In X-Cart Marketplace, with the Multi-Vendor add-on enabled, the storefront provides a Vendors menu from which store visitors can access the profile and products of specific vendors:

The Vendors menu appears on the storefront only if the store administrator has chosen to make this menu available in the sidebar of the store site.

By clicking on the vendor company name link on the Vendors menu, a store visitor goes to the vendor's profile page and enters a browsing mode in which they can view the products of just this one vendor. The vendor's profile information displayed on the page includes the vendor's company name, image, description, and location. It also provides a list of categories in which the vendor has products and allows the store visitor to browse through the products of the vendor:

Note how the categories list shown on the page is limited just to the categories where the current vendor has products:

If a store visitor chooses to view some category from the vendor profile page, they will see the products of this specific vendor.

The details pages of specific products also provide some information about the vendor, including the vendor's company name (with a link to the vendor profile page) and location:

When a product owned by a vendor is added to the shopping cart, the vendor’s company name appears on the cart page. If the cart contains products of more than one vendor, the products on the shopping cart page are automatically sorted by vendor:

In the "Warehouse" multi-vendor mode, the list of shipping methods available for the order is formed by the store administrator; the buyer has to choose a single shipping method for the entire order. In the "Vendors as separate shops" mode, each vendor has a separate list of shipping methods; the buyer has to choose a shipping method for each of the vendors whose products are in the shopping cart:

The buyer gets a single order invoice in the "Warehouse" multi-vendor mode. In the "Vendors as separate shops" mode, a separate order is formed for each of the vendors whose products are in the order; the buyer gets a separate order invoice for each order.

Once a customer's order gets the Delivered fulfillment status (the status can be changed by the store staff or directly by the customer - using the Confirm delivery button), the customer gets an invitation to rate their order. The customer can choose to do it straight away or provide the estimation later. In any case, the customer will be able to access the Rate order page at any time after that (even after they have already rated the order) via the Rate order link on the order list:

The Rate order page looks similar to the following:

Here the customer can give a detailed categorized rating of their shopping experience to let other customers know about the level of service at the store. The rating is done in the following categories:

In each category named above, the customer's experience can be rated by giving one to five stars.

If an order contains items sourced from more than one vendor, the customer can rate each vendor separately.

Because orders are tied to specific vendors, the order ratings provided by the customers are used to calculate vendor ratings. Basically, by rating their order, a customer estimates the vendor they purchased from.

The rating info provided by different customers for a vendor is summed up. The resulting rating summary is shown on the storefront (provided that the store administrator selected to display these data to customers).

Related pages: