Seller plans, coupons and storefront tools for a small-business marketplace

The challenge

A New Zealand founder was building an online marketplace where small businesses, many of them handmade and independent retailers, could open their own storefronts. She chose our multi-seller extension for OpenCart and told us it already met about 95% of what she needed.

The remaining 5% was what made the business model work. Sellers joined on contracts with plans and end dates that had to be visible, extendable and enforced. Store owners wanted tools to promote themselves: their own coupons, galleries and links to their websites and social pages. The admin team needed reliable order notifications across many sellers, and seller store URLs had to be clean enough for search engines.

What we did

• Seller contracts and plans. We made contract end dates visible to sellers and extendable by the admin, added automatic reminder emails 14 days before and on the last day of a contract, and moved expired sellers to the default plan automatically.
• Seller storefront tools. Sellers gained their own coupon codes, a gallery tab that the admin can enable per contract, website and Facebook buttons on the seller page, and a reviews tab on seller and product pages. Seller usernames can be shown across the site with an admin toggle.
• Order handling. Admin and seller are notified when an order is marked shipped. Sellers see order history in their panel, and the admin can update an order's status for all sellers at once. We also added a stock-subtract field and image-manager delete and move permissions for sellers.
• SEO-friendly seller URLs. Seller store URLs no longer contain encoded spaces, and product canonical URLs include the seller name. In 2018 we resolved a conflict between the extension and another add-on.
• Fixes and support. We fixed product options lost on approval, review and meta title issues, image problems after the move to the production domain, contract date calculation, admin coupon saving, newsletter emails and SMTP sending errors. We also set up demos across OpenCart versions to explain option-type differences.

Tech stack

PHP, MySQL, OpenCart 2.3, vQmod, SMTP email