Super simple for a multi-vendor marketplace
February 05, 2021

Super simple for a multi-vendor marketplace

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with CS-Cart Multi-Vendor Marketplace Platform

We are currently a small start-up with big plans, and CS-Cart is making it easy to realise those. We are utilising the multi-vendor functionality to quickly and easily create a marketplace with hundreds of thousands of products spread amongst an equally large number of categories. Though we are launching in a single (English-speaking) country, soon after launch we plan to take advantage of the multi-language capabilities to expand easily to other regions.
Technically it has been very easy to learn, extend, and style, and the marketplace has an amazing selection of both paid and free add-ons that we have also utilised. The page designer is extremely easy to use, and the REST APIs make it very easy to work with data, though I feel like these could be further enhanced for greater flexibility as they are an easy way to work with bulk data. Though the admin interface seems to struggle a little with the large number of categories and products (we haven't looked into any optimisation yet) the caching options on the client-facing side mean that the site will still be extremely fast.
One thing I would like to see added to the core product is the option to store media in a cloud PaaS offering such as AWS S3 bucket or Azure blob storage as we have many hundreds of GB of media, but for now this is a customisation we can look into in the future.
  • Quick and easy set up of a multi-vendor marketplace
  • Very easy-to-use page designer
  • Huge marketplace of add-ons to cover pretty much anything you need
  • Struggles a bit with 1 million categories / product with dozens of categories assigned
  • Default MyISAM tables meaning conversions is required to move to cloud options like RDS
  • No default option to use cloud storage for media (eg. S3 Bucket / Azure blob storage)
  • Saved time and money building a custom solution or extending another product
With a most of our previous experience in .NET we have also used nopCommerce and Sitecore Commerce, however neither of these really have the multi-vendor marketplace functionality that we needed out-of-the-box. Though we needed to enhance our PHP capabilities, CS-Cart was the obvious choice.

Do you think CS-Cart Multi-Vendor delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with CS-Cart Multi-Vendor's feature set?

Yes

Did CS-Cart Multi-Vendor live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of CS-Cart Multi-Vendor go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy CS-Cart Multi-Vendor again?

Yes

Super easy to use for developers, admins, and content editors. Could use a bit of a touch up for usability when working with really massive datasets.
Very easy to get in touch with CS-Cart support and good partner network active on the forums and marketplace
Great for a quick and easy setup of a multi-vendor solution, supporting multiple stores / languages / payment options. Will probably need some tuning if you have 1 million products or so. Great if you have a PHP dev or team, probably not the best option if you don't know the language and need to customise backend logic.

CS-Cart Multi-Vendor Feature Ratings

Product catalog & listings
10
Product management
9
Bulk product upload
9
Branding
9
Mobile storefront
10
Product variations
9
Website integration
10
Visual customization
9
CMS
8
Abandoned cart recovery
Not Rated
Checkout user experience
8
eCommerce security
Not Rated
Promotions & discounts
Not Rated
Personalized recommendations
Not Rated
SEO
Not Rated
Multi-site management
10
Order processing
9
Inventory management
8
Shipping
Not Rated
Custom functionality
9

CS-Cart Multi-Vendor Marketplace Platform Implementation

Mostly extremely easy to implement, both back-end logic as well as styling. Great addon marketplace helped, particularly around payment options.
Not sure - We're currently a startup so we were using CS-Cart from the start
  • Skilling up in PHP
  • Importing massive amounts of data as quickly as possible
  • Had to extend the REST API for common products (rather than vendor-specific)

CS-Cart Multi-Vendor Marketplace Platform Training

Yes very easy to learn without training. Great documentation available online, and free support for the first month or so. Need a base knowledge of PHP for backend customisations, and frontend for styling, but easy to pick up from there.

Using CS-Cart Multi-Vendor Marketplace Platform

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Page designer
  • Working with products
  • Viewing order data
  • Adding additional users / vendors
  • Nothing really, it's all pretty easy
Yes - Really well designed so that it's pretty much just as easy to do things on mobile as it is on desktop!