WooCommerce Multi Vendor Shipping with Dokan

WooCommerce-Multi-Vendor-Shipping-with-Dokan

With this guide, we’ll help you set up a successful WooCommerce Multi Vendor shipping store with Dokan and WooCommerce Multi-Carrier Shipping plugin.

Using the two plugins together, you can set up a WooCommerce multi-vendor marketplace where your vendors could ship via popular carriers like UPS, FedEx, USPS, Stamps, and DHL.


Benefits of having a WooCommerce Multi Vendor Shipping store

The variety of extensive features that WooCommerce offers has led it to excellence. WooCommerce’s userbase has been growing at a tremendous pace and clearly, there’s no downfall to that.

A WooCommerce Multi Vendor store would allow its users to expand their business by allowing multiple vendors/associates to sell products in one place. These vendors bring a lot of value to the store, something that is quite necessary these days.

Compared to a conventional online store with just one vendor, a multi-vendor store would offer a more diverse shopping experience. It can attract more customers from different regions, resulting in an overall increase in sales.

A WoCommerce multi-vendor store would also satisfy your need to become popular among your buyers. Offering various types of products in one place has real potential in the current market, Amazon and Ebay being the best examples.

But those are just mere words, let’s see how you too can achieve something similar with these two plugins.


WooCommerce Multi-Carrier Shipping Plugin

The WooCommerce Multi-Carrier Shipping plugin provides the power of more than a single shipping carrier for your WooCommerce store. Using this plugin you can configure your shipping accounts for the following shipping carriers,

  • UPS
  • FedEx
  • USPS
  • Stamps
  • DHL

This gives you the ability to offer live rates from multiple shipping carriers. Also, your customers can have the flexibility to choose the shipping service that suits them.

One of the most interesting features of the WooCommerce Multi-Carrier Shipping plugin is that it can also provide conditional shipping. This plugin combines the power of table rate shipping and carriers, making it the only one of its kind.

You could easily create shipping rules based on various factors like product weight, total price of the cart, number of products, etc.,


WooCommerce Multi Vendor Plugin – Dokan

Dokan is possibly one of the best WooCommerce multi-vendor plugins out there. It offers a ton of unique features that make this plugin so special and popular among its users.

Vendors can beautifully create products, categorize them, define the sale prices, offer coupons, manage orders and shipping, and a lot more.

Both you and your vendors can check out the information on the admin side. They can find out the total sales, new orders, pending orders, completed orders, and many more. The plugin represents this along with the charts and bars representation, which is very convenient.

Dokan also comes with a built-in SEO feature that allows your vendors to create an online presence of their products. As you might know search engines detect keywords and the site with more keywords is usually placed higher in the search results.


Advanced shipping for WooCommerce Multi-Vendor plugin

The Advanced Shipping for WooCommerce Multi-Vendor plugin acts as a connector between the Dokan Multi Vendor plugin and the WooCommerce Multi-Carrier Shipping plugin. After installing this plugin, vendors can add their own shipping carrier account details and select the way real-time rates appear on a cart page.


How do set up a WooCommerce Multi Vendor Shipping store?

The WooCommerce Multi-Carrier Shipping Plugin has been made compatible with the Dokan Multivendor plugin. Which means that the plugins operate together seamlessly. There is a set of instructions you need to follow to make the most out of this integration.


Adding vendors to your WooCommerce

The process of installing the plugins and configuring is quite simple. You just need to download and install the Dokan Multivendor plugin. The plugin then guides you through the setup process and allows you to configure it on the way.

woocommerce multi vendor

You can follow the steps given in the following document to set up vendors on your store.

Once you are done installing the plugin, you would have to set up the rules for the vendors. To do that, you need to go to WooCommerce > Dokan > Settings. Here you have multiple settings that you would need to choose and configure. You can choose the Dashboard appearance, define the commission percentage, set up withdrawal methods, etc.

Dokan Settings


Install the Advanced Shipping for WooCommerce Multi-Vendor plugin

After you have set up the Dokan plugin, you need to install another plugin called the Advanced Shipping forWooCommerce Multi-Vendor plugin. This plugin will act as a bridge and let you assign products to the vendors.

Yet, the most important feature of this plugin is the way it changes the appearance of the cart based on the products selected by the customers. To be specific, the plugin has two options – Split the shipping calculation and add shipping rates together, and Split the shipping calculation & show the shipping rates separately.

You would find these options on the plugin settings page.

woocommerce multi vendor setting


If you choose the first option, i.e Split and sum, then the rate would be shown as the sum of the individual shipping costs of the products. The image shows how the shipping rates will be added together.

Shipping rates for vendors

And if you choose the Split and Separate option then the prices would be shown separately. You can refer to the following image to see how it looks on the Cart page.

Shipping rates for different vendors

In the above image, the Cart page includes two different items from two separate vendors. This is a nice feature as it allows your customers to have options over the shipping methods.


Setting up WooCommerce Multi-Carrier Shipping plugin

Once you are done setting up the Dokan plugin, you need to set up the WooCommerce Multi-Carrier Shipping Plugin. This is fairly easy to set it up and start using the plugin. You only have to follow the steps mentioned in the Setting Up WooCommerce Multi-Carrier Shipping plugin guide.


How can vendors manage their orders?

Once you are done with the installation and setup of the plugins, you would find the following drop-down option on the Edit product page.

Vendor's products

With this drop-down, you can directly assign products to each vendor. This is a good way of assigning products as it gives you complete control. Furthermore, you can allow your vendors to use their own shipping carrier accounts to process their orders. This way you don’t have to pay the postage and your vendors can handle their shipments.

The vendors can visit the My Accounts => Account Details, to set the Vendor credentials for the shipping carrier, as shown in the image below.

Vendor Credentials

Now, let us assume that a customer is going to purchase two products from two different vendors. The customer will add the items to the cart and would proceed to the Cart page to see the shipping rates and fulfill the order.

Products from different vendors

Once the customer proceeds and places the order, the vendor(Seller A) would be able to see this order on the Orders page. The other vendor(Seller B) would be able to see similar on his or her Orders page.

Orders of different vendors

Summary

The combination of Dokan and the WooCommerce Multi-Carrier Shipping plugin could help you achieve your WooCommerce Multi Vendor business case. With this solution, you’re free to run any kind of marketplace with shipping.

If you need any help in setting up a multi-vendor shipping scenario on your WooCommerce website then feel free to contact our customer support. They should be able to help you out entirely.

Happy selling!