: order confirmations to customer and admin, status-change updates, customer opt-out, promotional messages to groups and bulk number upload by CSV. The same module was set up on a second store run by the client.
• VAT module. A custom module to handle VAT on the marketplace, delivered for client testing in March 2015.
• Product import/export. A module for bulk import and export of products.
• Fixes and maintenance. We resolved an eight-point list of errors (tab view, sorting, newsletter, CSV pincode handling and styling), an SEO problem caused by an earlier blog customisation, checkout errors and later seller image, import and option issues.

Tech stack

PHP, MySQL, OpenCart, vQmod, SMS gateway API