Arts and crafts store turned into a physical-goods seller marketplace

The challenge

An Indian online store selling art, crafts and handloom sarees wanted to open its catalogue to independent artisans and sellers, who would register, list their own products and manage their own orders. Our multi-vendor extension at the time was designed for digital downloads, so it had no concept of sizes, physical shipping or courier tracking, and none of the business details Indian sellers have to provide.

The store also ran a heavily styled theme with its own customised code, so seller pages had to sit naturally inside it. Two years later the store moved to a new theme, which removed the original marketplace changes because they had been made directly in core files. The client wanted the marketplace back on the new design in a form that would survive future changes, plus a faster way to load sellers' products in bulk.

What we did

• Physical-goods marketplace. We extended our multi-vendor extension so sellers can add products with price, size and a physical or downloadable flag, and fill in a profile with description, PAN and TIN numbers, export licence, international shipping and cash-on-delivery options.
• Seller order handling. Sellers see their own orders and add courier tracking details (agency and tracking code), see each product's approval status and receive seller emails. Commission is applied at a uniform rate.
• Theme integration and launch. We integrated seller registration, login and account pages into the existing theme, shared a demo for review, then uploaded the code to the live store and fixed the points raised in testing.
• Upgrade-safe rebuild. In 2014 we installed the vQmod version of the extension on a test copy, customised it for the new theme, resolved the client's approval, spelling and formatting points, and then installed it on the live store.
• Seller bulk import. We added a Seller column to the admin Excel product import, so each imported product is assigned to a seller account and appears in that seller's product list.

Tech stack

PHP, MySQL, OpenCart 1.5.2.1 and 1.5.6.1, vQmod, Excel product import