CS-Cart Multi-Vendor Reviews

Summary: I've test lots of free and paying e-shopping solution during months.
When you taking in account : the initial cost + add-ons prices + custom development + hosting prices
CS-Cart is by far the best solution for building and ecommerce at a reasonable price.

Positive: Carefully Design CS-Cart as been thought from the beginning as multi-vendors solution. It comes with a lot of built-in functionalities. But you can go further with lots of add-ons and themes.
The solution is easy to use, reliable, and the set of API available let you easily connect your platform to others systems (CRM, ERP...)
The community is large enough in order to implement your custom development.

Negative: I've notice no major drawbacks. Perhaps re-design the Admin Panel for vendors

Summary: Powerful, complex and a bit overwhelming if you're not a hardcore nerd. You can use it in a surface level way or you can get your hands dirty with coding and tweaking the hell out of it.

Positive: This Software is a Swiss Army Knife, literally does everything in every direction. Whatever type of E-Commerce platform you're trying to implement, CS-Cart is a great and extensible solution.

Negative: Very, very steep learning curve! Videos are available to aid in learning topics but even so, it's still a pretty daunting task to learn it inside and out.

Summary: I'm a CS-cart multivendor + user. It gives me perfect solutions on dropshipping e-trade. Definitely recommended!

Positive: All in one solution for all demands on a marketplace software. Easy to use for store admins and vendors

Negative: Nothing! Everything is great about this software.

Summary: Efficient operation, Responsive and professional customer support, very good website speed, very useful add-ons

Positive: The most important advantage for me is that this software has most of built-in features I need, and has a very useful add-ons.

Negative: Software pricing quite high, the default theme not very attractive.

Summary: We bought the license for Multivendor last year, we have been able to build a really nice looking marketplace, with all the functionalities that we wanted, good SEO ranks and more than 100 really happy vendors. We completely recommend the solution for any kind of people. If you dont know anything about programming you will be able to get a good ecommerce. And if you are a really experienced developer, it will be a really nice base for your custom place and you will get the full potential of it.

Positive: Completely customizable, easy to use and set-up, great themes, access to source code so you can tweak every inch, lots of marketplaces for addons, long trajectory so there's a lot of amazing and really experienced programmers, good SEO features, good support, documentation and community.

Life-time license, but the upgrade plans worth the money

Negative: Not really anything that I can think of, once you get used to the platform and you have a trusted programmer, you can achieve any development.
Maybe a little outdated backoffice L&F.

Summary: I did a lot of research and tried out the different provider's trial runs. It took me months. This one was the best fit in price, the long and truly impressive list in functionality offered as standard and the potential to customize anything, should I want too and being open source I can do so without even touching the core code.
One more thing. There is a lot of competition and your site better look and be professional. Your buyer and vendor customers will know the difference.

Positive: Designed for multi-vendors, this is not an afterthought clunky add-on. They thought of everything. It has stability, speed and a very active informative help forum. Should you want a special feature that is not included in their long standard feature list, no problem. They have a stable add-on marketplace community with very reasonable pricing and developers that will customize, tweak or built your add-on as you desire. Lots of beautiful themes too.

Negative: The vendor admin part needs a more modern facelift. It tends to be confusing to new vendors at first. I want my vendors to list their products as simple as can and get on with selling them.

Summary: I am looking forward to increasing my company revenues because of this software now allowing me to attract a whole segment of the business population, the small businesses, which we could not before.

Positive: The concept of this software is fabulous for businesses like mine. As the owner of a web design and development company, I saw that we were missing out on a lot of small businesses who could not afford the one-time costs of developing an online store. CS-Cart Multi-Vendor is the perfect solution. We can now offer an alternative to small business wanting an online presence for their products. With this software, they can spread their costs out by paying on a monthly basis, thus staying within their budget.

Negative: The documentation is a little difficult to follow because there is so much of it, but their Support people were very good at helping get through it all.

Summary: 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.

Positive: 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.

Negative: 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.

Summary: 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.

Positive: 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.

Negative: 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.

Summary: CS-Cart is the solution i would recommend for multi vendor. I am curious how the shop system will go into operation when it is fully operational.

Positive: We are developing a regional marketplace for all local dealers with no online presence. This solution is the only known one with all features out of the box. For our vendors it is easy to register and to use it.

Negative: Some administration features are not so easy to handle. Payment configuration for us and several features for our vendors are not clear to understand when using the first time.

Summary: Overall we feel that this product has good positives, in that the platform itself can be easily worked with once the initial set up is done. However, doing the initial set up and dealing with issues as you go along is a bit of a nightmare.

Positive: If you're planning to build a platform for long term use, then the cost makes sense as you don't have to constantly be spending a monthly amount to keep the platform running. The layout of the majority of the backend is clear, and easy to use. There are quite a few features included which are nice, and when there are additional add-ons needed I like that there is a one time cost.

Negative: The support team sometimes gives useful answers, but often they do not seem able to understand what an issue is, and things just go back and forth to no end. There are quite a few things that we can get much better answers by doing a Google search than asking the customer support team - plus they take a really long time to respond. If you are not a developer the set up of the back end can be challenging, as it seems unnecessarily complicated, even for people who are tech-savvy.

Summary: For multi channel shipments and order generations, CS helps. Its extraordinary interface helps in managing all the channels and its delivery system easy. Support team helps in integrations and hand hold services.

Positive: Most of the market place listing can be made from single point. Inventory managed from single point. Commission calculation can be made from Single point. Integrations with various shipping partners act as an add-on service.

Negative: Sometime customization required for integration which seems tough but thanks to support team which make it easy.

Summary: Very good overall experience. Definitely the best option for marketplaces platform compared to other players in the market.

Positive: - Easy to set up with many helpful video tutorials available
- Free support during the first 3 months were very good and, most of the time, quick to respond.
- A great range of features available to enhance the customer experience

Negative: - Expensive support after the 3 months
- Not ideal for services as the platform is very much focused on selling products.
- Payment processing time is slow with no clear reason why.

Summary: As an artist I need a better storefront to sell my products online with better presentation and CS-Cart provides just that.

Positive: A much better alternative to sell your products online when compared to other services such as Gumroad, Sellfy, etc.
Also provides a decent 3 months free trial. and its also 1 Time payment which i prefer.

Negative: Costly but worth every penny since it is one time payments and you don't have to keep paying those annoying monthly subscription.

Summary: CS Cart Multi-Vendor is a good comprehensive solution for any business looking to create their own online marketplace.

Positive: Easy to setup and use.
Lots of features to customize your multi vendor marketplace.
Great community support.
One time license fee .

Negative: Support model needs improvements.
Upgrades are only free for 1 year.