Multi-Seller Marketplace

With a regular online store, you sell your own products: one seller, one warehouse, one set of books. With a multi-vendor marketplace, other sellers sell on your platform and you take a commission. The extra features are: seller applications and approval, a seller admin panel, splitting orders across sellers, per-seller commission and reconciliation, payouts, and reviews and reports. If you're the only one selling, see "E-commerce Website"; it costs much less.

This is the first thing to decide for the whole project; the two setups are very different. [Paid straight to sellers] This is our default. We connect the split-payment feature of ECPay or NewebPay, so the buyer's money goes from the payment provider straight to the seller, and your commission is settled to you separately. You never handle that money, the system stays simple, and you don't need any extra qualifications. [Into your account first, then paid out] Legally this is called "collecting and paying on behalf of others." Under the Money Laundering Control Act, the platform operator must first complete anti-money laundering and service capability registration with the Ministry of Digital Affairs, and must also obtain a trust account or a bank performance guarantee with a limit that covers the average daily balance collected on others' behalf. That is a qualification of your company. We can't obtain it for you, and we won't assess for you whether you can get it. We can build the system either way. For the second option, please get the qualifications in place first, and then we'll start work.

These are charged by the payment provider, not by us. Listed here for your reference: ECPay: domestic credit cards 1.68%–2.75%, convenience store payment codes US$0.97 per transaction, settled weekly. NewebPay: credit cards 2.8%, convenience store payment codes US$0.90 per transaction; its split-payment feature is more complete. Actual rates depend on your revenue and industry; negotiate them with the payment provider. We set up the connection; we don't handle this money or take a cut of it.

Yes, they can list products themselves. Whether approval is needed is up to you, and you can switch between both modes in the admin panel. The default is "sellers must be approved, product approval optional": sellers upload company and bank account details when applying, and you approve them in the admin panel. For product listings, you can choose approve-then-publish, or publish-then-spot-check. When the site first opens, we suggest approving both. Once you have more sellers, you can loosen it by changing a setting in the admin panel; no need to come back to us to change the code.

The shopping cart is split by seller. At checkout, shipping and discounts are calculated for each seller separately, and the order is automatically split into three shipping orders, each going through that seller's own shipping process. The buyer sees one checkout, three packages and three tracking numbers; your admin panel shows three orders that can each be reconciled and have their commission calculated separately.

The admin panel lets you handle it yourself: seller approval, removing products, order lookup, commission settings and exporting reconciliation to Excel can all be done there. Things like server issues, problems with payment or logistics connections, or digging up records for seller complaints can be handed to the infrastructure maintenance plan below.