Vendor Overview

How to Create a Vendor Account

We will release a vendor sign-up form, but if it’s not visible on the Sitetheory.io website then your vendor account will be created manually. The vendor account can be accessed and managed on the admin.sitetheory.io website.

Types of Vendor Accounts

Most vendors will have a syndication relationship with the Sitetheory vendor. This means that they will inherit all the functionality and content types of the Sitetheory vendor. This prevents them from having to recreate everything from scratch. But if a vendor wants to use the Sitetheory platform for something entirely different than a traditional website builder and CMS, they can become an independent vendor and create their own content types and functionality from scratch.

Vendor Account Functionality and Purpose

The Vendor account has several purposes, but generally allows a vendor to customize the service they offer their clients.

Manage Site Genres

Based on the Vendor’s target audience, the Vendor will create Genres that are selected by clients when they sign up. These genres will be linked to the Vendor’s Master sites, so that when a client creates a new site, it will be deployed with content that is duplicated to provide a fully functional basic site.

Typical Genres may include vertical market categories like “Blog”, “Artist”, “Small Business”, “Realtor”, “Church”, etc.

Manage Subscription Products

Vendors are required to create their own subscription packages so they can set prices and service levels that are appropriate for their business model. It’s simple to create subscriptions and specify what content types (pages and functionality) each package has the ability to access.

Vendors can also view all the clients that are using their subscriptions, add, edit or remove subscriptions for their clients.

Automated Billing and Invoice Management

Vendors will provide their merchant account (credit card processing) account information and the Sitetheory system will manage the billing process for all their clients (using their bank information).

Whenever a product is purchased (or a subscription is billed on a regular basis) a new invoice is added to the Billing History. Billing History will show the products (including subscriptions) that were purchased and indicate the billing method that was used. If there was an error with billing, the invoice will be flagged as unpaid and the client will be required to update billing information to retry. Vendors can manage these invoices, edit or cancel.

Vendor’s Custom Admin Site

When a vendor creates an account, they will also have a separate “Admin Site” created for them on their vendor’s Admin site (e.g. admin.sitetheory.io). By default this will be duplicated (syndicated) from the Sitetheory Admin site, which means it’s a fully functional Admin optimized for providing your clients all the functionality they need for building and managing their website.

The vendor’s custom Admin site will be white-labeled with the vendor’s logo/name and contact information. It can also be customized (like any website) by editing the theme template files to match any design you want. It can also create custom pages and links to add, remove or customize the workflow to meet your business needs, e.g. you may want to create another main section for “marketing” or any other service you offer, and then provide custom forms, functionality, workflows for your clients there.

Vendor Master Sites

Most vendors are going to want to create Master Sites for each of their different genres. The master sites will provide default content and menu structure that will be duplicated whenever a new client creates a website and selects the genre associated with that master site.

Master Sites are created in the Vendor’s Admin site like any other website, and choose the genre that they belong to. Any user with “vendor” permissions will be given the ability to flag a site as “Master Site” and also set whether sites that are deployed from the master site either “duplicate” the content and then remain independent, or if they “syndicate” the content (and are linked to the master site, to receive updates and new content as it’s modified on the master site).