 Thank you. Hi everyone. Good day so far. All right. That's me. I've been in WordPress world since before WordPress. Been in IT world for more than, yeah, all my entire adult life. And the rest of it you've already heard about. So, what is WC Vendors? It is a multi-vendor marketplace plugin for WordPress and web commerce. That allows you to turn a standard web commerce installation into a multi-seller platform like eBay, Amazon, Etsy, any of those. We have 10,000 plus active installs. We've been around 5-ish October. It's 5 years. And we're just about to hit 500,000 downloads for the free product. We have free and pro versions. RPV is the parent company. We focus mostly in building WordPress and web commerce stuff. But we've also just got into building Solutions for Learn Dash, which is, I think, the best e-learning platform for WordPress at the moment. We're a 100% remote team. We're based in Vietnam, South Africa, the Philippines, and soon India. If you want to come work for us, come talk to me later. So, a little bit more detail. What is a multi-vendor marketplace? You build a platform, and you allow people to sign up and sell products on the platform. And you have a way that you charge them for them. You can either charge them a listing fee, a subscription, or a commission. And those commissions can be anything from percentage, fixed fee, tiered. There is a various number of ways to do commissions. And the biggest part is allowing the vendors to actually self-manage their products and their orders. So you don't have to do that as the marketplace owner yourself. You should be more engaged in creating an experience for the customers and the vendors, not the day-to-day order management. The best thing you get to do is you can create your own niche, Amazon, Etsy, eBay, whatever it is. So there's three different areas I'll be talking about today that people make mistakes when they build marketplaces. The plug-in or the platform is only just a third of it. You've also got all the business and after-launch operations. So firstly, in business, people never have a plan. They just start their business and off they go. They think that they can have very simple commission rates and they completely forget about all the business requirements and legal requirements required to actually start a business in their jurisdiction. So I'll go through these different areas. Plans. Actually define what you want. Know what you're going to do before you build it. If you can't define what your business is, you've already failed. You need to know who your target market is. Who's going to look after it when it's built? Who's going to build it? How long do you think it's going to take to find your commission rates? And the biggest one that I don't see anyone doing and myself included in some of my first businesses is doing financial projections. And financial projections help you know if your business is actually viable. So if you can't see your earnings and you can't see profitability in the product then there's probably no point in building it. And something that we see a lot is people come to us and ask for discounts. Severe discounts because I can't afford the plug-in. If you can't afford $200 a year for your business then you probably shouldn't be building the business. So there's a lot of issues where people will... They think they can just install the plug-in, hit send and the business is done. I'm going to be a millionaire next week. No, that doesn't work like that ever. To build it and they will come attitude of internet businesses just doesn't work anymore. As we've seen in other talks today, SEO and marketing plans are very important. Almost as important or more important than the product itself. Because if people can't find your marketplace, if vendors can't find your marketplace to sell on it, it's just going to be a wasteland of nothingness. You need to have onboarding systems for your vendors and for your customers. So many people forget about their vendors. They think that because the customers can buy a product, that's enough. They don't have decent sign-up systems. They don't have concierge systems to make it easy for the vendors to actually get on board. They don't even have help systems. So they just assume that the vendors will work out how to publish a product. They assume that the customers will know how to purchase something, how to request a refund, how to ask a pre-sales question. Just because you think it's easy doesn't mean it's easy. So these are things in terms of the business side of things that you need to think about before you even get started writing a lot of code or installing a plug-in or buying a plug-in. Commission rates. I've logged into thousands of sites where the commission rate is 5%. So they're taking 5% of a sale. 3.6% of that is taken in transaction fees. So they're making less than 2% on every sale. That's not sustainable. When you're in a niche marketplace, you should be charging much higher chunks of commission if it's a percentage-based commission. So you should be looking at a minimum of 30%. Especially when you're first start. As you get larger and larger, you can adjust your commission rates. You can use different things where you can use a membership system where you can say a bronze membership, you can publish 50 products, but your commission rate is 80%. But if you pay me $100 a month, then I'll only take 20%. So you can get recurring revenue before you even sell a single product and bring memberships to the vendors instead. And the other option is you can reward your top sellers. So if you look at any of the marketplaces like Envato or any stock marketplace, the more you sell, the more money you make. So you do commission systems. So if you're up to 5,000 in sales, it's a 70-30 split. If you do 15,000 in sales, then it's a 1575 or 1585 or whatever it is. So the marketplace earns less because that vendor has already earned their place on the marketplace. So you see the top sellers get extra promotions on the Envato products where you always see the guys that are like, these guys have made a million dollars on Envato. And you're like, well, that's a lot of money. But you need to realize that it took them maybe three years to get to that. But they rewarded every step of the way. And so many businesses don't reward their vendors when they build their marketplaces. All the legal requirements. Do you need a business license? So many people build these systems and then they go to sign up for their bank accounts and stuff like that or they don't at all, they just put it into their personal account. Bad idea. Do you need business insurance? In a lot of countries you actually need business insurance even for internet businesses. So you need to look that up. Australia is a good example of that where you need to have a billion different insurances to do anything. Get all your policies in place. Your privacy policy, your user policies, your vendor agreements. So these are things that most websites should have even for just a standard WooCommerce shop. Marketplaces but just any online business. Have your support policies in place. So you can tell the customer what support is covered. So you need to work that out. And these policies will change over time as your business grows or the direction of the business changes. What are your refund policies? Is it a flat blanket 14-day refund? No questions asked. Or is it have they downloaded the product? There needs to be a fault with it. Have you returned the product? How are you going to do RMAs? What are your copyright notices? Do you have any DMCA requirements? That's more of a US thing. And then your jurisdictional requirements like in the EU they have some very interesting tax requirements for anyone that does business in the EU including people that don't live in the EU. So where as a business in the US or Australia or even Singapore if you're selling to EU customers you're supposed to actually be collecting taxes and sending that to the EU. But it's not viable for most businesses to do that so they just ignore it. But if you get big enough the EU will come after you. And taxes. Get your taxes and orders from day one. So work out if your vendors are taking on the tax burden or whether you're taking on the tax burden. So some jurisdictions, commissions are actually taxed so you need to think about that as well. So taxes is a nightmare and you should talk to your accountant before you get started because taxes can break a business very quickly. Platform concerns. So these are building the actual product. So what features are you going to have? What are your expectations? What solutions are you going to do and how are you going to pay your vendors? And in all of these areas I've seen the same mistakes over and over again. First one is everyone tries to make every feature they could possibly install in there and you log into the site and they've got 84 plugins active. And you're like, what are you doing this? And it's like, oh, well, I need to have every feature that Amazon has, which comes down to the expectations. Don't try and compete with Amazon. There's no point. They're a perjillion dollar marketplace. You should be competing against yourself first. When you first launch your marketplace what is the minimum amount of features that you can provide to build that marketplace and do nothing else? Then once you've got that worked out have all the data and analytics in place so you can collect and work out what features you should be adding after launch. So listen to your data and even listen to your vendors. Vendors will start to ask questions about, oh, it's really difficult to do this or we don't use this feature at all. Why is it active? We really need this new way to communicate with our customers because we're missing out on pre-sales. As I said, don't try and compete with all the big marketplaces. Find your niche, which is something that another talk spoke about earlier today is find a niche and just drill down into it and just saturate your niche by yourself. Some of the most successful marketplaces I've seen have just done one thing. So one is all they do is they sell fantasy book covers. So if you're a fantasy writer you go to this marketplace and you can buy a book cover. That's all they sell is digital book covers. And then you've got just secondhand books. So as soon as I see someone that comes in and says, hey, I want auctions. I need bookings. I need digital downloads. I need shipping to 15 countries. I need multi-currency. The first thing I say is you've got too many features. Just do one thing and do it well. If you want to do auctions, do auctions. If you want to do service bookings, do service bookings. If you want to do digital download products, do only digital download products. Don't do all of them. There are certain areas where digital and physical make sense, where you might be selling an online course and it comes with physical learning materials. That makes sense. Or cooking classes is another example, where the cooking class is online and it's scheduled, but they actually send out a box with all the ingredients to the students. That makes sense to have physical and digital. But just stick into one area and make it work. Because if you try and do too much, you won't do anything at all. Your payments and payouts, time and time again, I've had people contact me. We need to launch in a week and I don't know which payment gateway to use. You should have picked the payment gateway three months ago. So so many people will come to us, they'll build a complete solution and then realize that Stripe or PayPal doesn't work in their country. Which are the two of the biggest in the world and something they probably should have figured out a long time ago. There are hundreds and hundreds of payment gateways for WooCommerce. But they just don't look it up. So know how you're going to take payments from your customers. Work out what your refund policy is for those payments. What are the transaction fees? Are you passing those transaction fees onto your vendors? Or are you taking the transaction fee? That needs to be worked out because a lot of people, when they do their 10% or 5% commission and then they do their, their numbers is like, hey, I made 92 cents on that sale. That doesn't seem like much. How am I going to make any money on this? It doesn't seem sustainable because it's not. You need to think about all those things and that's where the financial projections come in at the beginning. When you're doing your financial projections you need to include your taxes, you need to include the transaction fees, you need to include your hosting fees, you need to include your recurring plugin fees, developer costs. There's all of these things about operating your business that everyone forgets about and just assumes that it'll all just come out in the wash. It doesn't. The other one is how you're going to pay your vendors. Depending on which product you use will depend on how you're going to pay your vendors out. So most, almost all big marketplaces pay out on a schedule. The reason why they do that is commission payouts take time to do the reports. It's an accounting action that is done by your accounting team. That might be you. It might be your actual accountant but someone has to sit down and work that all out. And that needs to also come into account with your refund program. So if you've got refunds you need to have a way to ensure that the refunds are actually taken into account before you pay out your commissions. Because if you pay out a commission and then a customer wants a refund you have to pay the refund out of your huff until you can then get it back from the vendor. So how do you handle that? Put it on a weekly schedule, daily schedule, monthly schedule. So all the big places usually put it on a schedule and they have a minimum payout. And that's usually so they can cover a refund. That's the main reason why they'll have it on a schedule. Or if you're in specific industries you may not be able to actually pay your vendors through anything other than a manual payment system. So that could be a bank transfer, could be a check, cryptocurrency, bottle caps, whatever it is without paying it in a manual system. So depending on what products and services your marketplace provides will determine what you're paying out when you're paying it out and at how often. Now your operating concerns you've managed to get your business plan written you've managed to work out you only need six features so you're only going to need 24 plugins instead of 80. You've worked out what your commission rates will be you've worked out everything you've got it all ready alright it's launched. So who's going to look after it? Are you going to be doing the monthly updates? Have you actually been smart enough to get service hosting from WordPress Kinsta, WP Engine Site Grounds managed services Bluehosts managed services Have you paid someone else so it's their problem to look after your day to day maintenance? Or is that something you're going to take the burden on for yourself? Do you have someone technical in your founding team? If you don't and you need customization who will you go to for that? Refund management again your support systems and that's for both customers and the vendors you need to test your plugins all the time you need to test your themes all the time that's just part and parcel of being in the WordPress ecosystem updates are regular security holes are found all the time so be subscribed to the vulnerability databases so you know if any of the plugins that you're using have a security hole in them get staging servers don't run live updates on your sites ever I have so many people come to us and say a plugin maybe ours or someone else's has bricked their site so they can't take any orders you should be testing every single update on a staging environment first that way if you find a problem you can report it while your business is still operating otherwise you're going to have problems ask your users send out surveys your customers, your vendors if you see if you've got a heat map system in your environment and you see that one feature is never ever used start to A.B. testing to disable anyone notices ask your vendors what feature are they going to want what's going to help them out later on refunds and support what is your policy is the platform going to take on the burden or is the vendor how are they going to be contacted is that through a chat system is it through a support ticket your customer support and vendor support most of these are much the same don't do email support and by that I mean support at something and it goes into a Gmail inbox and you're just reading a Gmail inbox you can still do email based ticket support but have it going into a ticket system such as Zendesk or Fresh Desk Help Desk Help Scout awesome support is actually a really good one if you have a medium sized store which is built into WordPress plugin you can use support forums in some instances but as your volume gets bigger it gets more difficult to moderate your forums and if you're using any of the WordPress based forums notifications just break BBPress where are you that's the reason why we went to ticket based support we would just not get notifications for things and anyone who has a plugin on WordPress.org it's it's difficult to keep up with that so we've actually got a Slackbot now that hooks into the RSS post to notify us of a problem of any new posts but even then the Slackbot will notify us days later of a post so we'll get in there and it's like new posts and it's like posted three days ago but I was on there three days ago this wasn't there what's going on so ticket based support for everyone the great thing about Help Scout is the basic one you get five mailboxes you can use so you can have one for your vendors one for customers one for refunds and you got two spare Help Scout Scout as in SEO vendor support how are your vendors going to contact you when the vendors have a problem are they going to be emailing you every hour of every day create guides for your vendors a lot of the WordPress plugins for marketplaces create documentation for vendors and things like that but it's a generic view it doesn't have your marketplaces theme it doesn't have your color scheme so that can be confusing for new vendors you can't assume your vendors are tech-savvy they just want to sell some stuff on your site the whole reason they're selling on your site is because they didn't want to build their own so create helpful videos create HL2 guides HL4 so have a private forum for your sellers to help each other so part of what you want to do is you want to create as much self-service support as possible to reduce your tickets it'll make it easier for you to do and run your business so in conclusion what do you need for a marketplace a plan's a good start have a platform you can use WordPress WooCommerce WC vendors you could use one of the hosted marketplace solutions don't do it what are your products and services how are you going to what are you selling on there or what do you want people to sell who are your vendors, who are your customers make sure you've got good tools for your vendors great customer support systems and lots of documentation send out regular newsletters so people know that there's new products that there's new features and have a blog so people can come to you for content marketing purposes so you're not just a sales platform you're also creating an environment where people coming to your marketplace for useful information that's basically all of it is something that we're launching soon it's going to be a new marketplace for plugins and themes so this is going to be a dedicated, curated plugin and theme marketplace for developers we're including a license and update server all of the releases will be git based we're going to have a pre-sales and support ticket sales system built into the marketplace for the vendors all of our code will be passing through human code auditors as well as computer code auditors we're going to be setting minimum price recommendations so we're not going to be doing race to the bottom pricing like a lot of other marketplaces do and we're going to create an FAQ and doc system for every product so we're going to create an environment where as a customer when you buy the product you're not going to for websites to get information it's all centralized you get ticket based support and updates you get ticket based support you get a easy use pre-sale system and some regular tips and tricks to help you get along the way questions? I have to pay tax to EU even if I'm not I have to pay tax to EU even if I'm not EU citizen it's not about EU citizenship it's about selling to EU citizens correct nobody does though but we're supposed to correct no you have to pay Australia has started enforcing if you're an Australian GSD registered business and you're selling to the EU you have to collect EU taxes yeah it's going to start getting that's what they're supposed to every business since the EU tax system came in is supposed to be collecting taxes on behalf of the EU no matter where your business is based but you're supposed to but they don't so if you get big enough though the EU will come and ask you for them to start remitting taxes Google it, it's not fun when you start realizing hey that's not very fun anyone else Bueller Bueller it's the same thing I mean how let's say for example Vietnam your service in Vietnam you're selling to the EU well EU has no law so that's why no one actually does it yeah so if your business gets big enough you usually create a subsidiary within the EU to just send all the payments through the EU and then it just gets handled so you'll see on some marketplaces now if you're an EU citizen it'll kick you off to an EU version of the site so it'll be an EU payment system the taxes will be adjusted for your location so the taxes we're in the process of writing a tax plugin at the moment and taxes are painful in every jurisdiction if you look at for instance in New York state in the United States they have 2176 tax rules for one state in America and it's all based on what you're selling so you need to select what the product is and then that will change what the tax rate is and then the tax rate is different depending on where the seller and the buyer are and then you need to collect all that and report it to the state and federal tax authorities it hurts your brain a lot so if you can for taxes for any e-commerce look at tax jar or other services like that where they handle all of that and there's great plugins for WooCommerce and EDD and those where you can just get tax jar to US taxes or your EU taxes so if you're an EU based business use tax jar or Avalara or one of the other taxrates.com where they'll actually they'll handle all the taxes for you and it gives all the interfaces and makes it much easier for taxes I had too much coffee Question like business perspective how is sustainable is the model that you propose to sell for the real estate customer like when you started Vietnam in terms of my business or in terms of running a marketplace so the sustainability of these kinds of things it's kind of a chicken and egg problem where you need to have sellers but you also need customers so what I do is I find sellers first and the reason is is because they've got nothing to lose because this marketplace that we've launched will not have any penalties so you can sell on as many marketplaces as you want so there's nothing to lose to come onto our service but you get everything to gain in the fact that we create an entire set of business services for you so the support ticket system pre-sales we audit your code so if your code has a bug in it that a computer or human can detect we'll let you know using automated code scanning tools to ensure that every release so not just your first submission every single release will be scanned so the prices will be free for customers they just purchase as usual and the vendors it'll be a 60-40 split to begin with 60 to the vendors any other general WooCommerce questions I can answer those two any more questions before we wrap up no we've got one more final tour coming up