Merchants

Merchants are the people behind the products in your marketplace. They can be a single person or a team of people.

Your company can also be a merchant in your marketplace. If you want to publish products of your own, you’ll need to create a merchant profile for yourselves.

Merchant properties

Merchants have name (which isn’t necessarily unique) and a hash which is unique.

Other properties can be added and selected by you in the Store settings page.

Available properties:

  • Business name
  • Location
  • Profile picture
  • Cover picture
  • Website link
  • Support link
  • Twitter link
  • Instagram link
  • Custom fields (tiers, badges, etc)

Merchant profile page

Merchants can have a unique url, that is used to access their profile page. Something like https://sidedish.store/@merchant

To set a url for all merchants go to the Store settings page.

Creating a Merchant

Merchants can be created in three ways:

  1. In the SideDish admin dashboard
  2. By using the API, from your own app.
  3. By merchants themselves using the New Merchant embeddable component.

Once a merchant is created, it isn’t yet published. You will need to publish them in the Dashboard app, or by using the API.

Merchant teams

Merchants can have multiple people working on their team. Adding people to their team can be done from multiple methods:

  1. In the SideDish admin dashboard
  2. By using the API
  3. By the merchants themselves, in their Team page, available from the Merchant embeddable component.

Merchant possibilities

Successful marketplaces require full cooperation from the merchants. They are the ones who can create products. To better assist them with this, SideDish provides the following features:

  • Self management of their profile page
  • Self management of their team
  • Self management of their payments
  • Upload documents
  • Creation of products
  • Editing of products
  • Responding to reviews

Since we fully support every action from the API, you can have all these functionalities from your own app and your own components.

Authenticating merchants

If you want to use SideDish’s interface and the prebuilt components, you’ll need to authenticate your merchants.

Merchants can be authenticated in two ways:

  1. By you, using the API to create End User tokens. See here
  2. By utilizing SideDish login page.