I'd like to allow users to sell products on my website

Design help Ecommerce
1

Here is my site Read-Only: Webflow - Baluchon Sewing

My (largely unfinished) site is a “portfolio” of sewing projects and will have a place for me to be able to sell products, but I would like to know if there is any way to allow “users” of my website to sell their own products on my website too? I was looking at E-bay APIs, but honestly have little idea how to accomplish this (or if this is possible), any help would be greatly appreciated.

2

The short answer "NO". What do you mean to “sell” - you need to have some system to track sales and send money for each user (Sound like a “custom made system” with dashboard - not a website).

3

Alright, I’ll have a look into making a custom system, or just abandon the idea. Thanks!

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4

Lets say like: https://www.etsy.com/uk/

Your Q is very general (So also the answer). With tools like memberstack, airtable, zapier and so on you could achieve ideas like this - but again it is not simple and with limitation.

By webflow only ==> No way (True to 07/2022).

Start by reading about “webflow marketplaces”.

5

Hey there!

Nicolas here. I’m a developer advocate / community engineer at Memberstack.
At a really high level, here’s how I’d approach + things to consider:

  • You can use Memberstack for managing YOUR users (aka sellers) and authenticating them in your portfolio site (aka marketplace)
  • You can use Memberstack to create “gated” dashboards.

Everything else will probably need to be a custom implementation on your end:

  • You would have to build the logic & design the interface where your “sellers” can create / manage or import products (or links to products)
  • You can use Webflow CMS to create “sellers” and “products” collections, and create a relationship between the two.
  • Give each seller a dedicated page to publicly display their products. Hint → give them their own page from the “sellers” CMS template and make the page slug their memberstack ID.
  • Display seller’s products on their public page: Use the product CMS collection list on the seller’s page and filter for products that belong to the seller.

Next you need to decide if you want to take a cut from your seller’s transactions.
If you do, the implementation will be slightly more advanced.

  • You can use something like Stripe Connect & no code Payment Links to create products on behalf of your users with a percentage / fixed price automatically taken out after each transaction
  • You’d most likely still have to do some backend API work in Stripe to create "connected’ products that are associated to sellers.

You’ll want to set up some logic with Zapier or Make (formerly Integromat) to sync your Product CMS collection with wherever your seller’s products are originally being created.

If using Stripe Connect for instance: Each entry in the product CMS collection could have URL field that references a Stripe payment link. When clicked, it would open a Stripe Hosted Checkout session for your user’s customers.

Additional suggestions

  • You could look into other headless e-commerce solutions that allow you to pull products from an API. Ex: Shopify’s StoreFront API

Overall, I’d say this a very ambitious build on Webflow.
You’re going to encounter a lot of limitations, but theoretically, it could probably be done.
Personally, I’d probably build something like this custom in React.js and use Stripe Connect or Shopify Hydrogen.

Good luck, and feel free to ping me if you want me to elaborate more on some of these tools.

3 Likes
6

Amazing reply Nicolas!

1 Like
7

Hi all.
Josh with Foxy here. When it comes to marketplaces, payouts can be the trickiest part. For example, logic to handle withheld percentage, UI for merchant to manage where funds are deposited, etc.

We’ve got experience with marketplaces and a seamless Webflow integration: https://foxy.io/webflow If you’re looking for a no-code / low-code marketplace setup you may have a hard time finding one.

But if you’re looking for a solution that can scale and if you’re open to getting your hands dirty, hiring a dev (or even our team), definitely reach out. We’ll do our best to get you pointed in the right direction: hello@foxy.io

Thanks,
Josh

8

Hi Foxy,

I will send you a mail.

1 Like
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@Josef_Eines We’ll watch for your email.

Thanks,
Josh