Multi-vendor marketplace with a branded, locally adapted seller panel

The challenge

A Sri Lankan company was launching an online marketplace where multiple sellers would list and sell their products on one site. Its store already ran on OpenCart 2.2 with a third-party theme, and the client bought our multi-vendor extension to add seller accounts, seller product management and a seller panel.

Installing the extension was only the start. The seller panel needed to read and behave the way the client wanted for its own market: its own wording and labels, its own branding, the local tax identification field for sellers, and seller rules that matched how the marketplace would be run. The extension also had to sit cleanly alongside the existing theme, and marketplace emails had to reach sellers reliably.

What we did

• Installation and theme compatibility. We installed the extension on the live store and adapted its modification file so it worked with the client's theme, re-installing it when the theme was later updated.
• Seller panel customisation. Working point by point through the client's document, we changed panel labels, replaced the "powered by" text, renamed the tax field to the client's local TIN label, adjusted a seller restriction and added seller logos.
• Email delivery. We switched the marketplace's outgoing emails to SMTP and resolved an error that occurred when sending seller registration emails.
• Bug fixes. We fixed an error that appeared when deleting a seller from the admin.
• Server diagnostics. When sessions expired unexpectedly and seller approval and image uploads failed, we investigated and traced the causes to server configuration, including missing cross-origin (CORS) settings, rather than the extension itself, and explained what the host needed to enable.

Tech stack

PHP, OpenCart 2.2.0.0, multi-vendor extension, SMTP