6mth review; Do not use – Dokan is full of long-term bugs & poor support

If you care about your multivendor marketplace and vendors, do NOT use Dokan. Do not be fooled by their marketing. I have been “trying” to use Dokan for 6 months now. It has cost me thousands of dollars in development and many months in lost time. My site is still not live to to their major / critical bugs (there are many, many bugs!).

I hate leaving bad reviews, but if this saves one person the pain and lost money that Dokan has cost me, it will be worth it…or if it causes Dokan to step back and address all the bugs (and stop marketing until they do so!) it will be worth it.

Firstly, I will say that I made ‘great progress’ with Dokan initially. You will download it, spend time getting it setup and think things are going well…you will get 80% of the way before you start discovering the big bugs and the complete lack of support &/or fixing of bugs. Like many other free plugins, they will encourage you a lot to upgrade.

With Dokan you will:

* think things are going well at first (eg you’ll get about 80% of the way quickly), then you will …
* discover documentation is incomplete at best (and dishonest / false at worst).
* discover that much of what they advertise requires third-party plugins, many of which cost $$$.
* receive the slowest and worst support I have ever experienced (yes, if you ask a basic question they know the answer to, you might get an OK response).
* discover Dokan is not GDPR / CCPA compliant — the communication methods offered within the plugin between customer and vendor exposes personally identifiable information.
* find that Stripe direct to Vendor split payments does not work correctly and cannot be used in any country requiring SCA / 3D Secure (if it is not a requirement in your country, it will be soon!).
* discover that Paypal adaptive (split payments) is not possible.
* be unable to set up shipping easily….then you will think it is working, and you (or one of your vendors) will discover it is not working.
* Wildcards (*) for postcodes do not work eg. if you operate in the UK and wish to restrict shipping shipping zones via postcode, it does not always work as expected. From what I understand, there is the same problem will * wildcard zip codes too.
* many other problems with shipping are reported by other users.
* shipping interface is the worst UI / UX for vendors. Maybe you will try to use Dokan developer template to create your own? Then when you realise it will not implement, you will discover that their documentation is all wrong and their ‘template’ is for an old shipping system.
* other Dokan ‘templates’ (template system) also do not work.
* their support will tell you everything is working correctly when it is not.
* their support will take days to reply, not 24hrs, and their reply will probably not be helpful — you will need to reply again and again…often waiting days for a reply.
* You will spend hours / days looking for the problem, thinking it is you…then try a different Dokan support channel and get a different answer; they know it is a bug/issue…this will waste a lot of you / your developers time.
* miscommunication within the Dokan team regarding what works & what does not work.
* you will get a faster/better response here on WordPress, than you will via their ticket system (only if it is related to free feature).
* their Stripe is not working correctly with Subscriptions.
* vendor packages do not allow admin to permit vendors to create subscription products.
* they keep marketing for more customers and yet for 6 months (longer — I see many people from +6 months ago in their Facebook page complaining about bugs) bugs are not fixed.
* you will be terrified every time an update is released because you know that even if it has ‘fixed’ something, there is a 90% chance something else will break…and you will need do deal with all that stress.

I really wish Dokan was the plugin it markets itself as, but sadly it is not ??

I would not wish anybody to have the same experience as me. We (all the users of Dokan) are all working very hard to make our sites work for our vendors and Dokan delivers false promises and extremely buggy software, that months later bugs / issues have still not been addressed.

This is only a small list of the critical and most frustrating issues — you will discover many, many more issues.

So far, in +10 years of WordPress, Dokan has been the most disappointing plugin I have used and sadly, it ‘sucks you in’; you invest a lot of time/money working on the site before you realise their bugs, lack of quality support and that they do not really seem to care about fixing bugs — they only care about getting more users.

If you think this review is harsh, it is not. There are many other individual flaws I could point out. Do a search in their Facebook group and you will find many frustrated people.

I really hope Dokan sort things out and invest more in their development & support…and zero in their marketing until these critical issues are resolved and the development team is releasing bug-free updates that do not cause us to feel ill and constantly need to ask each other if update is ‘safe’.

I also feel sorry for their support team having to deal with these; a “working” product would be better for everyone.