B2B & Wholesale for Your Dokan Marketplace (Without Replacing Dokan)

Dokan turns WooCommerce into a multi-vendor marketplace, and it’s very good at it — vendors, sub-orders, payouts, the vendor dashboard. What Dokan doesn’t do is B2B: customer-group pricing per vendor, trade registration and approval, per-vendor invoices, wholesale ordering across several vendors at once.

That’s the gap Softminal B2B for Dokan fills. It’s a small bridge add-on that teaches B2B Suite about a Dokan marketplace. It does not replace Dokan — Dokan still owns vendors, sub-orders and the dashboard. The bridge layers wholesale on top, so “Wholesale customers get 15% off Acme’s whole catalogue” becomes a thing your marketplace can actually do.

This guide explains what the bridge does, what it needs, and how it fits together.

TL;DR

• Softminal B2B for Dokan is a bridge add-on that makes B2B Suite vendor-aware on a Dokan marketplace. It doesn’t reinvent Dokan — it sits on top of it.
• It adds vendor-scoped wholesale pricing & quantity rules, per-vendor invoices, marketplace trade registration & approval, cross-vendor bulk ordering, and a vendor-dashboard B2B pricing tab.
• Vendor prices rank correctly against product, category and store-wide rules, on one precedence ladder — no guesswork about which discount wins.
• It’s a free download, entitled by your B2B Suite Pro licence — no separate key. It activates only when B2B Suite (free core) + B2B Suite Pro + Dokan are all present; otherwise it stays idle with a single explanatory notice.
• On a single-merchant store the underlying B2B seams cost nothing — they’re inert until a real marketplace vendor is involved.
• Per-vendor net terms / credit / payouts are deliberately not in v1 — vendor settlement is a hard problem we’d rather do right than fast.

What the bridge is (and isn’t)

A marketplace plugin and a B2B plugin want to own different things, and the trick is to not make them fight.

It is a translator. Dokan already knows who the vendor of a product is (it’s the product’s author) and already splits a multi-vendor order into per-vendor sub-orders. B2B Suite already knows how to resolve a customer-group price and render an invoice. The bridge connects the two: it tells B2B Suite which vendor owns a product, and lets B2B price and invoice per vendor.

It is not a marketplace engine. It doesn’t touch vendor registration, payouts, commissions, store pages or the vendor dashboard’s existing tabs — Dokan keeps all of that. And it’s not a fork of B2B Suite: all the Dokan-specific knowledge lives in the bridge, so the core B2B plugins stay marketplace-agnostic and work exactly the same on a normal single-merchant store.

What you get

Five capabilities, each one B2B Suite already knows how to do — now applied per vendor:

• Vendor-scoped pricing & quantity rules. The marketplace owner can price a whole vendor’s catalogue for a customer group — “Wholesale gets 15% off everything Acme sells” — plus per-vendor minimum quantities and order rules.
• Per-vendor invoices. A multi-vendor order produces one invoice per vendor, each carrying that vendor’s own store name and details. Buyers and admins get a per-vendor download link on the parent order.
• Marketplace trade registration & approval. The B2B trade-registration and approval flow works marketplace-wide, with optional per-vendor buyer approval for vendors who want to vet their own trade customers.
• Cross-vendor bulk ordering. The bulk order form shows which vendor sells each product and prices every line by its vendor, so a wholesale buyer can fill one basket across many vendors.
• Vendor self-service. A “B2B Pricing” tab in the Dokan vendor dashboard where each vendor sets their own wholesale pricing — for their own catalogue only.

How vendor pricing is decided

The moment you add vendor pricing on top of product, category and store-wide pricing, the obvious question is: when two discounts could apply, which one wins?

B2B Suite answers that with a single, fixed precedence ladder, and the vendor level slots into it cleanly:

customer → company → product → category → tag → vendor → global

Read left to right, most specific wins. A price set for a specific customer beats a company price; a product-specific rule beats a category rule; a vendor rule (all of Acme’s products) sits just above the store-wide global band. So a vendor-wide “15% off Acme” applies broadly, but a sharper product or category rule still takes precedence where you’ve set one. No surprises, and you can always confirm the outcome with Pricing → Check a price, which shows the whole precedence walk.

Because a vendor is simply the product’s author, vendor pricing needs no special product tagging and no extra pricing cache — it rides the machinery that’s already there.

Vendor self-service

Marketplace owners rarely want to hand-set wholesale pricing for every vendor forever. So beyond admin-set pricing, each vendor gets a “B2B Pricing” tab inside their normal Dokan dashboard.

There a vendor can set a catalogue-wide wholesale discount per customer group — for their own products only. The bridge stamps ownership on those rules and validates it on every write, so one vendor can never price, edit or even see another vendor’s rules. It’s the same pricing engine the marketplace owner uses, scoped down to one seller.

What it needs to run

The bridge activates only when all three of these are present:

1. B2B Suite for WooCommerce — the free core, new enough to expose the vendor seams.
2. B2B Suite for WooCommerce Pro — with a valid licence. The bridge is a free download entitled by your Pro licence, so there’s no separate key to buy or manage.
3. Dokan — Lite or Pro.

If any of those is missing, the bridge simply stays idle and shows a single admin notice telling you what’s needed. It never fatals or half-activates.

Because it’s a Pro-entitled add-on rather than a standalone plugin, it’s distributed through Softminal — every B2B Suite Pro customer can download it and it auto-updates with the same Pro licence.

What’s not in v1 (and why)

One thing is deliberately left out of the first release: per-vendor net terms, credit and payouts.

B2B Suite has a full net-terms and credit ledger, but on a marketplace, “pay on account” collides with vendor settlement — who is owed what, when a buyer pays late against an order split across five vendors, and how that reconciles with Dokan’s payouts. That’s a genuinely hard problem, and getting it subtly wrong means money that doesn’t add up. We’d rather ship it correctly later than approximately now.

Everything else B2B — group pricing, quantity rules, registration, invoices, quotes, bulk ordering — is in v1.

WCFM and other marketplaces aren’t supported yet either; vendor resolution sits behind a filter specifically so another marketplace bridge can plug in later without touching core.

Setting it up

1. Have the prerequisites active. B2B Suite (free) + B2B Suite Pro (licensed) + Dokan.
2. Install the bridge. Download Softminal B2B for Dokan from your Softminal account — it’s included with your Pro licence — and activate it. It confirms all three prerequisites and switches on.
3. Set vendor pricing. As the marketplace owner, add a price rule scoped to a vendor for a customer group (for example, Wholesale → Acme → 15% off). Or let vendors set their own from the B2B Pricing tab in their dashboard.
4. Check a price. Use Pricing → Check a price on one of that vendor’s products, as a customer in the group, and read the trail to confirm the vendor rule wins where it should.
5. Place a test multi-vendor order and confirm you get one invoice per vendor, each with the right store details.

FAQ

Does the bridge replace Dokan?

No. Dokan keeps ownership of vendors, sub-orders, payouts and the vendor dashboard. The bridge only adds the B2B layer — pricing, registration, invoices, bulk ordering — on top.

Do I need B2B Suite Pro?

Yes. The bridge is a free download, but it’s entitled by a valid B2B Suite Pro licence and won’t activate without Pro (and Dokan) present. There’s no separate key for the bridge.

Will it slow down or change my normal (non-marketplace) store?

No. All Dokan-specific logic lives in the bridge, and the vendor seams in core stay inert until a real marketplace vendor is involved. A single-merchant B2B store behaves exactly as it did before.

Which discount wins when a vendor rule and a product rule both apply?

The more specific one. The ladder is customer → company → product → category → tag → vendor → global, so a product- or category-specific rule beats a vendor-wide rule, which in turn beats the store-wide global band. Pricing → Check a price shows the full decision for any product and customer.

Can each vendor manage their own wholesale pricing?

Yes. Every vendor gets a “B2B Pricing” tab in their Dokan dashboard where they set a catalogue-wide wholesale discount per group — for their own products only. Ownership is enforced, so vendors can’t see or touch each other’s rules.

Can wholesale buyers order from several vendors at once?

Yes. The cross-vendor bulk order form shows which vendor sells each product and prices every line by its vendor, so one basket can span the whole marketplace.

What about pay-on-account and credit for marketplace buyers?

Not in v1. Per-vendor net terms, credit and payouts are deferred until vendor settlement can be done correctly.

Conclusion

A Dokan marketplace and a B2B store want the same customers to behave in two different ways — and until now you had to pick one. Softminal B2B for Dokan lets you run both: Dokan keeps doing multi-vendor commerce, B2B Suite adds group pricing, trade accounts, per-vendor invoices and bulk ordering, and the bridge makes the two agree on which vendor owns what.

It’s a free add-on for B2B Suite Pro customers, it stays out of the way until all three plugins are present, and it’s honest about the one thing it doesn’t do yet.

Get B2B Suite free on WordPress.org to start, then add Pro and the Dokan bridge when you’re ready to go multi-vendor. Questions? The docs cover every setting, and support is here to help.