Verified seller onboarding for an Indian multi-vendor marketplace

The challenge

An Indian start-up was launching a multi-vendor marketplace where independent sellers list products and the platform takes a service fee on sales. It chose our multi-seller extension for OpenCart, which gave it a seller panel and a "sell with us" sign-up out of the box.

Indian marketplaces, however, need to know who they are dealing with before sellers go live. The client wanted every new seller to provide business details, bank details for payouts and their PAN tax number, to accept the platform's service fee agreement, and to wait for admin approval before trading. Early testing also showed that sellers could not change the status of their orders, which blocked day-to-day fulfilment.

What we did

• Order-status fix. We resolved the issue that stopped sellers changing order status from their panel and asked the client to retest.
• First-login seller profile. On their first login, sellers are taken to a profile step to enter business details, bank account details and PAN before they can continue.
• Service fee agreement. Sellers must accept the marketplace's service fee agreement as part of onboarding, and we showed the client's team how to edit the agreement page themselves.
• Admin approval. Seller accounts are activated only after the marketplace admin approves them.
• Further onboarding changes. Working from the client's change document, we covered items such as admin notification of new sellers, seller pickup addresses and the mandatory fields in bulk product upload. Only three points were charged; the rest were included free.
• Admin guidance. We explained how product IDs work in the bulk-upload format so the team could load catalogues correctly.

Tech stack

PHP, MySQL, OpenCart 2.3