Feature ?

[EK]

Hi,

We know that vendors can buy extra product limit after exceeding their limits. Can we make this time limited?

Eg: Each product can be listed for only 30 days after which they need to buy more credit to re-list ?

If this feature does not exist, this can be a great thing to add to your plugin in the future? I think this is the e-bay concept of listing?

Eg: $5 listing fee per item for 4 months listing

Cheers,
Ak

[WCFM Forum]

Hi,

$5 listing fee per item for 4 months listing

– What will happen after 4 moths? Those items will be deleted!

Thank You

[EK]

Hi,

After 4 months, the status of the published products can be forced to be made draft thus affecting the product limit? So, they will be forced to purchase the credit to upload or publish new products which includes making the draft products back to publish again?

good idea? 😉 If you want, I can give you a more specific answer based on which you can programme to make this into an extremely powerful feature 😉

In short,

1. Store product expiry date in a variable during purchase of product credit. (X= 4 months from date of purchase)

2. On vendor login, check X and if x >= date then select all products linked to x and run function to change status from published to draft

3. Check product credits and minus from product credits, the total number of products made into draft. (hence customer has to buy more next time they want to publish products-New or the ones made into draft).

4. Email vendor which products became draft with payment button.

Now this is my very short and over the top of my head. You get the idea 🙂 Ofcourse, you have to really think and plan this to make it into production unlike my simple 2 lines.

Thank you

[WCFM Forum]

Hi,

After 4 months, the status of the published products can be forced to be made draft thus affecting the product limit? So, they will be forced to purchase the credit to upload or publish new products which includes making the draft products back to publish again?

– OK, then why you are not creating a membership level with 4 months renewal and product limit 5 ?

Thank You

[EK]

Hi,

This is because each vendor will want to publish different number of products. So, we cannot predict this.

Eg: Vendor 1 wants to purchase only 25 product credits while vendor 2 wants 35.

Also, most people are used to 30 days membership plans. If I ask 4 months worth of fee at once, not many will stay.

Therefore, the only true solution is to allow them to purchase unlimited product credits while admin fixes the expiry (No. of days).

Lastly, membership plans have many other factors (Commission level/ capability limits etc). So, asking people to manually change membership to get more product limit is bad vendor experience as they have to do this multiple times and in this competitive market people are too much demanding and people tend to choose user friendly websites more.

Thank you 🙂 Have a nice day ahead 🙂

[WCFM Forum]

HI,

Vendor 1 wants to purchase only 25 product credits while vendor 2 wants 35.

– That’s fine, you may may create different level of membership plans and set different product limit for those.

Check this – https://youtu.be/pO4_9xEzWic

Thank You

[EK]

Hi,

I checked the link.

Your solution is not user friendly for vendors when they can easily choose e-bay or amazon where product listing is possible to purchase for cents.

Imagine 1 vendor has high inventory for a specific month. I have to ask him to upgrade his plan and downgrade next month when he needs a lower limit? I will lose a recurring member just by bringing his attention to this point.

I have purchased group and staff and I design the membership according to capability and not product listing.

Listing fee is a big factor to recover server space cost and ensure that vendors are serious about listing and not just list crap products. Ofcourse I can limit space etc but look, the reality is people have better options to sell elsewhere and unless your plugin gives similar ease compared to big brands like ebay and amazon, no one likes to join when you say “limited space” or limited product listing in this membership plan. Convincing sellers to sell in our marketplace is the key to success.

We can try competing with price but you are talking against giants who dominate and under price the market.

So, everything comes down to a mix of business and technology. I have many decades of experience and most of your users will find it the hard way how tough it is to maintain a marketplace unless your plugin equips us with the features which allows us to compete with like weapons against the giants 😉

I hope it makes sense.

So in conclusion, I would say this feature is incomplete without a time frame. If a vendor lists for 10 years without a sale, I pay for that space. Multiply by 10,000 users doing the same with just 100 products and 10 years and you will know why listing fee was developed by e-bay to counteract this issue. Just this cost can kill the business unless action is taken.

I talk from experience in the industry here 🙂

Best Regards,
Ak, Founder

[WCFM Forum]

HI,

WCFM has “Pay for Product” for the purpose- https://youtu.be/WwFHorx93Fw

Thank You

[WCFM Forum]

But here purchased product limit never expire!

[EK]

But here purchased product limit never expire!

—Exactly 🙂 That is why I posted here so you can consider introducing this expiry limit in the future. Without this limit, vendors can pay 10 cents for listing useless products for months or years while I pay for the server space and they pay only once with a few cents. This is what happened to other marketplace websites that I had helped design using other technologies in the past.

The vendors started listing anything and everything and the marketplaces suffered increasing server space and bandwidth costs. Therefore, we introduced the listing fee and everyone suddenly became careful about their pricing, products and promotions AND the IT costs fell significantly in 6 months.

Thank you.

Thanks

[m.rejhan]

I have to agree with this guy

[WCFM Forum]

Hi,

That is why I posted here so you can consider introducing this expiry limit in the future

– We will add “Expiry Duration” for this limit in next update.

Thank You

[EK]

Outstanding. Always glad to help you make your plugin the strongest in the market by sharing my experience. Thank you for your amazing efforts.

Have a nice day.

Best Regards,

Founder,Ak

[vanilladev89]

Hello,

I agree with what @ak is saying and I also requested a listing fee some time ago. Let’s talk about the Pay For Product Model.

1. In it’s current state, vendors are limited to the number of products they can have open in any state (draft, published, etc..). The idea is if the vendor needs additional products, they pay the fee and instantly get additional product limit. However, the vendor could get around this fee by deleting a product, archiving the product, or editing a product to a different product. This works because deleting and archiving products return the product back to the vendors total product limit. Thus, the current product limit/pay for product acts more as an overall product space limit and not like a listing fee.

1A. The response to this request was “disable vendor delete and edit live product capabilities”. Well, that’s not a very good solution. We need the vendors to be able to correct their mistakes and change prices and site owners would likely rather users have the ability to delete products to save on media space and website speed than not. If we remove edit and delete capabilities, the site admin would be responsible for these functions and that’s not efficient. Additionally, it gives your website a bad look when you hinder your vendors.

1B. You could custom code to prevent the “deleted product” from returning to the vendors total product space. You will also need to do this for archived products as well because they also return to the product limit once archived. This still has an issue because vendors still can potentially edit the listing to a different product and list a new product in it’s place. Additionally, this concept forces vendors to make additional payments because there is only one option for increasing product limit.

My point is that the pay for product model that is currently in this plugin is consistently being changed by developers and custom coding from wclovers to accommodate queries for a listing fee. I believe that a listing fee could be implemented into the current Withdrawal system, but I will use this post to present an idea to modify the withdrawal system to a different system that may be better for many WCFM users.

Proposed development for Pay For Product/ Listing Fee/ Withdrawal system:

Withdrawal System – I suggest the withdrawal system change to a running balance system capable of having fees removed directly from their balance. When the Vendor requests a withdrawal, they can fill in a field that designates the amount of their earnings they wish to withdrawal instead of having to designate which payments they wish to withdrawal. Admins should also have option to add, subtract, and modify vendor withdrawal accounts. These options would give admins much more control over their marketplace and simplify the refund system. Additionally, this new system would allow for a listing fee and other fees a marketplace might add to their website. Vendors could choose to preload their balance to cover listing fees, admins could offer a “negative balance limit” which could be reverse withdrawn from a connected paypal account to pay their listing fees, and this also opens up options for coupons to promote vendors to list products, such as a listing fee sales or a voucher for $10 deposited into their withdrawal account.This is just a few examples of how a different withdrawal system could excite website owners/developers.

Listing Fee – The listing fee is an amount that is reduced from the vendors withdrawal balance each time a product is published and/or sold. The listing fee can be taken on relisting products as well. For example, if a vendor lists a product sold individually with an inventory of 10 quantity available, each time a product is sold, the website collects a listing fee. In the previous example, if the listing fee was $1 and all 10 items sold, the vendor would owe $10 for the listing fee in addition to other fees.

Pay For Product – Pay for product could remain unchanged because it would work well in addition to the listing fee. Admins would still have the ability to limit their Vendor’s overall store size by product limits, but admins would no longer need to worry about removing delete or edit capabilities to use pay for product as a listing fee model. This thread’s expiration modification would still be viable, but more than likely, it would not be necessary since a listing fee would also satisfy this threads query. I believe the expiration suggestion in this thread is another solution around an actual listing fee being implemented.

I understand that my solution may not be as simple of a solution as the Expiry Solution that is presented in this thread, however, I do think that this plugin would benefit from offering a listing fee and a withdrawal system that opens the current restrictive system to admins and creates a simplified experience for the admins and vendors.

Cheers
VD

[EK]

Hi VD,

Thank you for your awesome and outstanding take on this topic. Sorry for my late reply as I was away. Your post is a real treasure for team WCFM.

The points you mentioned are extremely well thought and vital for the implementation of this feature. Any updates about this?

Thanks a lot and have a nice day ahead.

Best Regards,
AK

[vanilladev89]

Hi @ak

Thank you for the compliments. I personally have not received any updates on this top and will try and keep this post active. Possibly, the wclovers team will consider creating this as an option.

Cheers
VD

[EK]

Hi Guys,

Any updates about this?

Thank you

[Author]

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