7 Reasons Why Online Marketplaces Should Embrace Dokan

With the rise and rise of e-commerce, it is quite inevitable that people get accustomed to launching new online stores. Some of us want to sell solely whereas some are more inclined towards creating a marketplace. 

The thing with marketplaces is that it involves multiple vendors who sell on the platform. Allowing multiple vendors to sell means multiple tasks to manage the platform commerce. Management of such tasks does get tedious at times when the number of vendors increases. 

Keeping this mind, multi-vendor marketplace owners generally opt for readymade plugins which make their job easier. When it comes to choosing an appropriate plugin for your marketplace, you do have a lot of options out there. 

But overlooking all other options, Dokan must be your first-choice multi-vendor e-commerce solution. 

Here are 7 reasons as to why online marketplaces should embrace Dokan:-

1. Vendor Centric
2. SEO Optimized 
3. WordPress and WooCommerce Integration 
4. Hassle-free Refunds and Exchanges
5. Easy Shipping and Payment Setup
6. A Place Which Marketplace Owners Can Call Home 
7. Outstanding Support and Success Earned Over The Years 

Vendor Centric     

Vendors are the most important element of any marketplace. They sell their products on the marketplace and form the core of the e-commerce platform.

For your marketplace to prosper, your vendors need to be making money. And for them to make money and achieve success, it is of paramount importance that they are able to gain valuable insights. 

This is just what Dokan does!

Dokan is loaded with a lot of features and tools that help vendors manage their individual stores effectively. 

Some of these features include:-

• A separate frontend dashboard is provided to all vendors which help them keep track of product inventory including sales, orders, discounts, and coupons.

• Vendors have the freedom to sell any kind of products including simple, variable, downloadable, virtual product, grouped, and bookable products as Dokan supports all of them.

• Vendors can easily check the status of all their orders along with all the customer details. Dokan provides frontend shipping tracking which is a rare feature to find.

• Different reports with all the store insights are available to all the vendors. 

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Dokan is packed with several other handy features that allow you to stay ahead in the e-commerce game. 

SEO Optimized 

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is the talk of the town. It allows your content to rank higher in the search engine result pages when people search for related keywords or terms.

Ranking their online store high in search engine results is a big pain point for vendors. No one wants to create a beautiful interactive online store only for it to be never found. 

Dokan allows easy management of SEO for the different store pages. This, in turn, helps in ranking your store better on the search engine results. In a way, the online visibility of your store is enhanced which helps in driving more traffic to your store. More traffic results in more conversions. 

Vendors can edit the custom SEO title, meta description, meta keywords, and store permalink straight from their frontend dashboard. 

Dokan also has a Yoast SEO Integration. If Yoast SEO is present, Dokan integrates with Yoast and provides the seller listing in the sitemap as well. When Yoast SEO is not installed, it only provides the seller store meta tags (without sitemap).

WordPress and WooCommerce Integration 

Customization is king when it comes to designing an online store. WooCommerce gives you a plethora of extensions which you can use to beautify your store and add vital functionalities.  

With over 6000 WooCommerce plugins exclusively on WordPress.org, there would be no feature left which vendors can’t incorporate in their stores. We haven’t taken count of hundreds of other plugins being sold over CodeCanyon or other websites that sell plugins independently. A lot of WooCommerce themes are available as well to give an aesthetic look to stores. 

Along with this, Dokan also provides free extensions to customize your WordPress multi-vendor marketplace.  Dokan allows the smoothest customization of your online store and compatibility with WordPress and WooCommerce confirms that you are in good hands. 

Hassle-free Refunds and Exchanges 

One of the biggest pain points of selling online is to handle refund and exchange requests on your store. We all are aware of the fact that refunds and exchanges are absolutely indispensable to any business and should not be ignored. Sometimes the refund process is quite lengthy and tedious but remember that they are parameters that guarantee high customer satisfaction without any losses to the business.

With Dokan, all your refund woes are put to sleep and you get a seamless refund and exchange process. Customers can easily request refunds through vendors. Admins will review these requests and issue a refund.
There are also automated refund and exchange solutions designed exclusively for Dokan which will ease out the process a bit more. Products like RMA for Dokan have simplified the refund process even more and extended the functionality of the base product.

Some exclusive features offered by RMA for Dokan are as follows:-

• Adding the Exchange feature to the Dokan core functionality is a big boost. Earlier, there was no option to exchange products but now with RMA for Dokan, it is possible.

• Customer wallet option has been attached which allows vendors to refund the money directly to it. The customers can then use this refunded amount to buy some other product from the vendor some other time. Both vendors and customers stay happy and satisfied with this.

• A streamlined email notification system all along the refund process which helps the admin, vendor, and customer to stay on the same page. 

• Both the vendor and the admin can use the features separately which does not create any confusion and provides transparency.     

All in all, when you have Dokan, you don’t have refund issues. Whether you are the admin, vendor, or customer, you can take a deep breath as Dokan has got your back. 

Easy Shipping and Payment Setup 

Dokan has raised the bar of shipping products with the introduction of zone wise and product wise shipping. Vendors can easily setup everything from shipping rates to shipping methods for their stores independently. 

Some vendors may want to create different shipping rates for different groups of products. This comes under shipping classes and Dokan supports this very well. 

Vendors can use the frontend dashboard to setup unlimited types of shipping methods. With the latest update, vendors now can set their own shipping policy and shipping processing time for the customers.

Setting up payment methods and payment gateway compatibility are important points to consider while setting up an online store. Vendors need to provide multiple payment options if they are selling internationally. Similarly, compatibility with different payment gateways also helps in building customer trust and extracting more value from them. 

PayPal, Stripe Connect and Moip Connect are some inbuilt payment solutions provided by Dokan while there are several other payment gateways supported by its WooCommerce integration.

For the basic payment methods like Direct Bank Transfer, Cheque Payment, and Cash on Delivery are all free. You will not be charged anything for processing payments via these methods. 

Choosing and enabling withdrawal methods are significant from a vendor’s point of view. With Dokan, requesting a withdrawal from marketplace owners has never been easier. 

Customers can use some payment gateway to pay and then the vendor can use the same one to request the withdrawal from the owner.

A Place Which Marketplace Owners Can Call Home 

Marketplace owners and vendors are two sides of the same coin. Dokan provides a lot of features from a vendor’s perspective. So, to keep things fair, there is a bit in it for marketplace owners as well.

Here are some Dokan features which any marketplace owners would love:

Reviews and Ratings 

Did you know that displaying reviews can increase conversion rates by 270% and purchase likelihood improves 15% when buyers read verified buyer reviews over anonymous reviews?

It might be a mind-boggling statistic but still true. Every online seller knows the importance of customer reviews and strives hard to make a name for them. 

With Dokan, you have the amazing power of displaying vendor and product reviews separately. This might not sound to be crucial but in reality, this does matter a lot. 

Vendor reviews are for the service provided by them. Their response time and willingness to resolve customer issues are factors which improve by 15% when buyers read verified buyer reviews over anonymous reviews and determine whether some user will rate them excellent or not.

Product reviews are solely influenced by the quality of the product. They determine whether some item was good or not and whether someone recommends that product to you or not. 

Dokan makes it all even by asking customers to rate products and sellers separately. To increase profitability, every marketplace owner wants both its vendors and products to be rated highly.

Marketplace owners were waiting for something like this for quite some time now and Dokan fulfilled their wishes. 

Custom Commissions

Every marketplace owner charges some commission from every vendor who is selling a product on their marketplace. This commission may depend on the type of product that the seller has sold. 

For example: 

You would want to charge more commission from some vendor who has sold an iPhone as compared to a vendor who has sold an iPhone cover.

Following the above example, Dokan allows marketplace owners to charge different commissions from different vendors according to the type of products they sell.

The custom commission functionality of Dokan balances the profit margins amongst the sellers and the marketplace owners. 

Sale Reports and Analytics  

Checking your vendors’ sales and keeping an eye on the overall commerce was never easier. Dokan gives marketplace owners access to powerful analytical tools and different reports to keep a track of everything. 

This might be a little underrated as compared to the other features but still effective and vital.

Outstanding Support and Success Earned Over The Years 

To be honest, people consider natural word-of-mouth as the biggest factor which influences their purchasing decisions. You may list of dozens of exciting features in front of the folks but at the end, they will check what others have to say about the concerned product. 

And there is no one to blame because that is human nature. 

Powering 40000+ marketplaces worldwide, Dokan is not your buggy multi-vendor e-commerce solution. It is one of the most complete and comprehensive multi-vendor plugins available in the market. 

Customer testimonials don’t lie. And when they are from the leaders of the industry, they definitely don’t. 

In case you are still on the fence about Dokan being the best fit for you, I would want you to consider their amazing support which is available to you at all times. If you have any issues with their products, simply open a ticket and their support team will take care of things from there.  

Have any general or presale query? Connect with their chatbot on the website. 

You have no reason to not consider this award-winning multi-vendor e-commerce plugin when you are looking to open a multi-vendor marketplace.

Over to You!  

To successfully launch and manage a multi-vendor marketplace is not a piece of cake. It requires insightful tools and a proper marketing strategy to give your business idea the required boost. Even if you have a great start, cementing your place as a successful and flourishing marketplace takes considerable time and effort.  

With Dokan at your service, you save both time and effort. An easy to use interface with useful features in abundance sums up the story for Dokan. Whether you want to sell physical products or digital items, Dokan is your one-stop solution.  

Which plugin do you consider to be the complete multi-vendor e-commerce solution and why? What features does it have in excess of Dokan? 

Share your thoughts!

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This is a Guest Post written by Himanshu Rauthan. He is an entrepreneur, Co-Founder at MakeWebBetter, BotMyWork, and the Director of CEDCOSS Technologies. He has worn many hats in his career – a programmer, researcher, writer, and strategist. As a result, he has a unique ability to manage multi-disciplinary projects and to navigate complex challenges.