FedEx Multi Vendor Shipping with WooCommerce Product Vendors

With this article, we’ll tell you how to manage and fulfill orders via FedEx from your WooCommerce Multi Vendor store using the WooCommerce Product Vendors plugin. Read along to learn more about it.

WooCommerce Product Vendors

The WooCommerce Product Vendors plugin by WooCommerce transforms your online store into a powerful, robust shopping center with independent vendors selling their products via a centralized product catalog.

This plugin lets you create a WooCommerce marketplace that would allow your vendors to sell almost anything. You can easily set vendor-specific commission rates that would let you reward your loyal vendors and earn more, which in return, would help you increase your store sales.

WooCommerce FedEx Shipping Plugin by PluginHive

The WooCommerce FedEx Shipping plugin facilitates a seamless FedEx shipping experience for your vendors through FedEx carriers. It is the best FedEx shipping solution for WooCommerce store owners looking to ship items via FedEx services.

Apart from displaying live FedEx shipping rates, this plugin is capable of letting you print labels, and share shipment tracking updates with your customers via email. This plugin works perfectly along with the WooCommerce Product vendors and offers a great opportunity to its users.

WooCommerce Multi Vendor Shipping Addon by PluginHive

The WooCommerce Multi Vendor Shipping Addon is a one-stop WooCommerce shipping solution for your vendors that works with the PluginHive Shipping plugins.

This particular addon allows your vendors to set up and manage real-time shipping rates from carriers like UPS, USPS, Stamps, DHL, and FedEx. Let’s learn more about this addon in this addon.

Setting up WooCommerce Product Vendors on your WooCommerce

The WooCommerce FedEx Shipping plugin has been made compatible with the WooCommerce Product Vendor plugin, which means that the plugins operate together seamlessly. Let us set up these three plugins and place an order to see how it works.

How to create WooCommerce vendors?

Once you’ve installed the plugin, go to the Vendors option under the Products section of your dashboard. You can add the vendors by entering the details like store name and email id. Have a look at the image below.

Once the vendors are created, a Vendor Admin(you) has to be assigned to every vendor and that’s because the shipping process is handled by the Admin and not the vendors.

As soon as an order is placed, the order details will be sent to the Vendors and they have to send the package to the Vendor Admin. Refer to the image below.

Also, you have to make sure that the address and other details are entered correctly for each Vendor Admin.

Once the vendor admin is set for each of the vendors, head to the Users section of your dashboard, where you can see the details.

Note: You can set more than one vendor for each Vendor Admin.

How to create WooCommerce products for the vendors?

The Store Vendor (Vendor Admin) can assign products to the vendors as shown below.

The Vendor section will look like the below image after the above setup process is completed.

How to install the WooCommerce Multi Vendor Shipping Addon?

After you have set up the WooCommerce Product Vendors plugin, you need to install another plugin called the WooCommerce Multi Vendor Shipping Addon.

As discussed earlier this shipping add-on acts as a bridge between the PluginHive FedEx Shipping plugin and the WooCommerce Product Vendors. This helps in displaying the live FedEx shipping rates at the cart page for every vendor.

How to add the vendor’s carrier shipping account?

Firstly, your vendors need to head to their My Account page and then click on the Account details. Thereafter, they have to go to the FedEx Account Details and enter their FedEx account details.

Under the vendor option, your vendors would be able to see the online form required to activate the FedEx account. Have a look at the image below. Once done, they need to save the changes.

How to display FedEx Shipping Rates on the WooCommerce Cart page?

Once the FedEx account is ready, you need to go to WooCommerce → Settings → Multi Vendor Addon. Here, you would find the two options, i.e, Split & Sum, and Split & Separate. 

If you choose the first option, i.e Split & Sum, then the rate would be shown as the sum of the individual shipping costs of the products. And if you choose the Split & Separate option then the prices would be shown separately.

You can refer the following images to see how the FedEx shipping rates look on the WooCommerce Cart page.

Split and Sum	Split and Separate

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. You can also refer to this article that explains more about this plugin.

Setting up FedEx Shipping on your WooCommerce

Once you are done the setting up WooCommerce Product Vendors plugin, you can start with the setup of the WooCommerce FedEx Shipping plugin. It’s really easy to set up this plugin and you can follow the WooCommerce FedEx setup guide for that.

Within the WooCommerce FedEx Shipping plugin, you need to make a few changes to make the plugin work in a WooCommerce Multi Vendor environment. Firstly, you need to select the Ship From Address Preference as Vendor Address, as shown in the image below.

After that, you have to select Vendor in the Send Shipping Label To option found under the shipping label settings. Refer to the image below for that.

WooCommerce Order Fulfilment using FedEx Shipping services

Let’s assume a customer wants to purchase two products from two different vendors on your WooCommerce store. The customer has to add the two items to the cart and proceed to the Cart page to choose the shipping option and fulfill the order.

The above image shows the real-time FedEx shipping rates on the WooCommerce cart page. These rates are calculated by FedEx and are returned directly from their API. Hereon, the WooCommerce store admin(you) could process your orders and generate the shipping labels for them.

Printing FedEx Shipping Labels for Multiple WooCommerce vendors

Now let’s assume an order containing two items from two separate vendors has arrived in your WooCommerce orders list. Once you open this WooCommerce order, you would see a similar Edit order page as shown below.

If you scroll down the page, you should be able to create the shipments for these orders. And of course, there will be two separate WooCommerce shipments since there are two separate vendors.

After creating and confirming the two FedEx shipments, you should be able to view the shipment tracking IDs and print shipping labels for each one of them. Have a look at the image below that shows how to print the FedEx shipping labels.

Now once the labels are downloaded, you can open the two labels to check the details of it. Here are the two labels generated for a sample order containing two items from two separate vendors.

FedEx label for the first vendor:

FedEx label for the second vendor:

Conclusion

We hope this guide has helped you set up and handle shipping from your multi-vendor store using the WooCommerce FedEx Shipping Plugin, WooCommerce Product Vendors, and Advanced WooCommerce Multi Vendor Shipping Addon.

If you have any doubts or need help with Setting up WooCommerce Shipping then feel free to Contact PluginHive Customer Support. Our support team will be able to help you out.

Happy selling!