Hi CranialBlaze,
Good luck indeed. These little slams to one's intelligence and experience on this forum are starting to get to me.
Out of respect to the IXXO developers, I actually edited out a huge portion of my original post in which I detailed exactly why IXXO multi-vendor is not ready for prime-time in the US market--at least for my modest business model.
And as far as my personal income goes, I believe I mentioned that I get a 'small percentage' of my main vendor's income. So, I'm not exactly filthy rich.
Nonetheless, I did in fact fork out $1500 for the IXXO Multi-vendor solution earlier this year. I thought it was most definitely going to be the great solution that I needed and was happy to make the investment--although for me, it was a LOT of money. Well, it was $1500 out the door with no return.
The IXXO model assumes that when you make a purchase across multiple vendors, the purchases all go in ONE cart, on ONE order with ONE financial transaction. They rely on Paypal Adaptive to split out payments and commissions. I've had multiple back and forth with Paypal about this. Paypal Adaptive, unlike Paypal Pro, will NOT allow you to take credit cards up front. That in and of itself knocks out 50% or more of our sales--not acceptable. But it gets to be more fun the deeper you go in IXXO. And because the configuration is pretty intense (fine by me), you don't really realize what's happening until you start to try to process orders.
They assume that the administrator of the site is going to finalize each and every order by actually confirming with the customer that they indeed got their shipment. And the money goes to the administrator and must then be distributed to the vendors later.
One order = one TOS. Let's say I order a large, bulky product from vendor A in California for $100 and a small, lightweight product from vendor B in Florida for $10. This goes on ONE order. One financial transaction. I'm not going to bother to detail out all the problems, because I'm assuming that you are intelligent and get it.
Another problem, let's say I have 3 vendors who sell a somewhat similar product, but they are all a bit different.
I do my shopping and choose a product from each vendor. Because they are on one order, I see three different shipping line items presented. One shipping cost might be 3 times the price of another--for whatever reason. IF I had purchased them separately, I would probably have just bought them, no problem. However, seeing the disparity in shipping, causes people to stop in their tracks and reassess their purchase decision. I know. I did it. I tried every IXXO actual store site I could find (not many). AND I actually went through a real purchase just to validate.
More important is the financial model. I DO NOT want the IRS headache of taking in all the income and distributing it back to the vendors. Why on earth do I need to inflate my reportable income? I surely don't. The IXXO model assumes that YOU, the administrator is receiving in all the income and then at some later agreed upon time, you then pay your vendors. Me holding my vendor's money and paying them later is NOT a selling point for my vendors. Not to mention you have to factor in the added transaction fees for getting them their money electronically. What I THOUGHT I was going to be able to do is have my vendors manage their store--their payment processor from a chosen list that I provide, their shipping, their orders, their customer support (for the most part). I had no intention (and still don't) of being the middle man. I'm marketing and tech support. I want to provide a MALL experience. At a mall, you don't go into one store, pick out some products, go to another store, pick out some more products, and then go to some giant central mall checkout and pay. That is not what I wanted. If I'm in Macy's, I'll pay Macy's. If I'm in Sears, I'll pay Sears. I want to know what commissions are due to me. I want the vendors managing their own business. I don't want to be involved in managing their logistics or customers. I was willing to compromise on getting paid later (my commission payments due to the constraints on paypal adaptive), but I don't want the liability for all of their transactions.
IXXO has not offered to return any money to me. There was a statement in one support post that they would develop the functionality I need, but I've heard nothing about it and had no other communication or responses.
I looked in detail at other IXXO sites and actually spoke with another frustrated IXXO client. I wish I could have made it work, and I tried very very hard to do so. Believe me, that $1500 was hard-earned. I spent a lot of time on support tickets articulating what's needed and why.
And here I am. If you know anything different, I'm happy to hear about it. Unlike VM, the vast majority of their support is through private tickets (a virtually dead forum), so you don't get the added view into what others are doing or experiencing. (A software vendor's model that I do not appreciate--although I'm sure it's easier and more profitable--for them.)
So, Cranial, good luck to you with the IXXO premium solution. Been there, done that, can't afford the T-Shirt.
Teresa
Thank you so much Teresa for your assessment of the IXXO multi vendor component. While I was waiting (a few years actually) for the long promised "real" multi vendor capability in VM 2.0, I was also leaning towards IXXO for my "Online Mall". I'm just sorry that you had to basically throw your money and time out the window.
After reading this whole thread, I totally respect your opinion, and I feel sorry for you that you couldn't get a straight answer. I was hoping that things would change in this forum when a new team of developers took over the VM project, but sadly nothing has changed. It's a shame that when a simple question is posted in this forum you either don't get an answer for days or weeks, or sometimes never, or you are presented with a non answer, a flame, or belittlement, but as I've come to expect from this forum if you need an answer to something, you pretty much have to answer your own question, literally.
So to answer your, and ibelieve's questions, here is the only documentation I could find on the multi vendor capabilities. In all fairness to the VM team, at least there IS some documentation now. In VM 1.0... there was nothing documented other than a mention that multi vendor was already built in. That was it, nothing more. Anyway, here is the documentation;
http://virtuemart.net/documentation/User_Manual/Vendor_Administration.html&
http://virtuemart.net/documentation/User_Manual/Vendors.html There is however a warning that goes along with the instructions which reads "THIS PART OF VirtueMart STILL IS NOT COMPLETE. IT'S NOT RECOMMENDED TO USE THIS FEATURE." There is also a brief mention in the template section of the developers manual which says "vendor_linkThe link to the vendor info page".. That's it.
It won't do any good doing a search in the forum because all you will find will be a lot of old and open ended threads, but by all means, don't take my word for it.
If you want to try and stumble your way through the multi vendor features in your VM install, I have found one place to start on my own; In the configuration options in the VM admin, there is a check box which says "Enable Multivendor (experimental only for developers)" with the following options "None" & "administrated multivendor" When you check the "administrated multivendor" box and go to add a product, you can select the vendor who the product is assigned to. Apparently you can assign a user as a vendor in the shopper group list elsewhere in the VM admin.
That's as far as I got, so then I decided to do a search in the VM forum to see if I could find some more info on how to use the feature and that's how I wound up here. So to try an answer your question, yes VM is able to support multiple vendors "(in any way, shape or form)", but you are going to have to figure out on your own how to use it, and you are most likely going to have to pay a developer to dig through the code and add anything more than basic functionality to it.
I hope this has helped somewhat. It's the least I could do for you, after all, you saved me $1500.00 ;o
Home
Forum
Extensions
Developer Portal
