Jem Turner jt@jemturner.co.uk +44(0)7521056376

Dorothy & Theodore Multi-Vendor Marketplace

Design and custom WooCommerce development for large multi-vendor marketplace

Dorothy and Theodore website on macbook pro

The Dorothy & Theodore team approached me with an existing multi-vendor marketplace website built on the CS Cart platform. They were having difficulties with a few technical things but making no progress on getting them fixed. After chatting about their problems, and their ongoing requirements, we put together a re-platforming plan to move the site away from CS Cart and across to WordPress and WooCommerce, utilising an existing WordPress plugin to provide the required marketplace functionality.

Taking advantage of the platform migration, the Dorothy & Theodore team also opted for a redesign. We designed a fresh new WordPress theme to accompany the WooCommerce development, featuring existing branding assets and colours but with a more consistent look and feel across the site; the redesign brought together both the e-commerce and community/blog elements, solidifying the browsing and buying experience as one continuous journey.

Migrating from CS Cart to WordPress wasn’t without its pitfalls. CS Cart repeatedly fell over when we tried to extract vendor and product data from it, which left us having to export information in tiny batches bit by bit. To process this data in a format that WordPress, WooCommerce and the multi-vendor platform understood meant writing a custom import utility and gradually feeding our data in.

To give the same level of product customisation to customers that the vendors were used to and expected from WordPress, I wrote a bespoke WooCommerce add-on to provide the ability to create “custom fields” on products, allowing them to choose product personalisation options that were independent from price-affecting WooCommerce-based variations.

Late in the development I realised that the multi-vendor platform we’d chosen was impacting upon WooCommerce filters, preventing the bespoke personalisation functionality from working, so re-platformed again to an alternative multi-vendor solution. This additional work meant the project didn’t meet its original deadline, but overall gave a much better experience for the vendor, the customer and the admin team and meant the bespoke WooCommerce plugin development worked as it was supposed to – a worthy trade-off.

If you’d like to chat about custom WooCommerce development, or how I can improve your WordPress website, get in touch.

Project Tags

Why hire Jem for your WordPress project?

  • 5 5

    Magiboards has been working with Jem for 9 years. She single handedly developed and continues to maintain the Magiboards’ website. Our brief to Jem was to design something which we can easily update ourselves. This has worked very well, leaving our budget to be spent on continually adding new areas to the website.

    An excellent web programmer, Jem understands what we are trying to achieve and always delivers. I would highly recommend Jem to any company wishing to use her services.

  • 5 5

    When I needed a new website, that’s where Jem came in and did a great job:

    – Quickly understood what I do for a living, where a website fits in my marketing and what kind of website would work for me (and what wouldn’t)
    – Built a website that does exactly what I need
    – Jumped in immediately when a hacker tried to do their worst
    – Taught this trembling technophobe to embrace WordPress when it all changed

    Jem is knowledgeable, positive, patient and a joy to work with. Highly recommended

  • 5 5

    We commissioned Jem to create a new school website. We wanted a website which was well ordered, accessible with a simple design and, most importantly, easy to update by various, non technical members of staff.

    Jem provided us with really useful design ideas which helped us give her an idea of what we wanted. Jem very quickly produced a new website, which looks very impressive. Jem then provided an excellent training session which enabled us to add our own pages and menus. Throughout the whole process Jem has been quick in answering our many questions and her suggestions have always been very helpful.

    We have found Jem to be extremely professional, helpful and supportive and we would thoroughly recommend Jem to any school looking for a new website.

  • 5 5

    Working with Jem has been nothing but a pleasure. From the get go she was friendly and understanding. She knew exactly what I wanted and already had a plan in place from the first phone call!

    She kept to the schedule she laid out and was very transparent the whole way through and I cannot recommend her enough. Even when problems arised (admittadly my own fault) she sorted them out without a fuss. She responded to every question I had in a professional and curteous manner.

    I will definitely be using her in the future for any WordPress work than I need.

Why I love working with WordPress

I've been using WordPress since the heady days of version 1.0 and developing WordPress websites commercially since version 1.5 (released in 2005!)

Open-source

Free software: now and forever. No crazy license fees or contract tie-ins. Pay only for your site development.

Massive user base

Over 75 million sites are powered by WordPress, with thousands of developers worldwide contributing to core development & free plugins.

Infinitely flexible

WordPress can be anything you want it to be: from a simple blog to a full e-Commerce platform utilising WooCommerce, and more.