Joobi jmarket (on Joomla) - Free, time consuming, no documentation - This is far from a ready-to-use software

Point of view

I looked for a free marketplace (multivendor) software to build an e-commerce site like Etsy, Notonthehighstreet, Amazon.

Review of Joobi Jmarket on Joomla

Pros:

• I promptly received answers from the customer support, for free, because I didn't pay for any consultancy. Those answers made me understand a bit more of the functioning of the product

Cons:

• imho you cannot learn how to use this tool by yourself (without looking at the code), reverse engineering is hard and time consuming and ineffective
• when you use the tool, you can observe many bugs. Later on, you may discover that by properly configuring the tool, these bugs disappear. But without guidance, you don't know how to configure the tools.

Conclusions

I wasted months trying to understand how to use and configure Jmarket. I gave up due to the anomalies I kept finding.
Either you are a senior developer willing to study the code, or you can't succeed alone.

Advises/observations/suggestions in brief

• tooltips are useful
• there is duplication between Joomla and Jmarket menus which confuses the use of the two software

BUGS

1) I just applied as a vendor and I can see sales of another vendor 

 

I just applied as a vendor, I have not been accepted as a registered user nor as a vendor, but I can see sales of another vendor by clicking on the link "vendor sales".
I tried also in incognito, in another browser, the behaviour is the same.
This buggy behaviour is not observed if the vendor has her own sales (or does the application behave correctly depending on the status of the seller?).

2) I just applied as a vendor and I can create a product without the store manager approving my application

3) As a vendor I can modify the products of another vendor

STEPS TO REPRODUCE

• Login as vendor "Paolo foolminati 2"
• Create a new product (on the frontend https://www.andafa.it/new-product)
• logout
• login as another vendor ("I want to be a vendor")
• go to the product page and edit the product created by the other vendor

ACTUAL
As a vendor I can modify the item of another vendor
EXPECTED
As a vendor I can NOT modify the item of another vendor
BACKGROUND
I explained to xxx that the only way that I have found to grant access the administrator section of joomla/jmarket CMS (backend website) is through the access control list of joomla.
However, as a vendor I could see the orders of all vendors.
So xxx suggested to verify if the same issue affects also the creation of products on the frontend website, and the same visibility issue is there.

UPDATE (Documentation)

This behaviour was caused by a wrong configuration of the access rights (the vendors were managers). Also the pages "create new product" and "vendor sales" were probably set to publicly accessible instead of accessible for registered users

It doesn't occur anymore


UPDATE2
The bug occurred again

4) split payment issues (draft)

It's difficult to understand why the "split payment" appears or not. It seems inconsistent. It's difficult to test

As a Vendor, I should be able to see these menus (https://joobi.org/wiki/catalog/vendors_payment_setup-item-599.htm) to be able to set up a payment gateway. But these menus are not visible to me as a vendor, so the payment gateway used on the website is the one set by the store manager, so all the money from the orders go to the store manager instead of the individual vendors.

Documentation of a few functionalities

1) paypal account

Probably xxx is right about the payment email being the identifier for Joobi to know that the vendor has a paypal account. See "paypal user.png". I created an account and applied as a vendor. Since my email address is not linked to a paypal account, then I see these messages on the screen (does Joobi check against the sandbox.paypal or the productive paypal? I almost sure it's the productive one)

 

2) Vendors can manage products and orders on the frontend website, not on the CMS 

 

For the vendors to see the sales, yoou need to configure the page "Vendor sales" in Joobi administrator page, joobi "Menus", All menu items, "+ New", "Menu Item type", button "Select", Jmarket -> Vendor Sales
Vendors never login in the administrator section.

 

3) Access control

To dig more about access control, you can find a very short introduction https://docs.joomla.org/J1.5:User_Group_Access_levels_explained_in_simple_terms# 
and this resource

https://docs.joomla.org/Help39:Users_Debug_Users

4) split payment

verify that

1. - to configure a split payment, it is necessary for the store manager default payment gateway to have configured a paypal account (see "business account for site manager.png")
2. - verify that it is the commission schema (vendors -> program) to determine the split payment. Verify that it is Joobi which says to paypal to split the payment (see "paypal split.png" as an example of split payment).
3. - verify why the vendor earned 1% instead of 99%

5) Functionality: paypal sandbox payment

Jmarket capability: if you want to try payments on paypal,

• set up a paypal gateway
• there is a "Use sandbox mode" configuration option on "Payment Preferences" which redirects the payments from a paypal.com gateway to the sandbox.paypal.com gateway.

Note about this review

This review is based on a free installation of Joomla and a free instalation of Jmarket

Note about Joobi jmarket on Wordpress

If you try to use jmarket on wordpress, you need to build the whole website and CMS from scratch