An online store builder like WooCommerce doesn’t offer the capability to let a user create a multivendor eCommerce store. For accomplishing such purposes an online store owner has to go for the third-party extension that comes with hefty amount of investment. One such extension is Dokan.
Why Not Dokan?
WooCommerce Dokan It is just a WordPress plugin. Hence, there are many features that may not be offered by Woocommerce itself and need the support of other plugins as well which may be paid as well. Some of the shortcomings are, the frequency of updates by the core team is low, It is hard to implement the multi-currency feature, the feature of “Wishlist” is hard to implement in the Woocommerce application, a store owner who may not possess technical knowledge may find it hard to implement by themselves and end up outsourcing the task of building and maintaining the online store to a third-party developer. Needs some knowledge of two platforms: WordPress and WooCommerce, for efficient administration. Moreover, the initials cost or let say the capital cost for a Woocommerce website is not cheap.
Expert knowledge is required when new functionality is required to be added. Specialist E-commerce site builders are needed in order to implement a robust site. Since Woocommerce does not fulfill the eCommerce funnel itself you need to install Dokan extension to implement a multi-vendor marketplace to your store. It doesn’t come with free hosting. So you will need to pay for it separately.
Building a multivendor marketplace is not an easy and economical task with Dokan. Many of the essential features are available in the Dokan Pro(paid version) at a high cost. In addition to that, there are annual subscription and maintenance charges as well. Some of the shortcomings that a store owner may face when decided to use Dokan are, No feature for package and shipment rating.
Rating badges are not available for vendors. Guest shoppers cannot rate the products and vendors. District, Zip, and Suburb filter for shipping rule cannot be created. Shipping rules for specific Manufacturer and Min-Max quantity filter shipping rules can be created neither by the store owner nor the vendor. Per-user coupon usage limit, Maximum discount on single-use, client category filter for coupon, shipping, and billing address filter based coupons, Country, state, district, suburb, zip filter for coupons, and Product quantity filter for coupons cannot be created using Dokan.
Rule on Rule (hierarchical tax/discount rules) for tax and discount, Cart rules, Fixed/% rules, Bill amount filter for tax/discount, Client category based tax/discount cannot be created by the store administrator. The owner can only activate or deactivate the tax and discount rule. They can’t set the start and end date of the rule. Sellers cannot sell products on EMI using Dokan.
Which is the best ideal alternative to Dokan?
So, what is the best online shopping cart development tools available in the market? A tool that would be economical to use for SMEs, cater to all the marketplace requirements almost for free and provide or allow customer development of any feature in the store or its backend.
Sellacious, the ultimate online shopping cart development tool has to provide more than 5000 eCommerce features to offer to create a potential niche or multivendor marketplace without any hassle. Not only b2c but also the b2b marketplace could be also created. Being open-source has provided a wide space for customization as well. Even a store owner with minimal technical knowledge could start with their eCommerce website in just 15 minutes.
All they need to do is download the quickstart package and deploy it to the host server(Sellacious provided or on their own), upload the product images(as many as they want), add descriptions, create categories and subcategories, select the desired payment options to available for the customer to pay and it is done.
So, if you are thinking to look for the speed the thing faster for yourself, then you must be glad to know that this online store builder is equipped with drag and drop functionality based template editor that would enable you to edit the storefront without any hassle. There is nothing truly hard, in fact, it’s completely opposite.
A Sellacious user will have plenty of fun coming up with their own ideas regarding the web design they want. In a case where the store owner doesn’t design their own storefront’s look, they could also use the preexisting templates. Sellacious offers 9 templates for free. These templates could be modified as per your business requirement and the taste of your targeted audience.
