Merchant sign-up, commission and payout workflow for a retail marketplace

The challenge

A Malaysian online retail business wanted to open its store to outside merchants. Instead of stocking everything itself, it would let approved merchants list their own products, take a commission on each sale and pay merchants their share.

The business had written its own merchant sign-up specification describing how merchants should register, how they would be approved and how commission and payouts should work. That process needed to be turned into a working system on the existing themed storefront, and then run on a second, mirror site as well.

What we did

• Marketplace foundation. We installed and set up our own multi-seller extension on the client's store, so merchants and their products could be managed within the existing site and theme.
• Merchant workflow. Working from the client's specification, we mapped and confirmed a nine-step merchant flow: merchant registration, admin approval, product listing, order alerts to merchants, commission calculation and a manual payout report for the admin. We returned an updated version of the specification to the client so both sides agreed on the flow, including the rule that every product must belong to a seller.
• Product-link tab. We added a product-link tab requested by the client as part of the merchant feature set.
• Fixes on both sites. We resolved an admin module error caused by a duplicate class declaration, fixed the logo display on the main marketplace, and later corrected errors in the extension's vQmod file and seller form template on the mirror site.

Tech stack

PHP, MySQL, OpenCart, vQmod, GSP Multiseller extension