With WC Vendors, can a customer purchase goods from several different sellers in one, single transaction?

Yup! You can have a hundred sellers in one single transaction if you wanted. There’s really no limit.

Can the admin (us) charge a subscription fee to sellers as well as a commission on sales?

If WooCommerce makes an order, you can charge commission for the products in the order, yes.

Can a customer pay for goods but credit card and, if so, do they require a PayPal account to do so?

You can use any payment gateway you like. We are 100% compatible with all WooCommerce gateways. The only time you’d need a special gateway, such as PayPal Adaptive Payments (included) or Stripe ($49 from us), is if you wanted to instantly, or on a schedule, automatically pay vendors their commissions through PayPal or Stripe.

Cheers

Danny,

For credit card payments w/o PayPal – you can try Stripe: https://www.wcvendors.com/product/stripe-commissions-gateway/ — With PayPal you don’t need a PayPal account anyway, you can still pay by credit card. But Stripe is credit card only, and much easier to use and keeps buyers on your domain instead of sending them off site to complete a transaction. Stripe is the best!

Charging monthly subscription fees to vendors is pretty easy. You’d need two plugins to do this.

1.) WooCommerce Groups ($$, woothemes.com)
2.) Groups (free, wordpress.org)

You’d create a product on your website called “Membership plan” or whatever. When someone buys that, you grant them access to the “Vendors” group. You’d last but not least, edit the Pro Dashboard page so that only people in the Vendors group can access it. That’s it! Easy as that.

If you spend some time searching the forums, there are also a number of other options that other members have done. @fervous has one that works very well I just cant seem to find her thread about it right now. Either way, it can be done, has been done, and it’s just a matter of how you want to do it.

Cheers

I’m about to write a WALL of text, @ben. 😛

FORUM POST : SUBSCRIPTIONS

@dbflex That ^ was my original post regarding subscriptions. I had used the plugin: Paid Memberships Pro, which is a popular membership plugin for WordPress.

I had originally configured my site so that members could choose to sign up as two levels of vendors, each requiring a different monthly recurring payment. The code in the forum topic above enables automatic role switching when a member subscribes (switched to vendor) or downgrades (switches to subscriber). Note: if a vendor downgrades, it does NOT delete their products. More configuring would be needed to do so automatically.

I have since simplified things on my site, because my needs have changed. The code I used in the above referenced forum topic and my configuration worked fine. PMPRO is a good but HEAVY plugin– it has just too many features for my needs, so I have since simplified.

I changed to using just this plugin: WP FULL STRIPE BY MAMMOTHOLOGY which is a light plugin that is well coded and meets my needs. I allow members to sign up as a vendor for free, but if they want a lower commission rate, I offer a monthly recurring payment subscription. I, for now, just manually switch the vendor’s commission rate when I see that they have subscribed.
There is also add-on plugin to the WP Full Stripe: WP FULL STRIPE MEMBERS which will allow you to add more functionality and options to your subscriptions if needed.

The author of those two plugins is awesome and knows what he is doing, BTW.

For any configuration in which you want to hide the vendor dashboard in a menu from roles that are not a vendor, you can use NAV MENU ROLES

And now a couple of *opinions*, for what its worth:
1) I’d advise that you DO NOT USE DOK AN. I did. I regretted it. The support wicked sucks and it is a very messy piece of work. 🙁 It was a huge and expensive waste of time for me.
2) Stripe is awesome.

– WC Vendors Free will enable the third party vendors configuration and the commission (the percentage of the sales price that you wish to take). WC Vendors Pro will add front-end publishing of products and a front-end dashboard for your vendors (among other nice features), so they do not have to add products and such from the wp backend. Both Wc Vendors free and pro allow a shopper to add items from many vendors in one cart and checkout in one transaction.

– If you want to sell you own products, you will need to also sign up for a vendor account on your own site. Not a big deal, I just thought I’d mention that.

– I’m not sure what subscription plugin will be best for you among the ones I mentioned and the config that Ben mentioned. PMPRO is free and has add-ons available… it is probably the most robust free membership/subscription plugin that I *personally* know of. I learned a lot by reading this guy’s articles: https://chrislema.com/memberships-plugins/ But if you want to treat your vendor’s monthly subscription like a product, then Ben’s solution may be best for you. Also- it depends what you can/want to spend on the plugin.

– The WC Vendors Stripe Connect plugin/add-on allows you to take customer credit card payments… the payments are then immediately split upon checkout— your commission % goes to you, the vendor’s % goes to them. Customers do not need a Stripe account, they just pay with a credit or debit card. Vendors need a stripe account to connect it to receive payments.

Hope this helps.

🙂