Product management in MultiMerch
MultiMerch lets you build your own online marketplace and have other sellers publish and sell their own products.
This guide covers the product architecture in MultiMerch in detail.
MultiMerch products – the basics
In MultiMerch, each product is unique and belongs to one specific seller – in a similar manner to eBay, AliExpress and other popular online marketplaces.
Customers can search for all products within your marketplace or browse individual seller's products in their stores.
Product categories
To make it easier for your sellers to organize their catalogs, MultiMerch lets sellers create their own categories that are independent from the main marketplace categories.
Depending on your requirements, you can enable product listing to seller categories only or also allow sellers list products into the main categories.
Product fields
MultiMerch supports over 30 different product fields which you as the marketplace owner can enable or disable depending on your requirements.
This lets you choose how detailed you want your product listing forms to be – from simple forms with only the basic product data to longer forms if you have a set of specific field requirements.
Some of the more common fields are:
- product name and description
- price and quantity
- product categories
- attributes and options (variations)
- dimensions and shipping rules
- product images and attached files
- and others
If you're running a marketplace in multiple languages, your sellers will be able to specify product descriptions and other language-specific text fields in multiple languages.
Attributes and options
Product attributes are properties of a product that can't be selected by the customer and don't affect its price – for example, you may be selling a cotton shirt – here, cotton is the value of a Material attribute.
Product options (or variations) are properties of a product that can be selected by the customer and may affect product's price – for example, your seller could be offering two iPhone X's in two different colors – Black and Space Gray. Here, Black and Space Gray are values of a Color option.
MultiMerch has a setting to let sellers create their own attributes and options to use with their own products. Alternatively, you may only have a predefined set of options and attributes from which sellers will have to choose from.
Digital vs tangible products
MultiMerch supports both digital and tangible (physical) products.
Digital products don't require any shipping and allow customers to download files after the purchase.
Depending on your marketplace type and requirements, you may either allow both product types or only have one type available to your sellers.
Product listing and catalog management for sellers
Listing products
Sellers create and manage their product catalogs through the Products page in their seller accounts.
Clicking the "Add new product" button redirects the seller to the product listing form.
Depending on whether or not listing fees and manual product approval settings are enabled, new products will either be enabled automatically or held for moderation by the marketplace staff.
Creating categories
If you enable seller categories in your marketplace, your sellers will be able to create their own category structure through the Categories menu.
Seller category interface lets sellers create and manage their own categories to list products into.
When creating a category, sellers will need to fill out the basic information such as category names and descriptions, as well as attach the new category to a parent category and specify additional data for SEO purposes.
Seller categories will need to be approved by the marketplace staff before sellers can publish products into them.
Creating attributes and options
Just like categories, sellers can create their own product attributes and options through Attributes and Options dropdown selectors.
Product attributes are grouped into attribute groups – for example, Color may be part of a Design attribute group while Memory size and Processor type could be grouped into Technical specifications.
MultiMerch lets sellers create their own attribute groups to group their product attributes into.
After the attribute is created, it will be available to use with seller's products.
Options are created in a similar manner.
Depending on the option type, a set of values for the customer to choose from may or may not need to be created as well.
Mass uploading products from CSV files
MultiMerch supports product imports from CSV files by your sellers.
If enabled, sellers will be able to upload products in bulk through the Bulk import from CSV.
After uploading the CSV file, your sellers will be able to map CSV fields to product fields before confirming the import.
This makes it possible to import products from other marketplaces and systems without having to prepare the CSV file to match the template exactly.
Product management by the marketplace staff
Viewing and managing products
MultiMerch lets your marketplace staff view and manage products through the Admin > MultiMerch > Products area.
The Products list makes it possible to view and filter products from different sellers as well as edit, remove and reassign products between sellers.
If needed, new products and also be created by the marketplace staff and assigned to sellers manually.
Configuring the marketplace for product publishing
MultiMerch offers marketplace staff an array of settings related to products and product publishing.
These can be accessed via Admin > MultiMerch > Settings > Product publishing.
For a more detailed description of MultiMerch settings, please see the Configuration section of this guide.