Home & Heritage is one of our newest projects that is a labor of love far more than any of our others. It is a site setup with inner systems that take WordPress to the limits and back. This site is one of a kind and I doubt that it could be replicated for other uses. Overall this market site is mostly function rather than fashion but it’s good looks come from it’s usual location of Dog Ear Marketing, all of our good looks always come from DEM.

The site itself is just WordPress and WooCommerce but all of the rest of the pieces that make it up really take it to new heights. Home & Heritage is not only a multi-vendor marketplace, but also a point of sale system for a brick and mortar store as all of the sales come from the store rather than online.

At any given time there are around 50 concurrent users working on the near 20,000 items that are on the site that are scanned at the front of the store to create commissions for the several vendors that work within the store. Not only does this site allow all of the different facets of the business be able to work together it also has a custom reporting side and statement generation piece to it that creates a huge amount of transparency for the vendors that work in the store itself.

What really helps everything come together in this site is the reporting to the vendors themselves. Throughout the month the vendors are able to track all of their sales throughout the month and see what’s outstanding for that months pay.

This site has a lot of bells and whistles built into it and a lot of custom pieces as well as it has a lot of room that it could still grow with automatons. The main one that comes to mind is the pay mechanism that works within the site. As of right now the pay is calculated and then sent out via ACH each month. If enabled this site could send out the commissions based on each sale through Paypal or Stripe instantaneously. The only downside to this great feature would be not allowing the vendor rent to be taken out of the payouts before they are sent as well as creating possibly too many fees for either side of the transaction.

Lastly the site comes with it’s community for support tickets and vendor to vendor and vendor to store communication. All of these things are integrated into the store itself without degrading the site performance allowing all of the customers to be able to work together with the store and have a resource rich store without hurting any of the functions of any part of the store.

This site required a little more beef than our normal sites running on a specialty server. Once we got it all dialed in and all of the features figured out the site loads around in 1 second like most of our sites. Depending on the load (sales, vendor interaction) that the site is experiencing it might take a little longer than that but that is to be expected from a site that is more of a workhorse than the standard WordPress site.

Home & Heritage POS / Vendor Market is a site that anyone should be proud of that has a lot of room for growing if it were to so choose. Hopefully we get to see it expand as it’s used more and more over time.