Handmade and vintage marketplace: SEO URLs, alerts and shipping display

The challenge

An independent consultant working for the owner of a live online marketplace asked us to extend the store. The marketplace brings together independent sellers of handmade, craft, vintage, antique and jewellery items, and also supports auctions. It already ran on our own multi-seller extension with a premium theme, so every change had to fit an established live site without disrupting sellers or buyers.

The owner wanted a set of practical improvements: pages that search engines and people can read, better communication when a return is raised, easier browsing from the homepage, and shipping information shown before checkout rather than after it.

What we did

• Readable SEO URLs. We set up search-friendly URLs for information, seller, blog and product pages, together with the supporting server rewrite rules.
• Return notifications. When a buyer raises a return, an email now goes to both the store administrator and the seller concerned, so nobody has to check the admin panel to find out.
• Homepage category menu. A category menu on the homepage gives buyers a direct route into the catalogue.
• Clearer product and cart pages. Product pages now show the shipping price and stock level. We hid an unnecessary "no shipping" warning, fixed cart button issues and corrected a problem on the sellers' plan page.
• Safe delivery. We built and tested the whole set on a demo copy first, then delivered it as an updated template, vQmod files for the multi-seller and product-based shipping logic, and the rewrite configuration, so the live store could be updated in one step.
• Seller panel fix. Later, the sellers' Manage Products list began repeating items across pages. We traced the cause to pagination in our multi-seller extension and fixed it the same morning. We also followed up on currency and tax display and on SSL redirect rules.

Tech stack

PHP, OpenCart 2, vQmod, Journal theme, Apache rewrite rules