An Automotive Marketplace with Easy Vendor Onboarding

The marketplace is tailored for the ease of onboarding new sellers who are mostly car resellers. Anyone on the website can buy and sell. Thus, it was required to create such an onboarding and registration process that anyone without huge experience could list their items. We created two types of vendors:

1. Simple vendors that sell used items. They can work in their profiles, see their products and orders. Such vendors are assigned to the free plan.
2. Vendors-companies that sell a lot of products. They manage the stock through a vendor panel. Such vendors are on a paid plan.

To achieve our goal of easy onboarding, we have done the following:

• Implemented simplified product management
• Changed the vendor registration process by splitting the process into several steps:
• Filling out a standard vendor registration form (without choosing a vendor plan)
• If the user is authorized, then the form fields are pre-filled.
• Selection of a plan. It can be skipped on a free payment plan
• Simple creation of a product (step can be skipped) through adding the product name, category, description, quantity, price and other fields.

We managed to fit the client concept: to make an easy onboarding for large companies and regular users wanting to sell on the marketplace their used items.

This new integration depends on the CS-Cart standard RMA (return merchandise authorization) add-on to allow users to get refunds through the Caplink payment gateway.

We added new fields to the Vendor information tab of the “Profile fields” page:

• Upload your Caplink membership card
• Supplier ID 
• Validated (by admin).

To use the Caplink payment gateway users are advised to have accounts in the Capricorn system. After the “Validated” setting is enabled for the user, he or she is automatically included in the user group to pay the orders using the Caplink payment method.
If users do not have a Caplink membership card uploaded  and Member ID, they are advised to fill in MemberID and upload a Caplink membership card to use Caplink payment method for payments on the website.

After the “Validated” setting is enabled for a vendor, users can pay for these vendor products using the Caplink payment method.

A customer can send a return request on the order details page by clicking the Request the replacement or a refund link.

This new integration depends on the CS-Cart standard RMA (return merchandise authorization) add-on to allow users to get refunds through the Caplink payment gateway.

We added new fields to the Vendor information tab of the “Profile fields” page:

• Upload your Caplink membership card
• Supplier ID 
• Validated (by admin).

To use the Caplink payment gateway users are advised to have accounts in the Capricorn system. After the “Validated” setting is enabled for the user, he or she is automatically included in the user group to pay the orders using the Caplink payment method.
If users do not have a Caplink membership card uploaded  and Member ID, they are advised to fill in MemberID and upload a Caplink membership card to use Caplink payment method for payments on the website.

After the “Validated” setting is enabled for a vendor, users can pay for these vendor products using the Caplink payment method.

A customer can send a return request on the order details page by clicking the Request the replacement or a refund link.

We also developed a Capricorn membership discount add-on to give discounts to customers if a vendor has a special Capricorn membership discount.

We extended the settings page to ask vendors about Capricorn discounts on the vendor registration page. 

• If a vendor enters some value in the “Capricorn discount(%)” field and submits the form, this value is saved and displayed on the Capricorn tab of the Vendor editing page.
• Admin receives an email notification and can verify the vendor Capricorn discount by enabling the “Verified” checkbox on the Capricorn tab of the Vendor editing page.We added a new email template to inform the admin about the Capricorn discount of a vendor awaiting approval. 

Thus, the marketplace got a new opportunity to get loyal customers with the Capricorn membership. 

We recommended our partner — Scalesta.com — to resolve hosting issues. Their team created a directory for the project, allocated a domain, installed the SSL certificate for greater site security, granted users rights to the directory and created a user database. 

When the project was released, a lot of products and an abundance of features slowed down the site. The project managers were dissatisfied and constantly asked to examine the site for bottlenecks. As a result, Scalesta engineers developed a custom hosting solution for UNIXMO. They created a script for cache generation and a preview to reduce the opening time of pages.

We have had services on many projects and in future we will do the same too. There can be satisfaction with the end product and the timelines are very reasonable.

Don
Unixmo Manager