How to create your online marketplace with Prestashop

Article by Charlène Guicheron - 02 Jan 2018 - 4 minute read

Overview of your options while creating your online marketplace with Prestashop

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Do you want to make your online business bigger and develop your offering greatly by proposing a number of products? Prestashop can be one of the solutions for your requirement. Prestashop is an open source eCommerce CMS that users can have hosted in the cloud or downloaded from the Prestashop website. Being used by thousands of business organizations and entrepreneurs all over the world, Prestashop CMS is one of the most popular online store starter solutions, boasting of extensive and robust features and integrations to help users build their online stores from scratch. 

Previously it was mandatory to take help of a professional to create a website, an online store, or a marketplace. But, now you yourself can create your marketplace easily without necessarily calling on a developer. The CMS (Content Management System) in PrestaShop allows you to create, delete and manage the pages of your store and also their contents like static blocks, images, banners and many more features. This e-commerce CMS is known to be a type of software for creating online shop, and can also help create its marketplace by adding a few specific modules.

After studying all the modules offered by PrestaShop to transform your online store into an online marketplace, here we are focusing on the most popular PrestaShop modules to create a marketplace. For the modules, there you may find:

  • Module description
  • Module picture
  • Price
  • Easy catch in hand
  • Advantage
  • Inconvenience

One important thing to remember is while PrestaShop is free to download and install, many of the modules must be bought. The prices can also vary greatly. As PrestaShop verifies any modules to be available on their website in the addons marketplace, there is a cost to appear if a developer wants the module to be free. Otherwise, the developer must charge customers a minimum fee which explains the prevalence of paid modules.

Always try to download from the marketplace and have the peace of mind of knowing the module has been verified and tested by the PrestaShop team. You will also be notified when the module is updated. So you can make sure you always have the latest version.

Here we will look at some of the most popular PrestaShop modules to create your marketplace with PrestaShop.

JA Marketplace

Price: 239.99 € - Getting started
This is one of the most popular modules of PrestaShop marketplace. The opinions of the users are very numerous and they seem globally satisfied. JA Marketplace will allow you to set up all the basic features of a marketplace. Following are some other features that it will allow:

  • For admin to manage the percentages of commissions on sales
  • For sellers to handle carriers and shipping rates
  • For sellers, send invoices to buyers

Advantages

  • Known and optimized module
  • Manages most of the issues inherent in the field of marketplaces
  • A very useful module that is easily modified

Inconvenience

  • Performance

JA Marketplace is a module that remains consistent and heavy, it may be an inconvenience not to neglect the maintenance and evolution of your marketplace.

Advanced Marketplace

Price: 239.99 € - Getting started

With the help of Advanced Marketplace module, admin can convert their "Prestashop Store" into "Marketplace". Sellers can add & manage their products in multi-language as well as manage their orders. Sellers will get almost all the back-end catalog (Combination, Features, Shipping) functionality. Admin will have full control on their marketplace store. The admin can access the individual recipes made by each of these sellers.

Advantages

  • SEO friendly module

Advanced Marketplace offers some options to optimize the SEO of offers in your marketplace.

Inconvenience

  • Incomplete

Insufficient module to cover all the needs of a marketplace of sale: you will have to fill the lack of functionalities of the module by the purchase of additional modules to correspond to all you are waiting for.

Knowband Marketplace

Price: 143.99 € - Getting started

The Knowband Marketplace module makes it possible to turn an e-commerce site into a multi-vendor marketplace with the standard features expected in a goods-based marketplace. This module allows you to manage a multilingual marketplace.
This Prestashop plugin for marketplace is an ultimate solution to become a marketplace owner in just a few clicks. You can convert your existing PrestaShop store into a fully-fledged marketplace site where you can start accepting the seller registrations.

Advantages

  • Customizable emails
  • Option to moderate sales profiles
  • Only approved sellers can sell their products on the site
  • The administrator can set an overall or specific commission rate for each vendor

Inconvenience

  • Limited free version
  • Quotation request for more help

Simple Marketplace

Price: 47.99 € - Getting started

Everything is in the name: this PrestaShop module is simple to take in hand, but will not allow you to create a complete marketplace allowing sellers to manage their orders independently. You will have to intervene at each stage. Here customers can sell the products that they are no longer needed as well as they can buy products from other people using your store.

Advantages

  • Easy installation
  • Low prices

Inconvenience

  • Incomplete

Sellers cannot handle orders, carriers and shipping costs

Subsellers 

Price: 107.99 € - Getting started

This PrestaShop plugin for marketplace allows you to switch to a marketplace model with a rather complex architecture that will not be addressed to everyone since it allows you to manage sellers who will manage themselves other sellers (Subsellers).

To simplify, with this Subsellers module the shop owners can easily build structure of their sellers and sub-sellers. They can provide same products but won't see concurrent sales customers or sub-sellers. Even after sale support via messages could be handled via sellers since they will see messages only from their customers.

Advantages

  • Demo site of the module
  • Email notification on any activity

Inconvenience

  • Complex documentation and user experience

Marketplace Pro

Price: 83.99 €

Marketplace Pro, one of the most popular PrestaShop module for marketplace, offers various possibilities including access to a tracking of sales statistics for each vendor and the possibility of duplicating product sheets. This module helps you to boost sales by allowing all vendors directly sign and sell their products. Here you can focus on developing and operating sales activities system.

Advantages

  • Customers can submit product reviews but also sellers
  • Management of url shops sellers
  • Multilingual

Inconvenience

  • Module not used
  • No customer reviews for the Prestashop store

Product Owner

Price: 179.99 € - Getting started

With Product Owner module you can create a simple but functional marketplace where your visitors can become your employees and maintain their products. When you have too many products and multiple employees, you can divide products among your employees. Here the employees can create new locations for them via a single click on a map and for your customers, it will be very easy to find you out (direction button in info window).

Advantages

  • Demo site of the module
  • Ability to enable or disable features

Inconvenience

  • Unconvincing customer review

Prestashop marketplace offers many modules which come up with more or less interesting features compared to the objectives of your marketplace. This solution is nevertheless not very scalable because the creation of marketplace is not its primary function. In conclusion, you will not have to count your hours since creating a marketplace with Prestashop remains complicated when you start. Indeed, most of the modules that will allow you to transform into a marketplace are intermediate and require an extremely extensive work of configuration and customization.

Charlène Guicheron
About Charlène Guicheron

Co-Founder and CEO of Kreezalid

After 5 years helping companies to develop their online marketplace, I saw success stories as well as failures. Today I share my experience and my clients feedbacks through useful resources that will allow you to focus on what really matters for the success of your online marketplace. Because believe me, the secret isn't in the code ...