Unless you've been living under rocks for the past few years, you have certainly noticed that everything is moving online. One key area that is seeing enormous success in moving online is shopping. While physically browsing items and shopping haven't become extinct yet, looking online to buy items of all sorts is gaining momentum.
If you want to start a shop, it's probably better to start an e-commerce platform instead of a brick-and-mortar store. Why? Because that way you will get a lot more visitors to your shop and you will be enabling customers to shop from the comfort of their couch.
However, there are some key tactics for your e-commerce success. And if you choose to use Dokan, you will automatically be entitled to some of its benefits that make your multi-vendor shop popular and user-friendly.
What are they? Let's discuss.
1. Multi-Vendor Shop
Let's say you're interested in selling electronics. You live and breathe gadgets, you know every little tidbits about every sort of gadgets in existence, and you believe you're the perfect fit to be doing business with them. What happens when a customer who's interested in buying clothes lands on your shop? Certainly they'll be on their way out because you aren't selling clothes.
Now, let's imagine this scenario, you pair up with a number of other sellers who have passion for different things; clothing, fashion, food, drinks, vegetables, hardware, automobile, etc. You take the big step of opening a multi-vendor shop on the web and you let all of those people with knowledge in different markets sell products.
The result is an enormous online supermarket where customers can log on to and buy almost anything they want. Think Amazon for example. You can expect almost any kinds of products from Amazon marketplace. If you pair up with enough vendors to sell on your shop, you can be the next Amazon. It's real possibility. And that possibility is brought to the table by Dokan.
As you know, Dokan allows multiple sellers to sell on the same platform. It does make a big fuss about it because it handles multi-vendor shops quite easily and efficiently. After the initial setup, you don't really have to do much as every sellers can add their products using the fairly easy seller dashboard that Dokan gives them. It's the biggest benefit of using Dokan instead of a traditional e-commerce solution that only lets you be the only one selling products on your shop.
2. Easy to Navigate
Navigation is an important part of any and every website on the planet. It's how your customers move from place to place. Imagine walking into a real world supermarket and confusing where to look at for things you want to buy. If it gets too confusing, you'll leave.
Okay, perhaps not. You've done physical work to get there, so you'll probably not leave if the navigation is confusing. But when it comes to the internet, things aren't like that. Moving away from a website is just a click away! So it's even more difficult to keep customers on site than a real brick-and-mortar store.
That's one reason the navigation of a website needs to be top-notch. With Dokan plugin, you receive a free copy of Dokan theme which is highly customizable to your liking. If you do the customization right, you'll end up with a professional-looking online store with easy navigation. Your visitors are bound to like the design!
It's worth mentioning that if you like another theme that has better navigation, you aren't restricted to the provided Dokan theme. You can use virtually any theme out there that is compatible with WooCommerce. And there plenty of them if you look for!
3. Seller Stores
Chances are, some of your customers won't be visiting your online store to buy everything. There may be a special type of products from a seller that they prefer more than anywhere else. With Dokan, every individual seller on your platform gets a store page of their own. On their own store page, they can display a custom cover photo, a custom profile picture, a map showing their physical location if they have any, and link to their social media profiles.
So if your customer likes a product from a specific vendor, they can visit their store page which looks like a professional store page. Most other solutions out there like WooCommerce Product Vendors will show products from a specific vendor as the form of search results, which doesn't look very professional. With Dokan, you get to keep your appearances!
Bonus: With Product Enquiry add-on, you can even allow your customers to contact the seller regarding specific products. That is of course in addition to the contact form that is already on the store page (without any add-on) allowing visitors to contact the seller should they have anything to ask.
4. Discount Coupons
Who doesn't love to buy items at a discount! Fortunately for you, Dokan has an efficient and intuitive coupon management system built into it. You can create as many coupons as you like for as many products as you want. Coupons can be created to discount the total amount in terms of amount or percentage.
So if you want your customers to avail, say, 20% discount on a product, you can create the discount coupon code to do so. Alternatively, if you want to give $20 discount, you can do that too.
The best part about coupons is, your sellers don't have to rely on you — the administrator — to create and assign coupons to their products. Coupon creation and management is part of Dokan's front-end seller dashboard where vendors can add and manage products, see reports and do a lot more.
With various discount offers round the year, not to mention on special occasions, you can keep your customers interested in coming back for more. And Dokan makes it super easy to create and manage discount coupons without confusing you in the process.
So there you have it! There are many more things under the hood that make Dokan extremely useful, easy to use, and search engine optimized for your e-commerce success that go beyond the length of this post. But one thing is for sure, Dokan is the first and foremost right step towards making your multi-vendor shop popular and user-friendly to make sure your customers come back again and again.
With that cleared, when are you starting your own e-commerce business?