BazaarKit – Multivendor Shipping for WooCommerce

One of your vendors posts silk scarves in a padded envelope for £2.50. Another ships a coffee table by pallet. WooCommerce gives you one shipping rate for the whole site, Dokan Lite does not change that, and every answer you have been given so far ends with “buy Dokan Pro”.

BazaarKit gives each vendor their own postage price, set by them, on the listing itself. A buyer taking three things from the same shop pays one bundled rate, not three. There are no zones to draw by hand, no carrier account, no API key, and nothing to set up before it works.

It is a companion, not a replacement. Rates go in through WooCommerce’s own shipping system, and vendors type their price into the Dokan dashboard they already use. Both plugins carry on doing everything they did before.

What it does

• A postage price per listing, set by the vendor. The field appears in the Dokan vendor dashboard when they add or edit a product, and in the Shipping tab of the WooCommerce product editor for you. Whatever they type is the postage on that item, quoted to a buyer anywhere in the world.
• One rate per shop, not one per item. Dokan splits a basket into a package per vendor, and each package is priced as a single line — “Bundled shipping (3 items)”. You decide whether that is the highest of the item prices (the default) or the sum of them.
• Free postage, said in words. A price of 0 reaches the buyer as “Free shipping”, not “£0.00”.
• A default price for listings nobody has got to yet, so a shop halfway through filling in its catalogue still quotes something sensible.
• Holiday mode. A vendor going away presses one button, and their listings vanish from the shop, search, category pages, product rails, block grids and the Store API, and cannot be added to a basket. Nothing is unpublished and nothing is deleted. Their store page explains itself to buyers, and coming back is the same button.
• A departed vendor leaves no live listings behind. Delete a user in WordPress and it makes you choose: destroy everything they wrote, or hand it all to another account, usually yours. Neither is right for a marketplace — one bins the catalogue, the other leaves live listings for stock nobody has, under your name, until a customer asks where their parcel is. BazaarKit moves those listings to the trash instead, recoverable, with past orders left exactly as they were.

It works quietly. No API calls, no live rate lookups, no key to enter, no account to make, and nothing that stops working after a while. BazaarKit’s own code makes no network requests. The one thing in the zip that can — the bundled Freemius SDK — is described under “External services” below, and it asks before it does.

Running plain WooCommerce, with no vendor plugin?

That works too. BazaarKit does not require a multivendor plugin: where there is no vendor package to read, the product’s author is treated as the vendor, so per-author postage behaves the same way.

Where it comes from

Every part of this started on Preloved Bazaar, a working UK multivendor fashion marketplace, where shipping, escrow, offers and disputes all shipped first and got fixed where real money moves. Marketplace plumbing is unglamorous and very easy to get subtly wrong. A rate that looks right in the basket and charges differently at checkout costs a vendor real income; a shipping method that quietly stops being offered costs them all of it. That is the part this plugin tries to get right, and the reason its code is so heavily commented.

The optional add-ons

Six other plugins add separate marketplace features — escrow, messaging, disputes, reviews, notifications and per-continent postage. Each is its own download, bought and installed on its own. Nothing described above depends on them, and nothing above behaves differently when they are not there.

• International Shipping — every listing already posts worldwide at the vendor’s flat rate. This add-on makes that rate precise: a different price per continent, so Ireland and New Zealand need not cost the same, and a region left blank is simply not posted to.
• Escrow & Buyer Protection — holds each vendor’s payout on Stripe Connect until delivery, with a buyer-protection window, automatic refund reversal and chargeback claw-back.
• Messaging & Offers — a private buyer-to-vendor inbox with image attachments, and make-an-offer negotiation where an accepted offer checks out at the agreed price.
• Disputes & Resolution — buyer disputes, vendor responses, auto-escalation and an admin mediation queue.
• Mutual Reviews & Ratings — two-way buyer and seller reviews under one store rating.
• Notifications & Email Preferences — in-app notifications, an email-preference centre with one-click unsubscribe, and a searchable log of every email your site sends.

They are £5 / $5 a month each, cancel any time — except Messaging & Offers, which is £7 / $7 because it is two features in one purchase. There is also a one-off lifetime bundle covering all six and anything released after them.

If you would rather try than read: bazaarkit.online has a marketplace you can log into and drive — set a shipping price, put two shops in one basket, see what a vendor sees — and the documentation is at bazaarkit.online/docs/.

External services

BazaarKit’s own code makes no network requests. Every feature described above works with
the site offline: nothing is fetched, nothing is checked, no licence is validated, and no data
about your site leaves it unless you opt in, or you click through to buy an add-on.

It does bundle the Freemius SDK (Freemius, Inc.), which is how the separately-sold add-ons
identify themselves if you ever install one. In this free plugin the SDK does one thing:

• On activation it shows an opt-in screen, and you can click “Skip”. If you skip it, the SDK
  contacts nobody. If you opt in, it sends your site URL, admin email and WordPress/PHP/plugin
  versions to Freemius as usage diagnostics, and you can disconnect any time from BazaarKit →
  Account. Nothing in the plugin behaves differently either way.

If you click an add-on’s Buy button, your site URL, admin email and WordPress/PHP versions are
passed to the Freemius checkout so the licence can be bound to this install. That cannot happen
on this plugin alone — there is nothing here to buy — but it is worth knowing before you install
one of the paid add-ons.

If you opt in, or buy an add-on, that data goes to Freemius under their Terms of Service
(https://freemius.com/terms/) and Privacy Policy (https://freemius.com/privacy/).

Each optional paid add-on is a separate plugin you install yourself. Those connect to Freemius
to validate their own licence and deliver their own updates, and each discloses what it sends in
its own readme.