There are many Joomla eCommerce software available in the industry to let anyone create their own marketplace software. Platforms like Virtuemart, J2 Store, HikaShop and Hikamart let the user create niche and multi-vendor stores but come with a lot of constraints.
VirtueMart
Rating and Reviews: by shoppers and guests to Seller and product are available but Rating for shipment and package is not there.
Shipment: No feature to put a restriction on the shipping and billing location are available. Admin with a niche store cannot create shipping rules based on product category, a specific product, or a specific manufacturer.
Coupon Management: Despite the fact where a store owner can define as to how many times a user can redeem and to what percent of the coupon value they can redeem, they are not capable of defining the number of times a coupon could be applied globally. No provision to define maximum discount on single use of a coupon. No filtration of coupon could be done on the basis of client category and geographical location. The dashboard doesn’t showcase any Total usage/redemption stat for the coupon.
Tax and Discount: Hierarchical tax/discount rules couldn’t be defined. Admin cannot define the start and end date of a discount and tax. Also, Billing/shipping address and client category specific based tax/discount couldn’t be created. No feature to generate reports based on discount rules.
Multi-Vendor Marketplace: Some of the few essential features that Virtuemart doesn’t offer are
- The seller cannot create coupons
- The seller cannot create shipping rules
- Seller country(from which countries sellers are allowed)
- eWallet
- Pay to List
- Free Listing
- Sell for Price
- Call for Price
- Query for price
- Incomplete checkout
- RMA for individual seller
- Shipping and Billing location preference for individual seller
- Special category listing, seller pay for making listing featured/bordered/ etc.
- Stock management for Variant
- Message to sellers
- Sellers cannot sell products on auction, bookings, rent, or EMI, etc.
- The seller cannot sell downloadable files
- In fact, sellers cannot have their own micro store all they have is their profile.
Means to say, no advance seller permissions are granted.
HikaShop
General Configuration: No third party API could be integrated with the hikashop marketplace. They have their own plugin to extend their capabilities.
Rating and Reviews: Though it is good to see that they provide a column for reviews and product rating but it is a point to notice that these features couldn’t be disabled by the administrator. The guest rating could be done if the store owner allows doing so. Besides all this, Seller, packaging, shipment rating, and rating badges features are not available.
Shipment: There is nothing like Rule-based shipping cost charges. A store owner has to manually set the shipping charge for each product.
Shipment by the seller is allowed and they can even restrict the delivery zones but they don’t have provision to decide upon allowed billing location.
There is a filter for Country and State filter for shipping rule but there is no feature to apply filter shipping rule for District, Sub-urb, Zip code, product category, specific manufacturer.
Coupon Management:
Cons: Hikashop doesn’t offer the below-mentioned features
- Minimum Bill value to avail coupon
- Maximum discount on single use
- Client category filter for the coupon in free version
- Shipping/billing address based coupon in free version
- Country, state, district, suburb, zip filter for coupon in free version
- Total usage/redemption stat for coupon
Tax and Discount: Besides the fact Hikashop enables store owner set the fixed or percentage taxes and discount rules on an individual product and also implement hierarchical rules, it doesn’t provide the feature to generate rules on the net cart value. No feature to set start and end date of tax and discount. An owner can create rules based on client category and shipping and billing location but cannot create any rule based on bill amount filter.
Multi-Vendor Marketplace: Hikashop doesn’t offer Native multi-vendor architecture. There is a version of hikashop named hikamarket which further diversified into Front-end edition and Multi-vendor. The Hikamarket Multi-vendor edition is available at a certain cost.
A brief overview of Hikamarket marketplace features:
- Administrators don’t have the capability to restrict sellers from certain countries. The seller can create coupons, create shipping rules, sell new products but they cannot sell the already existing products.
- A seller has to pay for a special category listing, the seller pays for making the listing featured/bordered/ etc. Paid vendor subscription and restricting vendor to create products for certain categories or pay for allowing other categories too.
- The seller can specify their currency. Can embed features like ‘Call or Sell for price’, ‘Query for price’, set fixed or percentage commissions on the sale, incomplete checkout handling, RMA management. Sellers can also enable a customer to select their shipping location preference but not the billing location.
- There can be a single product and multiple sellers but the seller cannot make product variants. Hence the same variant cannot be sold by various sellers.
- The seller cannot set email templates as well.
J2 Store comes with lakhs of the user providing small scale quick solutions but not the completely extensible and detailed ones that could be used to add dynamic rules or made into use by vig enterprises.
One such platform that overshadows all the challenges that one could incur while using the above mentioned tools is Sellacious. Sellacious is the ultimate Joomla eCommerce software with more than 5000 essential features in the freemium version itself ideal to create the best marketplace software.
Sellacious is known for its biggest advantage of providing the best user experience components. We ensure that it takes no time for the store editor with no technical knowledge to edit their storefront. Besides the UX components being offered by SP Page builder(a Joomla extension), Sellacious provides its own 30 components. Ranging from Category title, images, descriptions, sub categories, products, specifications to those for the products. We focus on providing simple yet scalable solutions.
Sellacious provides round-the-clock customer support. Either it be a technical consultation or a business requirement discussion. We handle it all. Sellacious focus on providing complete support to its users and is directly reachable right from its website. You could reach us through email. We guarantee to respond within a day to all your queries. Such a flexible and value adding customer support is not provided by any other eCommerce platform.
