Changing website to a marketplace

  • I have a wordpress website which was designed by a web developer so they created the theme. My plan is to change my website to a multi vendor/marketplace website to sell physical products. My ? Is what is the best way of doing this? Can I add a marketplace theme and switch over to the marketplace or is it best to start again with a new wordpress website and add a wordpress theme and WC Vendor ?
    Also which theme is the best to use?
    After some research I like the look of SOCIAL MARKETPLACE theme together with WC VENDOR.
    I’ve not really got any experience but willing to learn, is this something I can do myself? As a blog says it’s easy to put together?
    Thanks

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  • Hello @handmadegb,

    Great questions! Granted, any work you choose to do to your site should be done on a local copy of WordPress or a staging site. It is bad form to make changes to the production site unless you are sure they will not affect user experience.

    That being said, since this is a custom theme by a developer, you may wish to reach out to them in regards to changing what they have built, there may be strange dependencies built into the theme that you would need to consider.

    Additionally, changing themes is easy with WordPress. If you make a local copy of your website you can experiment with new themes and make corrections to the layout without fear of messing up the production site. Then when you’re finished you can backup your current live site, then push the development copy to your live production server.

    I highly recommend checking out WooCommerce, it’s a great marketplace plugin that you can build out with addons.

    Hope this helps

    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    Don’t be too concerned with which theme to use. Just about any theme can be made to work with some minor adjustments. The big decision is what e-commerce platform to use. In the WP community, Woocommerce is by far the most popular choice. It’s quite flexible and extensible. I would not call any e-commerce site “easy” to put together, though if you are not too particular and are content with the way it works by default, there is not much work to do other than entering or importing all the product data. If you have some reasonable coding skills, you can make just about anything work through customized templates, along with filter and action hooks.

    Woocommerce offers a slew of extensions, and yes, themes. While most themes can be made to work, these themes are designed to work. Some themes offer additional features which can be useful. You should work with the WC features alone first to see if any additional needs develop. Then seek themes or plugins that will address those needs. If WC meets your needs alone, then you are free to use any theme that appeals to you and even switch to another if you want to at a later time.

    If you depend on a particular theme feature, you become locked into that theme. Something to avoid if you can.

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