Categories : All, Case Study, E-Commerce Platform, Mobile and Wireless, Retail / E-commerce

Best mCommerce Marketplace System

Client Requirement

The client is one of the most experienced merchandize selling company owners who has been selling the products online since quite a lot of years now. Their requirement was to develop an Magento based marketplace portal where in vendors can come up to sell their products to the customers so that the customers can buy the products at the affordable prices and the admin gets the commission from the sales by the vendors.

The specific requirements of client were:

• The product with lowest price should be displayed at the top if the same product is sold by multiple vendors
• Vendors can upload their simple as well as configurable products
• Vendors should be able to view various reports on the basis of customers and products
• Vendors should be able to set shipping methods as well as shipping rates
• Vendor should be able to create new products and modify their quantity
• Like in any other Magento multistore portal, Customers should be able to view all the products from all the vendors and give their feedback or review in the form of ratings.
• Vendor must have the ability to reply to customer’s reviews
• Vendor must have their own login panel with dashboard which should show the numerical analysis

Project Challenges

The team faced a couple of challenges during this eCommerce marketplace system project:

• It was difficult to implement the functionality to compare the prices of the same product from different vendors and then display the one with the lowest price at the top.
• It was difficult to handle multiple vendors on the same platform and manage the orders from millions of customers at the same time.
• In the Magento ecommerce development, it is difficult to maintain the speed of the website despite of having hundreds of products; so it was tough for us to implement that.

Technologies Used

Manpower

Planning

All the planning for this m-Commerce marketplace system project was done by the combined efforts of the team keeping in mind all the challenges and resources available for the project.

• The database layer contains the MySQL server database and tables, to name a few.
• The Business Logic Layer contains all the business logic procedures for my wish list, login, my account, blogs and check out modules. Other modules include price comparison, refund of products, orders fulfillment, Order history and other shopping cart features.
• The Data Access layer contains the libraries which are responsible for accessing the data from the database
• The user Interface is responsible for creating the graphical user interface of the website

Architecture

This marketplace works on the Magento architecture which is the MVC architecture along with the few more additions to it. It is divided into three parts; two for model and one for the helpers and controllers. All the functionalities of this marketplace shall be built by dividing them into various modules, as all of us know that Magento is a modular architecture.

Development Highlights

The main objective of this project was to provide the platform to several vendors to sell their products to the customers. So, multivendor management is one of the best things that will be carried out. Another important thing is to manage the commission that the marketplace owner shall get for the orders as well as the category based commission for products. Basically, it is a marketplace where the marketplace owner, vendors as well as customers are benefited at the same time. The vendors earn the profit, marketplace owner gets the commission and customers get a chance to compare the prices of the same product from different vendors and then buy the one with the least price.