CS-Cart Multi-Vendor

Pros: As I mentioned in the title, CS-Cart is the best e-commerce software I have seen and experienced with its algorithm and depth. I think it is an e-commerce ecosystem. You will see that if it continues to spread over time and can continue its development at this pace, it will take on a unique ERP structure in the e-commerce field. In addition, it is unrivaled in the Marketplace category even in its raw form. It would not be wrong to call it the puzzle of the e-commerce sector thanks to its 100% open source and flexible structure in terms of development.

Cons: The user authorization section needs to be developed in its raw form, and the address section on the payment page needs to be developed a little more, which will allow inexperienced users who are just starting out to warm up to the system. The scope of the filter feature needs to be developed a little more, as the default features are not enough. It would be great if an accounting module, even if small, was added to its content in order to track orders and issue invoices.

Overall: CS-Cart is a software that professionals will prefer and be satisfied with, with its flexibility, quality, deep code structure and most importantly, its nested algorithm and hierarchical structure. In my opinion, the only track that can compete with it is the software that supports the e-commerce module in the ERP category. Other than that, I think it is unrivaled.

Pros: Very high expertise.
Perfect attitude to customer needs.
Speed of reaction to reported topics.
Wide offer in the standard version.

Cons: It is quite expensive solution but for sure worth the money.

Overall: I waited six months to give my opinion to make it reliable. At that time, I was working very intensively on adjusting the standard offer to my business. I have Multivendor Ultimate.
I can say with full conviction that most of my needs were satisfied with standard functions. What was not included in the standard I bought as a functional addition.
What's really important, my business was profitable after just 4 months.
And now the most important advantage of CS-CART. These are the people in the sales department in customer service. Extremely high level of competence and commitment. They react immediately and are always open to further help. This gives me a great comfort of work, especially at the beginning of the project, where we focus on business development and technical challenges are solved by the CS-Cart team.

Pros: - Lifetime licence WITH updates

- NO forced subscriptions

- awesome support that works with you and comes up with competent solutions and out of the box thinking

- highly flexible and scalable system

- nearly everything can be done with just php, js and HTML & CSS

- steady stream of updates that offer actual improvements

- wide range of addons (in varying quality) available

- very active community

- decent documentation

Cons: - huge DOM size when using a few addons

- niche product and thus very little support from market leading ERPs or shop systems when it comes to migration and integration

- not the newest tech underneath (which is a pro & con)

- bit picky when it comes to image and thumbnail handling

- if you have to meet European legal standards (regarding taxation, GDPR, unit price, cookie management, energy labels and much, much more) you will have mod in EVERYTHING... it is totally doable, but you have to be aware of it

Overall: If you want to build an actual MARKETPLACE with multiple vendors, there is not much software that will allow you to do that.

I researched greatly before starting our project www(dot)fairfox(dot )shop and in hindsight CS Cart was definitely the right call!
Even though the system is built around certain marketplace models and the internal logic is built with a certain moneyflow in mind, you can still manage to tweak it so that it will fit your concept, no matter how far out it is.
Granted, though, this does not happen overnight. For most people I believe this is not a turn-key solution but then again, I cannot imagine a marketplace software that is.

And that's the beauty of CS Cart: no matter what kind of marketplace or what kind of business-model you want to realize - you just can! Maybe not as streamline as with a tailor-made solution but certainly easier, cheaper and faster!
You will profit greatly from either being able to code yourself or having someone that can. But depending on how much you need to mod CS Cart you may get away without coding - especially with the very helpful support!

But be warned: if you are EU based, you WILL to do A LOT of modding to make your marketplace legally incontestable.

Be also warned: there are a lot of addons available, but there are also some devs that re borderline scammers. This is not inherently the fault of CS Cart...just know that you cannot necessarily trust good reviews.

Here are some special pointers to Germans who want to work with CSC:

Do proper research about what payment service provider you want to /can use and if it there is a ready-to-go CS Cart implementation. PayPal Commerce for instance is almost impossible to get in or even get proper information about.

Pros: One of the important advantages for me is the clear intuitive interface of the admin panel. Before choosing, I was able to try the demo version. I myself use two different versions from CS-CART, this is like an ordinary Internet store, as well as Multi-Vendor. Quite a lot of additions and extensions. The forum also helps a lot, where many users share their problems and solutions to these problems. There are some very serious companies that write add-ons to extend the functionality of the base configuration. In one word, simplicity. This is one of the most important advantages of this platform.

Cons: It turned out to be not pleasant for me the increase in prices for platform updates, as well as very high prices for Plus and Ultimate. But if you take into account that the Ultimate version has lifelong updates, this may explain the rather high price. In my opinion, there are not enough standard themes (templates) of design. And this, of course, is solved, but for an additional fee.

Overall: In general, if you compare the pros and cons, there are much more pluses. Of course, like everyone else, you want everything to be cheaper and more accessible, but you need to understand how much work is involved in the development of this product. I would definitely advise you to review and use this platform. Because I use it myself and I like it. If you want to create and try your own marketplace on any topic, and you do not have a staff of programmers, you will be able to cope with this platform with your own strength at the initial stage, I think this is a pretty big plus. I wish you all the best.

Pros: CS-Cart Multivendor is a fast, efficient, and above all affordable solution for young start-ups and larger online stores.

The platform offers a great balance of scalability, flexibility, and security. It allows admins and sellers to effectively grow customer engagement, traffic, and revenue with a whole suite of optional addons (available on CS-Cart Marketplace).

You'll be able to have unlimited sellers who can list unlimited products. CS-Cart Multivendor allows you to create physical, downloadable, and variable products.

As an administrator, you can use CS-Cart Multivendor to control everything that happens on your marketplace. Vendor registration, product posting, subscription renewal, and all other vendor activities can be done through you.

Cons: Wish they had more updated themes available. Of course, a good web designer can easily handle this but still... wish CS-Cart could provide 2 or 3 of them.

Overall: In the end, CS-Cart Multivendor offers everything you need to develop your marketplace. Don't hesitate to read their documentation to discover all the features of the platform.

Pros: - Great tech support from the development team
- Cs-Cart Multivendor has a massive amount of features from simple to complex built in that with other services like Shopify or WordPress you would need loads of plugins for which end up costing more to use than a Cs-Cart licence.
- Large amount of plugins available from third-party developers that can add even more platform capability.
- Active forums with third-party developers and other users always at hand to help
- Great for companies of all sizes whether you have 100 products or 10,000
- The features available such as built in SEO and the mass of options available for listing products mean you can be as detailed or as simple as you like when vendors are listing products.
- Solutions for things like Taxes and Shipping worldwide are built in, making expansion easier.
- Great overview of sales details to give you more information
- Lots of great tutorial guides made by the devs which is perfect for new users, but can be a bit daunting.
- It offers a one stop solution for the majority of Marketplace businesses.
- Ever growing integration with providers for things like accepting payments and other solutions.
- A Lifetime Licence which means you pay once and own it forever, which works out much cheaper than competitors solutions long term. You just need to keep up with the yearly subscriptions to upgrade the software, which is value for money.
- the system can adapt to multiple business models allowing for flexibility.

Cons: - I wish there was a bigger variety of themes for website owners to choose from, there are many themes but because Cs-Cart is a more complex and niche service the options are less than other services like Shopify. But it makes up for that in features.
- More inbuilt integration with a bigger variety of third parties for services like Accounting would be a big plus.
- Cs-Cart is very complex, and although anyone can learn how to use it, the learning curve for this product is quite dramatic, this platform really can scale and as such can be quite daunting to learn all of it's features.
- Importing mass products from other websites can be slightly frustrating as most e-commerce sites make their XML product files in different layouts, so can be a bit fiddly to mass import we found.

Overall: Overall we are very happy with Cs-Cart and would recommend it to other businesses.
The platform is very high quality with quality code, massive amounts of features built in for a one off licence cost, and the updates you pay for yearly which are value for money to keep your platform up to date and secure.

It's really well optimized and can be adapted and customized in many ways, ultimately by choosing Cs-Cart we were able to save a lot of money long term compared to other solutions like Shopify, which has a monthly payment but also is very limited in features meaning you need to pay for loads of different plugins per month.

If you can find a theme that works for you, and you check the features match up with what you need, we would definitely recommend Cs-Cart Multivendor as a solution for most businesses small and large, it speaks volumes that so many massive companies with 10,000+ products choose Multivendor to run their marketplace.

Having tried WordPress and Shopify, we found that Cs-Cart was a must-have for a multivendor marketplace platform and would choose it again.

Pros: - Easy to install;
- Easy to configure;
- Easy to use for administrators;
- Easy to use for sellers;
- Easy to use for buyers...
.. and many other verbs which can be used with the word "easy" =)

The CS-Cart Multi-Vendor is the marketplace solution that helped me to start easily my small business and of course, I will use it in the future.

When I was looking for the engine to make a website on, I couldn't find anything better than CS-Cart Multi-Vendor.

Cons: High cost of advanced versions (CS-Cart Multi-Vendor Plus/Ultimate).

Overall: Personally, I recommend this to you for purchase. I'm sure you can't find a better solution from other companies.

Moreover, you can always try the free demo version before buying.

Pros: I am Mohammed and use CS-Cart Multi-Vendor.

CS-Cart Multi-Vendor platform is something many startups as well as established businesses would love to have as it is a robust platform which is built ground up as a multivendor marketplace solution unlike many others which are not comprehensive but CS-Cart gives you superb support along with upgrades on regular intervals and this saves you tons of money if you had to hire a developer and customize, as you can do it all yourself with a little effort and they have a super detailed User guide to do it all, from installation to final setup and running your website.
Let me explain in detail with my experience as i use CS-Cart Multi-Vendor,
1. firstly i wanted the best multivendor solution with good features needed to manage a marketplace and also wanted to be sure that the platform will be upgraded on long term basis, along with options of addons and themes to further enhance my marketplace, after researching i found that nothing beats CS-Cart presently, i can easily claim that its the best in the world, and if you bought the multivendor-plus or multivendor-ultimate versions then you even get the app as well which is very well designed, and ultimate has a lifetime free upgrade.
2. Managing the vendors along with their commission rates is all built in and you can easily create vendor administrator accounts along with their login credentials, and then whenever there is a sale of a particular vendor product then automatically messages and emails can be sent to the vendor as well as the customer, managing each vendor’s product portfolio as well as product approval by the the marketplace team after vendor uploads his product is also there,
3. Customer engagement with newsletters or email marketing too is inbuilt, which can be sent out on regular basis too keep customers updated and retain for longer time, also you can connect with Mailchimp or Moosend to convert abandoned carts to a sale and configure messages and mails as per customer behaviour and thats awesome,
4. Blog is a very essential part for any marketplace or business and you can post blogs for the marketplace and for your vendors as well.
5. Design is important to keep your customers engaged and interested with the a good looking website and here CS-Cart is simply cool as you can just drag and drop blocks or configure new blocks with html content or other ready to use blocks and all this for your homepage as well as product, checkout and all other pages too, and depending upon your theme you can have preset theme color options changed anytime at a click of a button.
6. Shipping is the key to a successful marketplace and you can connect with almost all popular couriers like fedex, dhl etc or just customize a addon for your local courier partner and you are ready to go, once done you can automate to send out messages or email to customers updating them about status of their product in transit.
7. Its open source code thus you can customize it as per your specific needs also.
8. taking back ups or restoring your website is all a matter a click of a button,
9. Well there are many many more features which are all vital but i have listed a few above as per my usage past few years.

Cons: Honestly i really don't see any cons but judging CS-Cart on a high standard i would say they can provide a little more design to the blog for the default theme other than that i really don't see anything missing, as they keep upgrading their platform and keep it up to date so really its a world class multivendor platform at a super low price as i feel it. after mentioning the pros i am pretty sure you can understand i really don't have anything much as a con for CS-Cart Multi-Vendor.

Overall: Overall its a complete software fulfilling all the end to end needs and requirements for a multivendor platform from shipping, vendor management, payment gateway, execellent addons,themes, very good vendor dashboard and moderation, customer dashboard and engagement features, main admin dash board, and still its very fast too, SEO is again very good and easy to configure, blog feature, commissions setup, shipping setup, product upload with bulk upload feature, its endless, sophisticated and still easy, i have recommended this platform to my friends and even others whom i don't know when they called me to enquire about CS-Cart Multi-Vendor and now they are fans of CS-Cart Multi-Vendor too, so i would say please use their platform for free which you can download for a limited period and i am sure you will buy it and recommend other too, i guarantee it as a user till now.

Pros: Easy to use and to add products , easy to integrate with another platforms and also a lot of addons for good price. We really manage more than 10 websites and with other software and no one is better than CS Cart.

Cons: Support not the easiest and the way they manage sometimes loses you time.

Overall: I think it's one of the best options for a marketplace if comparing service and price. Hope they will be more open to support clients.

Pros: CS-Cart Multi-Vendor comes along with a lot of features and functions inside. You don't need to buy other add-ons for a lot of money ~ it's all already inside.
So my Pros are:
- many functions and features
- easy to use
- effective ... because of the SEO-features you can get a lot of traffic without magic
- low price ... but that's not the most important point ... the others are ...

Cons: When we started 6 years ago, there were some features for the German market missing. But meanwhile they added those features ... so there a no cons at the moment from a German perspective.

Overall: I am very happy that we chose CS-Cart Multi-Vendor.
It's a cheap and effective marketplace solution.
And if you need help, the team is always there.

Pros: 1) The high level of customization that the platform allows - one can virtually make any additions to it. This is in our view one of the best features of the platform.
2) The variety of solutions ready made and processes already introduced into the platform for an ecommerce business.
3) Rich in functions
4) Regular updates
5) Multilingual, multi-interface which is a rare function for multi-country projects
6) There is a mobile version

Cons: 1) + 2) + 3) - lack of qualified developers. It is almost impossible to find a good and independent one, which is a huge problem.
4) If one customizes the platform, some addons stop working, the code of addons is however not available. Either one should create your own addon from a scratch or ask a certain approved developer to make changes. So, high level of customization will also lead to the impossibility to use available addons.
5) The price for a really good and extensive version of a multivendor platform is very high.

Overall: It is a great platform but the biggest drawback is that there are just a few good independent developers who know the platform. One should really invest time and resources in the own developers for them to learn the platform, but then you get fully dependent on them.

Pros: Reliable stable scalable architecture.
We did not encounter yet any big difficulties having a catalogue of around 300.000.
Easy customizable.
Overall easy to use.

Cons: Maybe a difficult to understand the php code flow.

Overall: I think is the best option for marketplace software available.. comparing price with what you get.

Pros: The cost-effectiveness is excellent. You don't find this anywhere else. Everything is user-friendly and highly customizable. You can import and export CSV/XML files automatically daily. You can set as many tax rules as you want, shipping methods and much more.

Also, when we need help, CS-Cart usually answers within 1-2 days.

Cons: An outstanding layout of our homepage is crucial. You have to work a lot on the design to have a good and professional one though when using CS-Cart. However, you don't need to have a lot of knowledge when designing your homepage when using CS-Cart.

There is no built-in integration for Shopify and WooCommerce synchronization. You have to buy it in addition and it doesn't work properly, unfortunately. It would be one of the biggest advantages if CS-Cart would offer an API connection with these third parties.

We would love to use different payment gateways such as Klarna and Twint. However, CS-Cart doesn't offer them.

Overall: We are happy with the CS-Cart and hope they will improve a few basic functionalities in order to outperform. We really believe in CS-Cart and want to continue working with this overall solution.

Pros: I really like the prompt response the sales team had. Also in comparison to other market places, CS-cart did a great job answering most of the Q&A on their website either by videos or by writing.

Cons: I can not really say much about that as I did not install it yet and working on it.

Overall: So far great customer experience. Usually very fast in answering my questions. I am sure that the service support is as good as the sales support. The fact that is sold over 1500 times should make it the most stable market place out there.

Pros: 1. Platform is easy for users to navigate due to the format and design.
2. Multifunctional.
3. Creation of your own promotions in selling items.

Cons: The price is a little steep going from the basic program to the highest level program.

Overall: This program is a top-rated marketplace software featured on Capterra which makes marketing easier for the buyer.

Pros: Very user-friendly marketplace software. I managed to set it up myself, with minimum knowledge on programming. CS-CART 3-month support (included in purchase price) was sufficient to get me through the various “obstacles” I encountered. I managed to fully set-up my store and go live within 2 months (part time) and since them managing mostly on my own. Helpful forum (with a few very experienced resellers really supporting up) and good documentation and videos to guide you through. A rich marketplace with many addons available.

Cons: Frontend design is very basic. More fancy themes are available at an extra cost but then, one cannot be sure of the usability of addons if you deviate from the standard theme. Also, a more personalized support system (live chat) would be appreciated.

Overall: A great solution for starting your marketplace. The price is OK and is a once-off payment. Would definitely recommend.

Pros: We now have a very extensive, scalable multi-vendor solution with which we can quickly roll out a wide variety of websites for different industries - e.g. digital goods, electronics, home & garden, health, furniture...

Multi-Vendor has a wide range of backend and frontend functionality and also offers excellent admin functions, vendor functions, ... up to mobile app functions.

Cons: The use of enterprise marketplace solutions in different countries also requires country-specific adaptation options and country-specific standard features in line with legal guidelines and specifications. Some more features would be desired here, but we believe that it is only a matter of time before these are also offered as a standard feature. In principle, however, all solutions on the market have to master the same challenges here.

Overall: In 2020, as part of the decision-making process for an enterprise marketplace solution, we analyzed many solutions and followed up on analyzes from leading business consultants (e.g. Gartner). We then assessed the enterprise solutions based on previously defined criteria. In the end, the multi-vendor solution from Cs-Cart was the best solution for us. the large range of functions and the scalability enables the use of multi-vendor by a small company up to an enterprise multi-vendor marketplace operator.

Pros: I like how many features it has got which are out of the box and easy to use. The solution has great add ons and there are Quixote a few developers you can contact.

Cons: I wish the backend was a bit modern. The customer service could be quicker, 48 hours wait can sometimes be too late to solve urgent queries.

Overall: I have started using this solution for building my marketplace. It has got really good add ons which I can use straight away. There is no limit to the number of products I can upload and it is very customisable.

The solution has helped me to get to market much quicker than building from scratch. The support is good, but it can be quicker. Also, would be better if they had a direct telephone number to speak with someone.

My users have provided me with some decent feedback which gives me confidence in the product.

Pros: Great for business owners looking to get up and running without a developer. We were able to build the marketplace with no knowledge of php and just a basic understanding of websites and html.

Documentation is very helpful. The way the User Guide is arranged and searchable makes it a great resource if you just have a quick question or want to use it as a step-by-step setup guide.

Reliable support. Responses were fast, straightforward and everyone on the team is extremely knowledgeable.

Easy to edit design. Really impressed with Layouts and how you can add, remove, and drag and drop page elements. They’ve already pre-built several graphic, functional, and text elements you can use as is, or adjust to your liking.

Easy to customize, with lots of freedom on what you can customize. You can adjust typical look and feel items like font colors, but also text snippets, automated emails to customers, and on and on.

Cons: I think the one area where CS Cart could improve is in striking a balance between promoting vendor brands and allowing the marketplace owner to deliver a consistent design.

Would love to see more editability on the Vendor profile page where all vendors can input standard things like their company bio, return policy, and maybe a banner. That way the marketplace owner can keep the site look they want and the Vendor gets to better promote their business.

CS Cart has options for vendor customization, but they seem to offer either too much or too little editability. Some examples:

Vendors are allowed to modify the theme, but the trade-off is people will inevitably build pages that clash with the overall look and feel of your website.

Getting to the Vendor Product page is easy, but Vendor Profiles are hard to get to. It would be good if customers could access each Vendor profile more easily, especially when the page offers great features like vendor reviews.

Vendors are allowed to upload logos which is fantastic, but unless you tell the Vendor to choose a certain image size, the invoices Customers see may be out of alignment.

Vendors are allowed to add a Blog and Pages, but building and customizing these pages seems a bit hard to navigate for sellers without any design experience.

Pages created by Vendors are not on a subpage. So, if a vendor creates a page called "aboutme" it would appear at yoursite.com/aboutme which may be confusing to buyers. It would be better if it would appear at yoursite.com/sellername/aboutme so it's clear it's a Vendor page and not one created by you as the marketplace owner.

Overall: CS Cart has developed a great product that I’m glad I purchased. It looks like they make frequent improvements (they regularly post update videos to YouTube), so I’m looking forward to what they do next and would happily recommend them to any business owner.

Pros: Easy to get help with setting up for a small fee (that's what I did). After that, it's pretty easy to self-manage add-ons and do upgrades. As an admin with only very basic server management and also coding capability, there are certain small things that I can do on my own, which is great. Anything more complex or fancy would probably require some more professional help, which there is a good list of resellers and service providers that you can approach for a quote. Open source means plenty of add-ons directly from cs-cart or other developers readily available for more feature rich things or localisation (e.g. setting up local payment gateway).
Access to the template files directly from the admin portal, no need to go via cpanel.

Cons: Designs/themes are not very fancy, just basic and but passable. More fancy themes at a cost.
The guides could still be improved further, especially if the target customer base is SMB who could possibly be doing most of it DIY and not engaging professional help. (e.g. the guide on upgrades said if you hit a particular warning, contact the helpdesk or get professional help, would be helpful to provide a little additional info or help there in the guide itself.
If you're in Asia, then not many Asia-adapted features, options or integrations may be available out of the box, e.g. payment and shipping options.
Messaging requires a login to the portal, Can't see content of the message in the email itself, which is kind of irritating.

Overall: Given the competition out there, I think CS-Cart delivers quite a good value for money for small businesses to very quickly set up a marketplace and go live with it, with key essential functions included in the price. It does take a little exploring around to know where to set different things, but once you get the hang of it, it will be much faster to get some setting or change done.
Would surely recommend the free trial.