The success of marketplaces like Amazon, Airbnb, or eBay has proved that the multi vendor store model is truly scalable and ideal for almost every business. Several entrepreneurs and business owners have shown keen interest in starting an online marketplace, citing rapid growth. But launching an eCommerce business requires careful assessment and understanding of the right eCommerce platform. Here, we’ll discuss two prominent eCommerce solutions – Yo!Kart and Shopify to help users decide which one is right for their multi-vendor marketplace needs.

Shopify for Multivendor

A SaaS-based eCommerce platform, Shopify uses a third-party multivendor plugin offered by Webkul to convert online stores into multi-vendor marketplaces. The plugin enables businesses to add unlimited products/sellers and even sync products from other stores. It comes packed with a variety of multivendor features such as marketing automation, product catalog, order management, and more. Moreover, there are additional eCommerce features that can be integrated with help of different Shopify Apps:

  1. Stripe Connect (for real-time split payment between admin and seller)
  2. Store pick-up
  3. Seller membership plan
  4. Commission management and more 

These features are available to Shopify users at an additional cost. Also, Shopify’s pricing plan ranges from $29/month to $299/month while the multi-vendor plugin starts at $10/month. So if you calculate the overall cost of using Shopify for a multivendor marketplace setup, it will be more than 100 USD per month. There are other limitations to Shopify multi-vendor such as limited SaaS APIs for integration with the existing business system & no dedicated technical support.

Yo!Kart

It is a license-based eCommerce multivendor solution. Yo!Kart provides complete control to a business owner to start an online marketplace. A popular choice among billion-dollar enterprises, Yo!Kart delivers ready-to-launch eCommerce marketplaces and mobile apps to businesses of all sizes. The multivendor platform is extensively designed with intuitive eCommerce features and offers customization to cater to individual business requirements.  

There is no need to pay for addons to integrate additional features. The platform is equipped with a variety of eCommerce multivendor features, such as:

  1. In-built Content Management System (CMS)
  2. Order management
  3. Separate vendor storefront
  4. Product Catalog
  5. Multilingual and Multicurrency support
  6. External Business API integrations like Stripe Connect, ShipStation, TaxJar, and more
  7. 20+ payment options and pick up module

Unlike Shopify, Yo!Kart comes with a one-time license fee and is available in two distinct packages – 

  • GoQuick plan with default design at $999
  • And GoCustom plan with full custom design at $6999

In addition to this, you get12-months of free technical support for any bugs and errors found in the system. Yo!Kart also provides responsive design layouts, intuitive dashboards (for admin, seller/buyer/advertiser), personalized marketing features (like PPC advertisement, social media sharing, rewards & discounts), and many more features. It is a robust and flexible standalone solution to kick start your multivendor marketplace with ease. The only drawback is, there are limited Yo!Kart themes out-of-the-box.

Conclusion

While Yo!Kart is inherently designed to start an online marketplace, Shopify on the other hand, is designed to start a regular online store. This provides Yo!Kart a definite edge, making it an optimal solution for entrepreneurs and business owners to build their eCommerce marketplace. 

To get a detailed comparison between Yo!Kart and Shopify, read this blog post

Similar Reads:

Best Multi-vendor eCommerce Platforms in 2021

Comparison of Yo!Kart Multi-vendor Platform with Shuup Multi-vendor Platform

Yo!Kart vs BigCommerce Webkul Multivendor Platform – Which one is better?

What are the best Shopify alternatives?

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