Item: CS-Cart Multi-Vendor
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with CS-Cart Multi-Vendor Marketplace Platform

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Pros

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

Cons

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)

Return on Investment

Saved time and money building a custom solution or extending another product

Alternatives Considered

nopCommerce and Sitecore Experience Commerce

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.

Key Insights

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

Other Software Used

Sitecore Experience Platform, WordPress

Usability

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.

Support Rating

Very easy to get in touch with CS-Cart support and good partner network active on the forums and marketplace

Likelihood to Recommend

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.