How to use WooCommerce Product Table in a multi vendor marketplace

WooCommerce multi-vendor plugin product table

Lots of people ask how to use our Product Table plugin with a WooCommerce multi vendor marketplace plugin. A multi vendor plugin lets multiple sellers upload and sell products in your WooCommerce store.

Product table layouts are the perfect way to list vendors' products, as you can show more products per page and choose which information to display about each product. A table view also makes it easier to find products, as you can add features such as keyword search and product filters.

What is a WooCommerce multi vendor plugin?

A product vendors plugin transforms any WooCommerce store into an online marketplace with multiple product vendors or sellers.

All multi vendor plugins work in similar ways, so read about them all and choose your favorite one that works with WooCommerce Product Table.

WooCommerce marketplace plugin with product tables

Sellers can register as a product vendor on your WordPress website, or you can add vendors manually. Each vendor can upload products to sell on your WooCommerce store. All the vendors' products are sold together in an online marketplace, similar to popular websites such as Etsy or Not on the High Street. Each vendor will have their own store page within your WooCommerce store, and you can also list products centrally.

You can choose how to pay your vendors. Most multi vendor marketplace plugins have built-in options for giving them commission and sharing profits.

Which WooCommerce multi vendor plugin should I use?

There are quite a few WooCommerce multi vendor plugins, such as YITH WooCommerce Multi Vendor, MultiVendorXDokan Multivendor Marketplace, and WooCommerce Product Vendors. I've tested them all and can tell you that the best plugin to use with WooCommerce Product Table is YITH WooCommerce Multi Vendor/Marketplace.

It's from a reputable company and integrates fully with WooCommerce Product Table. This means that you can build a fully functional multi-vendor marketplace, with the vendors' products listed in a user-friendly order form layout. As well as having a separate shop page for each vendor, you can create a central page listing all the products in the marketplace. Customers can easily filter by data such as vendor or product attributes to find what they're looking for.

As a result, I will mostly focus on YITH's in this tutorial. At the end I'll show you how to use other WooCommerce multi vendor plugins with WooCommerce Product Table - but there are some compromises involved.

If you're using a different WooCommerce multi vendor plugin, don't worry. I'll provide tips on how to use it with product tables later. But for the fullest integration with WooCommerce Product Table, use YITH WooCommerce Multi Vendor.

Keep reading to find out how!

What is WooCommerce Product Table?

WooCommerce Product Table is a WordPress plugin by ourselves at Barn2. It lets you list any type of WooCommerce product in a flexible table layout with search box, filters and any product data that you want to display. It's popular for creating a one-page order form layout for a WooCommerce multi vendor marketplace.

The plugin comes with over 50 options, so there are literally dozens of ways you can customize your product tables. For example,  you can create tables listing all the products in the marketplace, or products from a specific vendor only. I'll talk about the most popular options to use with a WooCommerce multi vendor plugin later.

Here's a video to explain how WooCommerce Product Table works:

How to use YITH WooCommerce Multi Vendor with Product Table

WooCommerce multi vendor plugin with product tables
Create an order form listing all products in the marketplace, or separate shops for each vendor

To get started, install WooCommerce Product Table and YITH WooCommerce Multi Vendor.

The multi-vendor plugin allows you to create multiple vendors and give them the ability to add products and manage their orders. The product table plugin creates better layouts for your multivendor store. This combination will get more sales for your sellers, and more commission for you - everyone wins!

Set them up now using the documentation for your chosen plugin. Add some products and vendors to get you started.

Set up your multi-vendor product tables

  1. Install WooCommerce Product Table.
  2. Navigate to WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Product Tables and enter your license key. Choose the default settings for your multi vendor product tables. In particular, you should:
    • Enable the option to display product tables on the Shop page, Vendor taxonomy, and anywhere else you want to use them.
      WooCommerce Product Table Shop Archive template
    • Choose which columns of data you want to include about your marketplace products. For example, you might add image, name, tax:yith_shop_vendor, price, buy. This will display columns for the product image, name, vendor, price, and add to cart buttons.
    • For the 'Add to cart buttons' option, select either 'Checkbox' or 'Button and checkbox'. This helps to increase conversions by allowing customers to add multiple products to the cart at once.
    • In the variations option, select 'Dropdown'. That way, vendors can select variations from directly in the product table.
    • Enable the 'Lazy load' option if the marketplace is likely to have a lot of products.
    • Set the 'Filters' option to 'Custom' and add tax:yith_shop_vendor if you're creating a central page for the whole marketplace. This will let customers filter to find products from a specific vendor. If each vendor will have their own shop page, then add something different like categories, tags. This will add filter dropdowns above the table for the product categories and tags.

Viewing all products in the central marketplace

Now go to the 'Pages' section of the WordPress admin and find the page that is labelled 'Shop'. View the page, and you'll see a product table listing all the products in the multi vendor marketplace.

The table will have whichever columns you choose on the WooCommerce Product Table plugin settings page. If you enabled other features such as filters then these will show too. For example, you might have a filter dropdown above the table where customers can choose a specific vendor. Customers can also click on any vendor in the Vendors column to view products from that seller.

If any of your vendors sell variable products, then the variation options will appear as dropdowns in the add to cart column.

Individual vendor shop pages

Multi vendor shop page with product table

The best thing about using WooCommerce Product Table with YITH WooCommerce Multi Vendor/Marketplace is that you can also have a separate shop page for each vendor. That simply isn't possible with any other WooCommerce multi vendor plugins on the market.

The reason it's possible is because the YITH plugin creates a 'custom taxonomy' for each vendor. WooCommerce Product Table works perfectly with custom taxonomy archives. As a result, the taxonomy pages created using the multi vendor plugin will work with the product table layout.

I already showed you how to enable this in the previous section, when you enabled the table layout for the vendors taxonomy. Once you've done that, find the 'Vendors' section in the WordPress admin, and view the list of vendors. Click 'View' for one of them, and this will take you to their vendor shop page. You will see the vendor's products listed in a WooCommerce table.

Listing vendors' products manually

So far, you've learned how to automatically enable the order form layout on the central Shop page and individual vendor store pages. For even more flexibility, you can use a shortcode to list specific products on any page or post in your site. For example:

  • You can create pages listing products from specific categories.
  • To draw attention to specific marketplace products (e.g. Christmas products), you can publish blog posts. As well as writing in general about how perfect your marketplace is for a particular type of product, you can use WooCommerce Product Table to list relevant products.

To do this, add the [product_table] shortcode to a page or post. Use the documentation to choose which products appear in the table. You can list products by category, tag or attribute. Alternatively, use the term option to list products from a specific vendor. This is how to list the products of a vendor called 'vendor1':

  • Product Vendors - [product_table term="wcpv_product_vendors:vendor1"]
  • YITH WooCommerce Multi Vendor - [product_table term="yith_shop_vendor:vendor1"]

The shortcode is also useful if you want different settings in different tables on your site. For example, you can add the columns option to the shortcode if you want certain tables to show different information.


How to use product tables with other WooCommerce multi vendor plugins

I mentioned earlier that  YITH WooCommerce Multi Vendor works best with WooCommerce Product Table. That's because it creates a taxonomy for each vendor and display the vendors' shop pages as a taxonomy archive - both of which work with WooCommerce Product Table.

However, it is possible to use other multi vendor WooCommerce plugins with WooCommerce Product Table. It's just slightly trickier to set up, and there are some compromises involved.

Product Vendors

The official Product Vendors extension does create a vendors taxonomy which you can display in the product table. It's just not our top recommendations because YITH's plugin is more feature-rich overall.

To use Product Vendors with WooCommerce Product Table, follow the instructions which I have provided above for the YITH plugin. The only change is that you should use tax:wcpv_product_vendors for your column and filter names, instead of tax:yith_shop_vendor.

MultiVendorX

The next best option is MultiVendorX. With this multi vendor plugin, you can easily create a table of all your vendors, complete with a 'Vendor' column and 'Vendor filter dropdown above the table.

The only downside with MultiVendorX is that there's no automated way to enable the product table layout on the individual vendor store pages. Instead, you have to create these pages manually and add a shortcode to list their products.

MultiVendorX does create a taxonomy for each vendor. That's why you can display and filter vendors in the product table. However, it uses a custom template to create the page for each vendor, which doesn't work with WooCommerce Product Table. Your developer could customize the template to allow this (post a job on Codeable if you don't have a developer). I've also provided instructions below on how to manually list products for a specific MultiVendorX vendor.

How to use MultiVendorX with WooCommerce Product Table

  1. Install WooCommerce Product Table and MultiVendorX in the usual way.
  2. Go to WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Product tables and set up your product tables, as described earlier in this tutorial. In particular:
    1. To create a central place for the entire marketplace, tick the box to enable product tables on the shop page.
    2. In the columns option, add something like image,name,tax:dc_vendor_shop,price,buy. This will add columns for product image, name, vendor, price, and add to cart.
    3. Set the 'Filters' option to 'Custom' and add tax:dc_vendor_shop. This will add a 'Vendors' filter dropdown above the list of products so that customers can filter by vendor.
  3. To create individual vendor pages, create a page and add the shortcode [product_table term="tax:dc_vendor_shop"]. Replace 'vendor1' with the slug for the vendor whose products you want to list.
  4. Finally, you need to redirect the default vendor pages that MultiVendorX has created, so that customers are taken to the product table page for each vendor instead. To do this, install the free Redirection plugin and set up the redirects.
WooCommerce product vendors plugin with table layouts
Using MultiVendorX to create a table of a specific vendor's products

Dokan, WC Vendors, WCFM Marketplace and other multi-vendor plugins

Now we've got to the plugins that are a bit more difficult to use with WooCommerce Product Table. However, it's still possible and I'll show you how.

All of these plugins store the vendors in ways that WooCommerce Product Table can't work directly with. For example:

  • Dokan Multivendor Marketplace stores each vendor as a user and has its own custom called template store.php. One of our customers has also reported that WooCommerce Product Table is incompatible with the front end product submission in Dokan (although there is another method you could use).
  • WCMp/WCFM has its own custom template called wcfmmp-view-store-products.php.
  • WC Vendors uses the post author/WordPress user rather than storing the vendor information directly on the 'products' post type.

To enable these plugins to work with WooCommerce Product Table, you need to create your own custom taxonomy for 'Vendors'. You can use this to manually tag each vendor's products. Once you've done that, then you can use the two plugins together with no limitations.

If you don't create a vendors taxonomy, then you can still use WooCommerce Product Table to list the products from your entire marketplace. It just won't be possible to add a vendor column, filter by vendor, or list products from specific vendors only.

How to create a vendors taxonomy

Use our tutorial to create a WooCommerce custom taxonomy. Manually add the vendor name as a taxonomy term for each product. This is similar to adding tags in WordPress. You'll find the taxonomy on the right hand side of the 'Add/Edit Product' screen.

Once you've created your Vendors taxonomy, you can:

  • Add a vendor column.
  • Add a vendors filter above the table.
  • List the products from each vendor separately. To do this, either use the Product Table settings page to enable the table layout on the vendor taxonomy pages, or use a shortcode.

Improve your vendors' sales with WooCommerce quick view

WooCommerce Quick View Demo

As you have seen, a product table layout is ideal for listing multiple sellers' products in a WooCommerce multivendor marketplace. You can make it even more effective by combining it with the WooCommerce Quick View Pro plugin.

This adds quick view links or buttons to the product table view. Customers use these to see extra images, read more information, choose options and add to the cart from a quick view lightbox. It's a great way to keep customers on the product table page, as there's no need to direct them to a separate page to learn about each product.

After adding a product to the cart, the quick view lightbox closes. This brings the customer straight back to their current place on the list of products, where they can continue browsing. As a result, they're likely to buy multiple products and spend more in your marketplace store.

Create a multi seller marketplace with product tables

WooCommerce multiple product vendors plugin

WooCommerce multi vendor plugins are a fantastic way to transform your store into a complete marketplace with multiple sellers.

By adding WooCommerce Product Table to your multi vendor store, you can create improved layouts and increase sales. This benefits you and your product vendors, so get started today!

Use WooCommerce Product Table alongside YITH Multi Vendor Marketplace and list products from different vendors - the easy way.

12 Comments

  1. I have a spefic requirement and I ma not sure if multi vendor is the way to go, or how to tweak it to do what I want. Problem. I want to create a buy sell trade video game store preferably with a woocommerce back end. The main requirement I think is necessary before all else is the ability for a vendor to select the game he owns from a list of games with image and description that will drop into his product creator . Dokan has the ability to add a button "sell my copy" for a game that is listed. Its the closest I can find Is there another way you can suggest I would have loved to buy a plug and play product but cant find anything like it

    • Hi, Graham. I'm glad you found this article! It won't exactly be plug and play, but Dokan should work for your use case as each vendor will be saved as a user and each user will have the ability to upload their own content (video games) to the marketplace. If you require assistance in building a bespoke website, please post a job on Codeable where their pre-approved WordPress experts will send you a quote. We have partnered with them to provide plugin customization for our customers. Hope this is helpful!

  2. Hi, am having a bit trouble with making a custom shop in dokan, because the products are not linked to shops, or there is not a query i can make in post archive widgets exc to show only this shops products, so youre plugin will not be able to help me? :-)

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