Disclaimer: Another long post, but with an easy solution, I promise!
Right now, the Pay Plugin offers a ton of amazing features and opportunities for an admin to monetize his Osclass install, with one of the most important ones being the
Multi-Vendor Classifieds Marketplace option.
The problem here is that the admin doesn't have an easy way to get a commission from sellers, because there's no option anywhere in the interface to actually see how much the seller has sold, in a pre-defined timeframe.
To fix this, I've came up with a simple and clever solution that makes use of some of the existing Osclass capabilities.
- So basically, the admin would log in as a seller and check the total sales he had last month. In calculating the total, we take into account both
Shipped and
Completed orders.
- Then the admin would apply a commission of x% on that value and issue the final payment to the seller.
Now, to describe the whole logic we have:
The problems- Admin is missing a way to check how much a vendor has sold, in order to apply a commission on that amount.
- For tangible products, before applying a commission you need to let the order mature. This is because of European law that gives the customer 14 days to return a product ordered online.
So if you commission the vendor sales on the spot, and then a customer returns a product, you need to refund the customer and reverse the commission (horror story).
The fixTo solve the the above problems we need 3 simple math functions:
- A function that calculates and outputs the total sales a vendor had in the past month (date rage 01 - 31). This should take into account both Shipped and Completed orders (many times sellers will forget to change the status of an order from Shipped to Completed, so that's why we also include the shipped ones into the calculus).
- Another function that calculates and outputs the total YTD (Year to Date - the period of time beginning the first day of the current calendar year up to the current date) sales. This one is for the vendor, to see how much he has sold this year.
- The third one that calculates and outputs the percentage of cancelled orders in the last month. This one is to prevent vendors from exploiting the system (like changing the order statuses to Cancelled, in order to pay lower commissions).
So this should show a percentage of Cancelled orders in the last month, with a target set to < 3%. If the rate is higher then you can suspend the vendor account, on the suspicion of fraud.
Here's an example from the backend of one of the biggest marketplaces in Europe - https://www.emag.ro/
Bonus fix by implementing all of the above: The 14 day order
maturing part is fixed by issuing payment to sellers only once every month on the
15th. This way you give time for orders placed at the end of each month, to mature.
The final workflow- Around the 15th of every month, the admin logs in as each vendor and checks the amount sold last month and the Order cancel rate. If everything is ok, then the payment would be issued, minus the x% that the admin keeps.
How I think it should look for usFront:
*Maybe with some changed colors/icons - you're the design genius here.
Back:
Now, adding the above and the
post in X category restriction for user groups would finally close the chapter for the Multi-Vendor Marketplace System, by giving the admin total control of the eCommerce system.
So we'll have: vendors, a commission system, the ability to create categories where only vendors can post listings and much more!
Thanks!