FedEx Shipping with WC Vendors Marketplace for WooCommerce

With this guide, we’ll show you how to set up a WooCommerce Marketplace using WC Vendors and WooCommerce FedEx Shipping plugin. We’ll also show you how to create and manage multiple vendors, FedEx shipping automation, and the order fulfillment process.

WC Vendors Marketplace plugin for WooCommerce

A WooCommerce multi-vendor marketplace could help you generate more sales and organic traffic on your store. However, its implementation may hit you hard if you don’t know how to create vendors and the multi-layered process that follows.

The WC Vendors Marketplace for WooCommerce is considered to be one of the best marketplace solutions for WooCommerce users. This plugin lets you manage vendors and complete the orders in a much more professional way. Besides that, it comes with options to create Products coupons, View reports, Configure basic shipping methods, etc.,

WooCommerce FedEx Shipping Plugin by PluginHive

WooCommerce FedEx Shipping plugin comes with all the features you’d expect from a complete online shipping solution. You can display live FedEx rates on your Cart/Checkout page, print labels, and share tracking updates with customers.

When it comes to vendors, the plugin easily streamlines the WooCommerce shipping process for each one of them. Since most of the process in the plugin is automated, both you and your vendors would have a very pleasant multi-vendor shipping experience.

WooCommerce Multi Vendor Shipping Addon by PluginHive

The WooCommerce Multi Vendor Shipping Addon is the final piece to the puzzle and an essential part of the solution we’re trying to achieve here. This plugin acts as a bridge between the two plugins and combines the power of multi vendor and FedEx shipping services. You can continue reading this article to know exactly what it does.

Setting up WC Vendors on your WooCommerce

As the first step, download the WC Vendor plugin and install it on your WooCommerce store. From there on, you need to activate the plugin and follow the on-screen setup wizard provided by the plugin itself.

The setup wizard would help you set up the vendor rules and other necessary settings. If you would to customize the plugin even more then you need to visit WooCommerce Dashboard → WC Vendors → Settings. Here, you can set the Commission percentage for each vendor, set up withdrawal methods, and much more.

How to add vendors to your WooCommerce?

There are two ways to add vendors to your WooCommerce. The first option is to add a new user in WordPress and assign him the role of a vendor. Second, you can let prospective vendors register on your website. Let’s explore both options.

Adding vendors using the Add New User option

When you’re on your WordPress dashboard, go to WooCommerce → Users → Add New. Add the user and assign them the role of the Vendor as shown on the image below.

Note: The Vendor option would only come as an option once you’ve successfully installed the WC Vendors plugin.

Let prospective vendors register on your website

With the help of WC Vendors, interested vendors can sign up as vendors on your website. For that, they have to go to the My Account page and click on the option Apply to become a Vendor? And again, this feature can be found within the plugin settings and you need to configure it before using it.

How to configure the vendor’s address?

The next step is to enter your vendors’ addresses into the system for rate calculation and package pickups. Your vendors can add these details by following My Account → Addresses → Shipping address once they’ve created their accounts.

How can vendors add and manage their products?

For the vendors to add and manage their products, they have to go to the WordPress backend(wp-admin) and enter into WordPress backend → Products → All Products. Here they can see all of their products and get the option to Add New products as shown in the image.

To completely set up the WC Vendors plugin on your store, we recommend you kindly follow the documentation provided on WC Vendors’ website.

Setting up WooCommerce Multi Vendor Shipping Addon

Now that you’ve configured the vendors, the next step is to install the WooCommerce Multi Vendor Shipping Addon provided by PluginHive. But before you activate this addon, it’s important that you install and activate both WC Vendors and WooCommerce FedEx Shipping plugin.

Enter the vendor’s FedEx account details

Since we are using the WooCommerce FedEx Shipping plugin in this guide, you need to go to Vendors Dashboard → Edit Account Details and then now scroll down to FedEx Account Details. Here you need to enter either your or your vendor’s valid FedEx credentials.

Display FedEx Shipping Rates on the WooCommerce Cart page

To display FedEx shipping rates on the cart page, you have two options to choose from, i.e., Split & Sum and Split & Separate. For these settings go to WooCommerce → Settings → Multi Vendor Addon.

When you select the Split & Sum option, you will see the sum of the FedEx shipping rate for both vendors. If you choose a Split & Separate option then the prices would be shown separately for each vendor. You can refer to the following set of images to see how it looks on the Cart page.

Split and Sum	Split and Separate

The above images show the real-time shipping rates from both vendors in two different ways, you can refer to this article on Sending shipping labels to multiple vendors to know more.

Setting up the WooCommerce FedEx Shipping plugin

Once you’ve configured both the plugins, you can now set up the WooCommerce FedEx shipping plugin for your vendors to start shipping. To set up the plugin you need to enter the FedEx credentials, your address, choose the packing method, enable the shipment tracking feature, etc.,

You can read the documentation on Setting Up WooCommerce FedEx Shipping Plugin if you need help setting up the plugin. Coming to the multi-vendor shipping, you need to change these two options within the FedEx plugin settings page.

Select the Ship From Address Preference as Vendor Address. Please refer to the image below.

Thereafter, you need to select Vendor under the Send Shipping Label To option to send the shipping labels directly to the vendor’s email address.

Order Fulfillment using FedEx

Let’s go ahead and try adding two sample products from two different vendors into the cart page. You can see the FedEx shipping services with the live rates on both the Cart and Checkout pages.

The real-time FedEx rates on a cart page are calculated by FedEx and returned to a cart page. The WooCommerce Multi Vendor Shipping Addon adds the shipping rates for both vendors and displays the final price as shown above.

Once your customer has placed this order, you can see the order detail and print the FedEx labels as indicated in the image above.

Send FedEx labels to vendors via email

As mentioned before, as soon as the store admin prints the FedEx labels, each vendor would receive the email containing the FedEx label download link.

Vendor 1:

Download the label from the email:

Vendor 2:

Download the label from the email:

Conclusion

The proposed WooCommerce Multi Vendor Marketplace solution provides a lot of advantages and benefits to WooCommerce business owners. Here is an article on UPS Shipping Guide for WooCommerce Multi Vendor with WC Vendors if you want to ship with UPS. 

If you need any help setting up WooCommerce multi-vendor shipping, you can Contact PluginHive Customer Support. We will be happy to help you out.

Good luck!