Hi,
We have a business model that consolidates a bunch of merchants selling the same type of products (specifications differ from one merchant to the other). The merchants currently sell through Instagram or other individual outlets and the purpose is to bring a fragmented market into one place that will serve customers in the Gulf Corporation Council (6 countries: KSA, Bahrain, Dubai, UAE, Kuwait, and Oman).
We’ll be reaching out to the merchants to onboard them and add products on their behalf on the platform. When a customer places an order on any of the items, the merchant needs to be notified through the platform, and once the order is prepared, the merchant can also notify us of that, so that we can pick it up from the merchant and deliver directly to the customer. The merchants and sellers can be in any of the 6 GCC countries.
Initially, we will not be keeping stock of the products, especially as, in its nature, its usually custom made for each customer, but we can revisit that in the future. For now, we will be doing something like a drop shipping model from a single or multiple supplier to a customer (depending on their order).
There’s flexibility around who will upload the products, us or the merchants, but we will definitely manage their sale, collect payments, and be the intermediary when it comes to customer support. We would like the merchants to have as little involvement with the customer directly as much as possible. Their presence on the platform as their own type of user persona is for now to simply be able to communicate with us and have visibility when it comes to orders. We can also explore the merchants managing their internal inventory/stock, sales, payments, etc.
For now, I’d like to know if such a model is supported by Shopify, especially in the region we’re targeting, and if I can integrate with logistics companies such as Aramex as well.
Thanks!
Yes, I require an expert’s help with this, additionally, can we set up Tamara and Taby which are installment based solutions and other locally available solutions in KSA and the GCC region? And how easy/difficult would this be?
I do exactly what you are describning. It has been a long journey but i now think i have found the perfect solution. But it has been close to 500 hours development. So what I use is:
- Shopify standard
- this is everything the user see on the homepage, I am the only one with admin here.
- Here i also have swedish payment gateway Swish pluggedin
- Shopify apps
- Mesa - workflow automation
- This is where I get the order data out of shopify so that i can have it in appsheet where each vendor can se thier own orders
- Hextom: bulk product edit
- This is where i import data from appsheet, this is where the products in read from appsheet so that each vendor can create and update thier own products
- Bulkbunny | bulk discount odes
- This is where i create discount codes, these codes are used for each vendor to give out as they please, they have module for this in appsheet
- Hulk product options
- I use this to add extra options fields to shopify frontend for customer to get more options.
- Google
- Gmail
- I create these for each vendor so that they can use that for login to appsheet
- Gdrive
- I use gdrive for data to be shared with the vendors, here every data is regarding appsheet.
- Sheets
- Sheets is where the data from orders is read out to with mesa. Each order is one row in sheets
- Google Appsheet
- Appsheet is a cloud service that makes it easy to make your own “app”.
- Appsheet can show diffrent data in diffrent form from sheets. It can show diffrent data to diffrent persons with security filter.
- You can also get data from appsheet back to shopify with bulk edit. So a vendor can updata products in appsheet and then this is read back to shopify
- Swedish Visma (cloud service for economy and taxes
- Foldermill
- I use this on a computer i provide each vendor. The vendor also have a thermal printer for package slips and a printer for delivery lists. All this printsout comes from appsheet. Appsheet auto generate the slips and folder mill starts automatic at a specific time and prints theses from google drive.
I think the hardest for you is the economic model, you nedd to find a way how you solve that. In my store i get all the payments then at the end of the month i use appsheet to autogenerate a invoice from each vendor to me. This invoice contains everything from the orders they recived during the month. I then pay this invoice to them.
There is alot more to this. But above you have the basic setup.
Yes, I require an expert’s help with this, additionally, can we set up Tamara and Taby which are installment based solutions and other locally available solutions in KSA and the GCC region? And how easy/difficult would this be?
When you say it supports Tamara and Taby, do you mean, I can have smooth integrations without having to manually configure something in some back end to set that up? So there are direct ways where I just choose to add their services on top.
Hi @Taira19 ,
I can recommend Feeds Bridge as catalog management system which allows you to grant access for your vendors so they can see their catalog and fulfill their orders. That’s the main features of Feeds Bridge.
So basically you could register your merchants as a vendor on Feeds Bridge, grant access for each vendor individually and they would get access to their catalog and orders requests.
Catalog can only be imported using catalog feeds (excel, csv files) by store owner, vendors can only see their catalog and fulfill orders.
Since each vendor will get dedicated fulfillment service on shopify you will be able to manage their shipping rates individually or group them into one if needed.
So from catalog and orders fulfillment Feeds Bridge can cover all of your needs.
It’s easy to integrate with Tamara but you need a merchant account with us first. If you don’t already have an account, you can sign up by clicking on either of the following links or contact our commercial team to set it up for you. https://partners.tamara.co/