Woocommerce store

When it comes to e-Commerce solutions, your requirements are describing a complex business model. Formidable is a form tool, which means data collection and storage. The filtering and reporting capabilities of any off the shelf form tool, Formidable included, will be limited. The account creating and product upload piece is not a problem. Sales reports come from WooCommerce, not Formidable, but even at that, sales reporting in WooCommerce is limited.

It sounds like you want a multi-vendor solution. There are multi-vendor extensions available that add the reporting you want. The way they work is to give each vendor their own store. You can then either aggregate reports for the entire coop or run individual reports for the vendors.

The are quite a few filtering extensions available for WooCommerce that work with Ajax, meaning they provide results in real time without refreshing the browser. You should probably search these out and fit your need. The thing that concerns me is the requirement for the conditional display of certain search fields. I don't know of any off the shelf products that do this. This leads me to believe that your requirement may necessitate custom programming. I have another customer that had this requirement for their WooCommerce solution and I had to code the filtering from scratch because at the time I couldn't find anything in the marketplace that could meet the requirement. You can see the result here: https://houseplanworks.com/

Hi Victor,

Thank you very much for responding in such detail.

I do not need complex sales reporting from Woocommerce; basically it will suffice to present the content creator with the number of sales in a time period. Any other information collected would be a bonus.
I've looked at all the multi-vendor solutions, but don't want to overwhelm content creators with Wordpress backend submissions. I believe some of the solutions provide a front end submission to address this, but it is a paid addon. I don't have a problem paying for that, but it got me thinking about building my own with forms. I'm also concerned about bloat in multi-vendor solutions that would slow down the site and finally, I expect I would have less granular functional and aesthetic control with that approach.
I've also looked a bunch of search and filter plugins. Saw some very robust ones so I expect I would find one that met my needs. Again, just figured I could exercise more control over the experience with a custom form. I did notice at least one plugin that offered conditional fields.
Most importantly...I really appreciate the houseplanworks.com example. Thank you. I tested the site on mobile as well as desktop. I found the desktop instance to be rather slow, but the mobile instance was so slow that I don't really think it's useable...up to three seconds to register a radial button click. If this is what I can expect on my site, it would be better to explore an ecom platform like Shopify.

Hmm...I'm  surprised you experienced such a response time with HPW. That site has been optimized for sub-second and has bee thoroughly tested across the US. The server is located in Chicago. In fact, I just tested it again myself and the search filter produces results in 3-tenths of a second. I guess wherever you're located is creating a latency issue.

I live close to San Francisco.

I'm not talking about yielding search results. I'm talking about how long it takes to activate a button. Just checked again on my desktop. I can tell you that I've never noticed a button take this long to activate. Well over a second for a checkbox to go from unchecked to checked. To be clear, no other part of my current online session is experiencing speed issues.

I'm using Chrome. Just checked the site on Safari and the same thing.

I've noticed sluggish responses on other Wordpress sites. Is this to be expected with the platform?

There are so many factors that affect perceived website speed that it would take a book to name them all. The website itself can be optimized for speed and test as extremely fast, yet people in different locations can perceive differences from measured results. This may nothing to do with WordPress, the underlying architecture or anything on the server. It may be entirely internet related.

When you access a website, the data being transferred from the host computer is traveling through many, many access points to reach your destination. This is call the route and each access point is a hop. If you run a traceroute test from your computer to any URL, you can see how many hops a data packet takes to reach its destination. Each one of these hops is a potential bottleneck in the route. What complicates things is that each time you connect to the internet, the route can change to a particular site due to localized outages or other issues.

I have a client that was using Network Solutions as their host. With Google forcing everyone's hand to https, I updated their site to use a SSL certificate. Network Solutions installs SSL certificates on proxy servers that adds an extra hop to the route. Their site went from sub-second response time to over 2o seconds to load a page. The site itself didn't change. The route changed causing a bottleneck at the proxy server.

The HPW site is extremely fast and is optimized as much as it can be. You are the first person ever to report perceived slowness. I can guarantee that there is a bottleneck somewhere along the route between the server in Chicago and your location. You also have to understand when a website has an Ajax filtering system like HPW's, you are requesting that the server runs a new database query every time you select an option. This means the site displayed in your browser is sending a round trip request to the server in Chicago. It is sending the data back to the server and asking for the database query to be run. The database query is executed and a the new data packets are sent back to your and displayed in your browser. When their is a bottleneck in your route, this delay is multiplied x2. This is not something that can be "fixed" at a site level. It's the way the internet works.