Multi-seller marketplace launch for a Malaysian technology firm

The challenge

A Malaysian technology company that provides time attendance and door access systems was launching its own online marketplace where independent sellers could list and sell products. The store already existed on OpenCart, but it had no way to handle multiple sellers, seller registration and approval, or the commission and payouts that come with them.

After checking licensing and features with us, the company bought our multi-seller extension and asked us to install it on its live store. Its own team was also building a custom payment module for the site, so the marketplace had to run alongside code we had not written. The company was also preparing a demo of the marketplace, and the problems it found during testing needed to be cleared before then.

What we did

• Installation. We installed the multi-seller extension on the client's store as soon as access was provided, configured for its OpenCart 2.2 setup with vQmod.
• Seller payment tracking. We added a back-office option to mark each seller payment as paid or unpaid, so the marketplace owner can see at a glance what has been settled. We also added the option to our standard extension.
• Issue fixes from testing. Working from the client's problem documents, we fixed logo and image display, the link in seller approval emails, the product delete button and forgotten-password handling, and resolved an error in the order confirmation template.
• Compatibility with the client's own code. The order confirmation error turned out to be a conflict between the marketplace's vQmod changes and the payment module written by the client's developer. We traced the conflict and fixed it.
• Seller-side improvement. In 2017 the client returned to have category selection changed on the seller's add-product page.

Tech stack

PHP, MySQL, OpenCart 2.2, vQmod, GSP multi-seller extension