WordPress entered our lives and helped gain small businesses tremendously. The software allows businesses to create websites far more easily and faster than one would think. But its capabilities are not limited to only that. WordPress business themes allow small businesses and even big brands to widen horizons through their professional feel. One such benefit is through the creation of business vendor communities.
The primary process of creating a website on WordPress is very convenient and seamless. One doesn’t even need to have any pre-acquired knowledge of coding or web designing.
In all honesty, that’s exactly why WordPress stole the spotlight, the ease of creating a digital platform is just too much. In addition, WordPress business themes add all the more appeal to any business website. The best WordPress business themes are created and designed to fit the requirements of any online business.
Registration and profile creation for WordPress website vendors
But WordPress business themes are incomplete without vendor registrations. These registrations help a business enhance and improvise its overall functioning.
Furthermore, it’s because of these vendor registrations that business themes are able to integrate vendor profiles to themselves which is the topic of discussion.
You can understand the vendor registration process and the step to create a vendor registration form for your WordPress website here. Additionally, it’s important to know how customized vendor registration forms enhance your WordPress business theme.
Looking forward to creating vendor registration portals for your website? RegistrationMagic plugin on WordPress is your one-stop solution for everything pertaining to vendor registrations to improvise your business administration.
The focus of our article is on vendor profile creation which is basically the next step of vendor registration. Try the ProfileGrid membership plugin for creating business vendor communities, profiles, and social groups on WordPress.
Rest assured, both of these processes will take your digital business a long way in a lot of aspects without any fail.
How can vendor profiles benefit your WordPress business?
The vendor registration process is beneficial enough as it is. But that’s just one step towards building good business vendor communities for your business. After the fundamental step of registration, the wisest thing to do is to provide vendor profiles to all individuals.
These vendor profiles help the registered members to take a look at all their info related to the business website at a glance and at a single place. Irrespective of the WordPress business themes applied to all websites, the plugin supports easy and quick vendor profile building.
Why should you build your vendor profiles using ProfileGrid? Let’s see:
Primary reasons
- Clearer communication: Vendor profiles help you stay in touch with your vendors, you share a relationship with them. Vendor profiles allow you to ascertain what, how, and when the vendor likes what they like.
- Wider opportunities: Vendor profiles allow room for feedback from the vendors which is too precious. Do you want to get better? Individual vendor feedback is your way to do that.
- Eliminating competition: As mentioned above, a strong relationship with vendors helps you get an edge over the competitors. Constant touch and genuine care for your vendors through such business vendor communities and profiling help you keep them from distracting other brands.
- Profit improvement: Thinking of business from a longer-run point of view, vendor profiles are important. It is true that maintaining an old vendor is more cost-effective than fetching a new one. Vendor profiles help in achieving the same.
Secondary reasons
- Attracting new vendors: Bringing in more new vendors gets too much easier when you know in-depth about the current vendors. Profiling helps you do just that. Insights and lots of it are what it offers!
- Segment targeting: The wisest thing to do after the vendor registration process is to group the vendors and their data based on shared interests. Profiling helps you to reach out to your audience based on segmentation targeting.
- Customized Content: Vendor profiling by means of providing deep insights, also helps in personalizing the content marketing strategies. Being able to sell based on each individual vendor’s context is a gift that your business can get through vendor profiling.
How do business vendor communities enhance satisfaction on your WordPress website?
Vendor groups enhance interaction within your business community. The registered vendors can interact among themselves and with the business representatives. This interaction and transparency lead to an increase in the satisfaction rate for your online business.
Here are 3 sharp reasons how you can take advantage of vendor groups to enhance satisfaction:
- Research and development: Vendor groups allow the business to do solid research on its supplier base all at once. Timely checking on vendor groups of different interests helps the business a lot in the research and development process.
- Enhanced support: The businesses are able to support and help their clients in a lot more connected and personal way through vendor groups. If an entire group is facing the same issue, it puts some weight on the subject for the company to work on right away.
- Better Engagement: Online businesses today function and depend highly on engagement rate. Vendor groups help brands take care of that in so many ways. You have got the profile, the group, filtered community. Now all you need is the right content and you’re good to go. This influences the supplier engagement rate highly.
ProfileGrid acts as a backbone for your business in the event that you wish to create business communities. These communities may range from business networking groups to business connection groups to business interest groups. You can read in-depth on the subject here.
So much said about ProfileGrid’s uses in real-life and the ultimate strategies it helps us with but what exactly is the plugin and what are its features? Let’s dive deep right into it.
ProfileGrid for your WordPress business vendor communities
In easy words, the ProfileGrid plugin is a WordPress plugin that helps you build profiles, groups, and communities for your registered vendors. Above all, the plugin provides better use and implementation for your vendor data. Without a doubt, it’s the most versatile system for profiles and groups on WordPress.
Many excellent global websites that are functioning through WordPress have created excellent and highly competitive communities on the site. Such communities include TED communities, Etsy groups, Sony communities, Dell groups, Microsoft News, etc. Rest assured, these groups and communities are bringing in a profit of millions of dollars for these businesses.
Why are we mentioning this? ProfileGrid is a versatile and high-standard global platform that allows you to build and manage smart communities like the brands mentioned above.
Let brush through some of the most outstanding features of ProfileGrid.
Vendor groups
- Flexibility: With this, you are free to create a wide number of vendor groups with profile fields specific to each group. Better yet, you can create separate registration forms for each group, set different prices and payment modes, add and restrict content as per groups however you wish.
- Properties: Now, the properties option helps you add and alter group names, descriptions, icons/badges, hide/show details, etc. You can also associate WP roles and assign leaders to communities, set a group membership price, pick email templates, etc. In addition, you can also set custom messages or redirect to a page, password change, vendor activation/deactivation, and many more.
- Groups page: Here, from this page, you can enable all settings related to all groups. Name, badge, price of membership, registration button, etc. are some of the options of this feature.
- Customized email: As the name itself suggests, this option allows you to send customized emails to all vendors. Additionally, it also allows for membership request/termination, on-group manager assignment, publishing new posts, etc.
- Privacy and restrictions: From this option, the managers of the website can set restrictions to content and admission permission within groups. Above all, the admin can set privacy levels of the posts for group walls and galleries.
- Group directory: Evident by the title, this option helps the admin of the website get access to an instant directory of all group members. Also, the vendor cards under this category will display Gravatar images, vendor names, field labels, icons, and values, etc.
Vendor Profiles
- Profile pages: These pages are the core of the plugin and represent each individual vendor profile. These pages show cover images, group badges, blogs areas, messaging and notifications areas, etc. This section essentially boosts the utility of your business theme by availing you of all the information regarding group members in one section with individual pages.
- Management: The management option allows the profile owners to edit and manage the vendor profiles. The option also permits change in uploads of all kinds, passwords, profiles, etc. This feature also helps in managing friends, notifications, conversations, etc.
- Sections: The option essentially holds subsets of information about every vendor being organized in profile fields. In addition, the plugin allows for further division of sections. This helps the admin keep a neat record of all members’ data.
- Vendor Directory: The field displays all vendors of the site along with advanced search options. The results of the search are filtered using AJAX. The field also shows vendor cards that hold quite a lot of vendor information. The glory of the business theme is highlighted even more by such brilliant and modern digital options.
- Templates: This option allows for the admin to choose from 8 built-in templates to customize the front-end of the page. Although, this helps you bring your groups and community aesthetics in sync with your business theme too.
- Tabs: The ProfileGrid tabs allow a seamless drag option for the admin to change profile tab orders and rename tabs as per the requirement.
- Private Profile: The admin gets the option to make any profile or group private if they wish to. Of course, it’s not mandatory.
- Element Visibility: This permits the admin to hide or show elements or content on any of the profiles.
Profile Modules
- Social blogs: The admin can allow vendors to submit and publish blog posts on groups using a simple shortcode. All vendors will have the right to define their own privacy levels for their posts. However, all WordPress business themes are unfinished without some social activity and this option lets you do just that with added benefits.
- Messaging: The messaging option allows the vendors to send private messages to each other. All vendors will be allowed to have specified areas in their profiles to manage multiple conversations. This adds even more to your business theme for all professional interactions.
- Friends: The plugin allows vendors a second privacy circle allowing them to share content in multiple ways. Above all, vendors are free to send/receive friend requests, share content, manage friend lists, and much more. In conclusion, your website theme is advanced even more with such interactive options for the communities.
Group Modules
- The Group wall field: The group wall option allows for the exchange of ideas within enclosed groups, posting central notifications by admins, etc.
- All Group photos: This option allows for the group photos to be organized and posted in high order. It allows easy setup, of photo galleries, album-based grouping, photo details, etc.
Registration Forms
- Registration Forms: Above all, ProfileGrid allows you to collect data using separate vendor-registration forms for all groups. In addition, you are free to define the fields of these forms as per your requirements. All advanced websites built through WordPress have added registration forms to them in one way or the other.
- Vendor registration data: Next, this option allows you to enable/disable the option to get you all registration data via email
- Spam Protection: The reCaptcha option in the plugin avoids any spam registrations. This is one trick that helps you protect your theme and vendor data both with one arrow.
- Vendor account activation: The option as suggested by the title, helps in activating vendor accounts for profile creation. Furthermore, this helps the admin of the website take care of the vendor account activation process and all things surrounding it easily.
Best of all, the above-mentioned features are available for all. Additionally, the premium version of the plugin comes with a lot more surprises. You can unlock powerful options of profile and community management through ProfileGrid premium.
Creating WordPress business vendor communities through WooCommerce integration
ProfileGrid’s Advanced WooCommerce vendor profiles are the next big step in integrating WordPress vendor profiles with WooCommerce’s eCommerce features. With the basic ProfileGrid & WooCommerce Integration, we provided you the ability to display WooCommerce purchases and other customer-oriented activity on ProfileGrid vendor profiles. If you wish to know more about how the basic ProfileGrid & WooCommerce Integration works, check out our guide Free WooCommerce User Profiles.
Now, we introduce a complete vendor-oriented environment to ProfileGrid user profiles with the new ProfileGrid Advanced WooCommerce Integration. To make Advanced WooCommerce User Profiles work on your WordPress site, you need to have the following plugins installed and active.
Go ahead and add them to your site now, if you haven’t already done so. Next, it is time to move forward and see your ProfileGrid vendor profile turn into a WooCommerce shop.
The Global Setting
After installation and activation from the ‘Plugins’ tab inside the WP dashboard, visit the ‘Global Settings’ under the ‘ProfileGrid’ dashboard tab. In it, you will see the new setting by the name of ‘WooCommerce (Advanced)’. To proceed ahead, click on this new setting.
Inside this settings category, you will see the option to enable Advanced WooCommerce Integration. Go ahead and enable it now.
The Group Settings
Once the advanced integration is enabled, it will add three new options to the Group Settings screen in the dashboard. These are…
- Display WooCommerce Vendor Dashboard Tab: Enabling this will display the complete WooCommerce Vendor Dashboard of WC Vendors Marketplace inside your ProfileGrid user profile. If you are using the Pro version of WC Vendors Marketplace, then the enhanced version of the WooCommerce Vendor Dashboard will display. This tab will only be visible on a user’s own profile.
- Display Shop Tab: Enabling this will display all products uploaded by a user for sale on the ProfileGrid user profile. This tab will be visible to all users.
- Display Shop Settings Tab: Enabling this will display the settings related to shopping setup as provided by WC Vendors Marketplace on the ProfileGrid user profile.
Advanced WooCommerce User Profiles
Now that all the required settings are configured from the ProfileGrid dashboard, let’s see how the WooCommerce profile is going to appear on the front-end of our website.
On the WooCommerce Vendor Dashboard tab, you can see all the statistics provided by WC Vendors to WooCommerce vendors.
On the Shop tab, you can see the products uploaded by a vendor for sale via WooCommerce and WC Vendors plugin. This tab enables ProfileGrid WooCommerce profiles to act as a marketplace where users can buy and sell products, all the while making friends, joining groups, and engaging in text chats.
On the Shop Settings tab, all the settings controlling the vendor’s shop is displayed. From here, a vendor can configure Shop name, Description, Bank Details, etc.
Closing thoughts
To make the best use of your WordPress business, vendor registrations are necessary. But the process doesn’t just end there. You must make judicious use of the data collected through such registration forms.
ProfileGrid ensures the best possible establishments for your vendor registration data. Therefore, enriching your current WordPress business with vendor profiles, groups, and business communities might be a beneficial idea.
Still in doubt? Check out the ProfileGrid free membership plugin today!