On the Stoffwald Marketplace, you will find huge product variants of different fabrics with offers from various retailers - all handpicked. With just one check-out you can order from various retailers and save yourself the hassle of “shopping around” on the Internet, because here you can find everything in one place, making online fabrics shopping so easy.

The offer on the Stoffwald is optimally tailored to your needs as a seamstress: the products are well structured, combination fabrics and accessories are displayed directly to you. With the ingenious filters and search terms, you can find what you need immediately.

Sewing Industry in Switzerland

The sewing industry in Switzerland was earlier present in the hands of small merchants and it wasn't possible for one of them to offer all the product variants.

The idea of a marketplace is reshaping the industry as all the small or big retailers are brought together at one platform which can offer all the product kinds in one place which is the beauty of the fabric forest. As a result, The sellers can set their sewing offers and sewing enthusiasts that is the consumers can find everything they need in one shop

Stoffwald - Fabric Marketplace

The Stoffwald was founded in spring 2018 after an intensive conception phase. The focus was to support retailers in competing in the global marketplace.

That's why the company started looking for synergies for retailers and end customers and found them with the marketplace idea: the end customer has a much broader range and an optimized shopping experience,

For the retailers marketing becomes more productive with combined forces and the costs can be reduced as well.
Apart from that, an enthusiastic seamstress consumer-like walking into a sewing shop. The Stoffwald marketplace is a perfect combination of my passion and creativity.

How Webkul Played a Key Role in the Success Journey of Stoffwald

We are very proud to say that in just six months Stoffwald has gradually grown and the sellers across the platforms along with the buyers are having a delight with the usage of the platform and its modern functionalities and practical approach of taking the sewing industry and its products online.

The complete platform is ideated by Esther Pfister, founder and CEO Stoffwald. Webkul always takes every possible measure to pin down all the requirements that our clients do specify and we implement them with great care until the final outcome is executed.

What is Shopware?

Shopware is the most exciting and extensively used eCommerce platform in Germany. Shopware is an enterprise-level platform based on PHP language. There are more than 80k plus users who have installed the Shopware for managing their products. Shopware is an open-source eCommerce framework.

It is growing enormously with numerous features like Content Management, Drag-Drop design layout, Multi-warehouse system. Shopware is now beginning to enter new European nations and is making a big impact in the UK. You can check here other Shopware modules - https://store.webkul.com/Shopware.html.

How Shopware Marketplace Can Rebuild Your Online Store?

Shopware Multi-vendor Marketplace (https://store.webkul.com/shopware-multi-vendor-marketplace.html) will transform your store into a complete marketplace. With this, any customer can become a seller and can sell their own products in the store.

However, the seller has to register for creating the seller profile in the marketplace. Moreover, the seller can manage seller profiles, Add seller products, check seller orders. Customers can review the seller as per his/her experience with that particular seller. 

Custom Features Based on Marketplace Requirements

Apart from the basic core features that the Shopware module does provide like in every business, there are some custom requirements that need to be added to better cater the services to the users of the platform that are specific.

Here as well our client needed multiple such features. To achieve this and provide a user-friendly experience so that customers can have better access to the store.

We added certain features using which a Seller role is eased such as:

• Sellers can add Properties in a Product -  Using this a seller can add properties and can further choose the Set, and Group for the same product. The seller can even add and save a product even if there are no properties added to a product.

• Addition of Custom Search Field -  In this customization product listing on the seller panel needed to be added with various columns apart from the article(Product) number name and its description we added the Supplier number using which merchant or the seller number is also added.

• Allow Seller to Switch Order Status “Open to Shipped” - The seller of the store can change the status of the order from open to shipping which means the product is sent to the customer. It allows the admin to have an overview of the shipped orders as well, from the backend.
• Duplicate a Product Seller End - We added a custom button so that the Seller can even clone a product with all the properties of the article(Product) remaining exactly the same including the price and images. Using this a seller can easily add a product of the same kind easily.

Compatible Theme Options

The owner of the Stoffwald - fabric marketplace required a great theme that fits the idea and resembles their product exactly as they offer, including the beautiful textured fabrics.

The Shopware module is compatible with mostly all the themes. For this, we used the pre-selected theme provided by the owner.

Multi-Lingual Support

Now, you might wonder why a Swiss-based marketplace store is configured in german and french language. For this, you need to know Switzerland has four national languages in which German and French are the most spoken languages which accounts for 62.8% and 22.9% of the complete population respectively as per the latest reports from 2016.

For any store owner, a multilingual option is a key requirement in such cases especially when the marketplace is made for a user group whose native language is other than English. The Shopware marketplace module can be developed with multiple language options.

We took extreme care in providing the store’s german language translation with every field that best describes the functionality in the required language.

Here, the multilingual options were very important. Since the Stoffwald fabric marketplace is predominantly accompanied by the German users and sellers on top of it In future, our client was also hoping to have the store configured with french language as well.

Seller/Customer Registration

The users can simply log in or register as customers or vendors i.e sellers. We have given the admin the option, based on the privacy policy entered the seller can accept it and then move forward.

Seller Approval

The Shopware module privileged the client with the feature to approve a seller manually as well. Since according to them they are a startup (Limited resources) and they require to rigorously monitor and approve new merchants of their platform.

Commission Management

Using our Shopware 5 Multi-vendor module the client was able to offer a required commission rate to their sellers of the platform based on the number of products that they sold. Which was very based on the essential factors such as since Stoffwald is a new marketplace store and the store owner initially wanted to attract more and more merchants to sell and offer products on the platform.

Shopware Multi-Vendor Seller Option

Post the successful registration, the seller can add these details to his profile page.

• Avatar - The seller can upload his/her profile image.

• Short Profiles - The seller can write short info about their store.

• Shop Name - Here the seller can enter his/her shop/store name that would be visible on the Marketplace.

• Twitter Id - The seller can enter his Twitter id.

• Facebook Id - The seller can enter his Facebook id.

• Logo - Here the seller can enter the logo of his/her store.

• Banner - The seller can provide the banner for the store.

• Description - Here the seller can write the complete description of his shop/store.

Product Page & Seller Review

The user can check the seller of the product on the product page and check seller details and added reviews. The customer can also add the review for the seller and seller products. The customer can go to the seller profile for adding the review.

Custom Search Fields

The admin can create and enable search fields for his products. Based on which the customers can narrow down the search results. Moreover, the product list can be sorted based on custom options such as Article name, Popularity and more. Using these, finding items that the customers are originally looking for becomes much easier.

Easily Place Orders

The customers on the Stoffwald marketplace store can add a product into the cart from the product view page after selecting the required length of the fabric or a desired quantity of the product and from there a pop-up in the sidebar appears. Further, the users can instantly checkout or view and edit the cart.

Next, all the details such as the order summary of the items of the cart including the Billing and Shipping Address and Payment and Shipping Address are visible under the same page. Thereby the users on the Stoffwald can proceed to checkout by accepting the cancellation policy entered by the owner of the marketplace.

Further Scope of Advancements in Shopware Marketplace

Keeping innovation alive and adding features that further enhances your brand value should never stop. We believe that with Shopware 6 Marketplace Module can uplift the number of sales of any store and will certainly add more customers since it can be integrated with various Shopware Marketplace Add-Ons like here - https://store.webkul.com/Shopware/Marketplace.html

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