What are the Available Payment solutions in Dokan Multi-vendor Plugin?

One common pre-sales question we often get is about the available payment solutions in Dokan Multi-vendor plugin. So here is a detailed idea about the available payment options and how to work with them in this post.

You can use 3 types of payment system in your Dokan powered marketplace –

1. Offline – Cash on Delivery, Local Pickup, Bank and Cheque Payment.
2. Online (Regular) – PayPal, Stripe and every other WooCommerce compatible payment gateway that exists in the world till date.
3. Online (Instant) – PayPal Adaptive and Stripe Connect.

I have discussed some important points at the bottom of this post about choosing the right payment gateway and what depends on whom. Be sure to read that!

Offline Payments

If you enable offline payment options like – local pickup, cash on delivery, bank payments and cheque payments, then the order status will always be pending for payment. If you use this for a marketplace, then the admin will have to take quite a hassle to get commissions from the vendors. If you are interested in these methods, then the best option for you would be using the subscription add-on. It will allow you to charge the vendors before creating a product and keeping them online.

Though this one is more favoured by the customers, it requires an extensive amount of communication between the 3 parties- site owner, vendor and customer to keep track of order and payments. So This is the last option you should go for.

Regular Online Payments

As Dokan is based on WooCommerce, you can use any WooCommerce compatible payment gateway with Dokan. Here is a list of 114 available gateways from WooThemes. You can also use the ones available and CodeCanyon and other places that say WooCommerce compatible payment gateway.

When a product is sold from a vendor, the admin receives the money and vendor get notified about the sale. When the order is complete, the vendor can see the amount on his dashboard. After a predefined amount of time, the vendor can send an withdraw request.

There is no limit of vendors or products in this system. As there is a single recipient, the customer has all the freedom to purchase from your marketplace. The main advantage of using this semi-automatic system is that you  can offer your customers protection from fraud vendors and maintain an escrow system. This will help you to maintain the marketplace quality and your vendors will be forced to serve the customers better. The this is the best system according to me.

Instant Online Payments

This option is quite favorite among our Dokan users. Because the instant payment system saves the admin from making hundreds of manual payments to each vendor each month and keeping up their accounts and logs. Currently, we are offering PayPal Adaptive and Stripe Connect. These two are the most popular payment gateway right now in the eCommerce industry. You can use them without any hesitation and I would like to mention that they both accept all major credit cards.

These payment gateways can handle up to 5 vendors without any complication. There is no limit on how many products the customer can buy at a time. The only limit is the recipients. You can read more about PayPal Adaptive and Stripe Connects payments working procedure in these documentations:

1. https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/products/adaptive-payments/
2. https://stripe.com/connect

Good to know

Only admin will be controlling the payment options. So it does not matter if a vendor wants to enable a certain payment gateway or not. Because if you are not using an instant system, the choice does not matter on the vendor's end. The admin will receive all the money from the customers in a convenient way and distribute manually to the vendors whatever method they like.

But, as an admin if you are going to use an instant payment gateway, you must talk to your sellers first and take their opinion if they are willing to use that as well. So you can make sure that before you activate a payment gateway on the checkout page, your vendors activate that too.

Let's say, you activated Stripe Connect on the checkout page. But a vendor was away and his product is online. Whenever a customer tries to buy that product, he will get an error message like this:

So it is always better to ask the vendors first and assign a specific time frame to activate and configure the gateway.

I hope my presentation of the details for the payment options help you to decide which one to use and which one works in which way. Feel free to comment below if you have a question for me or I need to add more details for you 🙂