Moving to WooCommerce – Ecommerce Fashion Multi-brand Marketplace

Hi @mnsajuser

Welcome to the WooCommerce community!

I want to assure you that you’re not alone; we’re here to help you navigate this transition. WooCommerce is a highly flexible and customizable platform that can cater to a wide array of eCommerce needs, including multi-brand marketplaces like yours.

However, to understand the specifics of your requirements and the level of customizations done by Ecomz, we recommend scheduling a consultation with one of the WooCommerce experts from the following:

• A local web developer
• Codeable.io
• WooExperts

In the meantime, I encourage you to explore our extensive documentation and blog posts on our website, which can provide you with a wealth of information about using WooCommerce.

I hope this helps! If you have any other questions, feel free to ask.

Appreciate your response Shameem

Is there a way I can schedule a call with an expert from woocommerce presales before signing up with an agency or trying to vet one and getting into commitments?

I’d like to discuss two things

1- The overrides made by Ecomz are all related to Aramex integrations (courier services), so we send manual values for the price, type of shipment and the weight of the shipment to Aramex through Ecomz instead of pulling values automatically from Ecomz’s backend, there’s certain information we don’t want to share or we want to standardize with Aramex as we faced issues with them in Saudi Arabia (one of the 6 GCC countries we operate in) overcharging us based on their understanding of this information. Maybe Woocomemrce can solve the issue from its roots and we don’t need to override anymore, but probably not, so we wanna know how much we can change in the source code and in our integration with Aramex

2- We’ve jotted down a whole bunch of features and enhancements we’d like Mnsaj 2.0 to have in Mural, from image / AI based search for products to enhanced UI / UX, etc. We’d like someone to have a look and genuinely tell us, without any bias or monetization motives if these changes are doable or should we just start from scratch and build our own backend

Hey! Depending on the size of your marketplace, you can get in touch with WooCommerce Enterprise team here

https://woocommerce.com/enterprise-ecommerce/

I’ll contact WooCommerce support but for starters, I wanted to see if anyone around has dealt with something like this

• As an ecommerce, we chose to deal with Aramex for courier services as we operate within the GCC cluster countries only
• Ecomz has a standard built integration with Aramex which we started using as is when we joined the platform
• After a while we noticed the following:
  • If we had an order worth let’s say 1500 SAR split across multiple items and therefore multiple shipments as each come from a different warehouse (designer) so arrives at its own time. We don’t stock anything locally yet, we simply act as a liaison between Designers and Customers. So shipping costs are per box from each designer combined
  • When separate shipments / AWBs are created through the API between Ecomz and Aramex, for each item as its ready from different warehouses, what happens is we send Aramex the total price / value of the shipment which screws us over in terms of VAT. Imagine each shipment is flagged separately as 1500 SAR
  • Also, the weights, are calculated unfairly using their laser machine, and there’s a whole story behind it, so we started sending them stable 0.5 KG weights, but have an offline agreement with Aramex GCC to manually change the weights later on based on a standard
  • And finally, we changed all the shipment types from PPX (parcel) to PDX (Document), and thats only for Mnsaj, I’m calling it an override, because the weight of the shipment even if its 1.5 KG, we still agreed that we will initially ask them to start everything from the baseline which is 0.5 and a document
  • All of those are types of manual adjustments or overrides in the sense that we’re asking Ecomz not to send data based on what they have in the system about our shipments and orders, but rather standard fixed values, and from there we have formal agreements with Aramex’s executives in place for our shipments. Mind you, we only deliver and use Aramex GCC (HQ in KSA), no other Aramex entity is involved
• Our main concern as we move and have now established this mode of working so extra costs of shipping are not incurred, is will we have the same level of flexibility if we move to WooCommerce as we’re looking to scale up quite largely and our business is growing

You can have this flexibility and more in WooCommerce, splitting up shipping is a feature in WooCommerce but you need a plugin to activate it. As previously mentioned, this forum is to handle technical issues and bug reports. Your case, from the look of it, seems doable, and WooCommerce is the most extensible ecommerce platform, so you can achieve anything you want, including Aramex (https://woocommerce.com/products/woocommerce-shipping-aramex/).

However, you need to engage with a developer/agency to have your migration done for you, as this is the open source forum.

Your other problems with Aramex including whatever you’re seeing in extra prices and so are up to you honestly. A developer can help you integrate this.