Better Search

Store Builder Feedback
21

Hello Mem,

Thank you for the detailed comment. Let me summarise and go through some of the points.

You would like to see following three features in the Multi-Vendor;

1. Sphinx out of the box.

2. Own subdomain for each vendor

3. SEO improvements

Sphinx is the best, because it uses less RAM and CPU. it's extremely fast. I have setup it for video DB and had over 1.4million records. search was takes only 20 millisecond or depending if include more field to search, just 23 to 30 millisecond. if you request one record with ID, 0 millisecond.

I didn't buy CS multivendor yet, because I am currently fully researching. because I believe every online ecommerce needs very serious research and proper design their business. over 2 months, part time I am researching multivendor systems.. found many of them... however haven't made the final decision yet.

indeed, CS-cart multivendor is kind of feature rich looking, but it's even not included the SphinX search or any other fast search. what I see is, there is option to use Searchanise. which is fetches your data and serve you back. I can't understand that, why people love giving their data to stranger hand? if CS-CART company integrates SphinX, that will be very useful for all marketplace owners.

I understand that NOT NOT NOT all marketplace owners knows Internet/IT. but the CS-CART company does. why don't just offer the essential and important part of CS-CART system like fast search? it's actually even much more good for the CS-CART company, isn't?

You are right about fast search. Moreover search should be not just fast but also relevant. And the "relevance" a way more important thing that "speed". Because relevance can increase conversions, whereas speed in some case may only decrease it.

As for the Sphinx - it's a server side application and create a universal solution for all hosting is a real headache. You want believe but some of the Multi-Vendors are installed at shared hosting.

So why Multi-Vendor does not need Sphinx at the moment:

1. It's not a big thing to setup sphinx for the Multi-Vendor and make it work. We did it for helpdesk.cs-cart.com

2. We suppose that any of Multi-Vendor owner do some changes in it. And the less configuration problems they have, the sooner they start.

3. There some other things that require more attention at the moment, and I see "Sphinx" as a "nice-to-have" feature.

4. We have Searchanise it is fast and what is more important relevant search. I don't thing it's expensive when we are talking about good and conversional search. It was developed by ex-CS-Cart architects and works really good.

So to summarise - "search" is a big thing, and most important thing of it - relevance. Adding sphinx won't solve the "search" problem - there should be a professional solution that always getting better and requires a lot of efforts.

Also, another one essential suggestion is, SubDomain for vendors on multi vendor marketplaces. Already all those huge ecommerce multivendor marketplaces offer their vendors the subdomain, like ebay, amazon, alibaba and more.. I was paying attention on this and even I see that WooCommerce multivendor has subdomain addon ($22-$32?)and Magento has subdomain addon ($49?$99?) for this. this was included on my plan for the project I am researching and find out CS-CART doesn't have this ability. actually it's very very small job for the developers. all you need is, CS-CART has to do server response link stricture for subdomain, and on the server side, just add wildcard CNAME. it's really very easy for those developers, but they didn't include this feature.

Right now you can set a unique SEO name for each vendor. Like "multi-vendor.com/nike/". It is not a big task to configure some server rules to make vendor store work on the subdomains.

Also, I don't know why some website has NOT NOT SEO friendly URL, some of them have SEO friendly URL. these things are really important for success. on your marketplace, some people calls the meta title and description as SEO, it's just funny. I believe the developers understand those. just needs improve it.

Are you talking about Multi-Vendor, can you please give me a few example of what you consider "not user friendly". I would appreciate this a lot.

22

Hi Mem,

/index.php?dispatch=products.view&product_id=241

anything using ? is not good. but I have seen that some of your customers using the right URL. maybe it’s their setup problem? but you see above link, it’s your seller, he should know it or your system don’t allow it?


As for SEO please check our demo at: https://www.cs-cart.com/multi-vendor-personal-demo.html
The link you provide belongs to 3rd party developers, and looks like they did not enable SEO addon.
Multi-Vendor has a powerful SEO add-on with different settings. Here is add-on settings
that can give you a general expression of what SEO addon is capable for.

So, subdomain can be even extended for not only for paid vendors, but also for categories and tags, brands, city names, countries, languages too.

imagine big, think strategic, see every invisible things, make clear and good decision. You need target website owners, we need target customers and vendors. I need understand and realize my customers and my vendors, you need understand and realize me. You are architect cs-cart and I am architect on my business. and we must need to have a good communications to understand each others needs and improve the CS-CART MULTIVENDOR.

shortly, Please include as much as possible extended, big and useful subdomain system, since it’s very important not only for vendors, but also for Google too. before Google sees subdomain as external domain and link juice was different. and currently sees as internal link, but on the search results still have a secret role playing. I am not going to teach SEO here, but we, your customers need it!

Subdomains is nice feature but not all of the Multi-Vendor owners need it. So strategic thinking is not only about custom scenario but also about data, how many users need this feature.

From my experience main problem is not subdomain but a personal microstore for a vendor, which Multi-Vendor have. You can navigate vendor products, filter his product and provide link to hist store, this is one of Multi-Vendor competitive advantages. Right know the link looks like example.com/acme. So adding subdomains is not a big problem here.
Besides since 4.6.1 you vendors have ability to change look and feel of their stores.

Anyway subdomains for vendor in our feature lists.

SphinX, the search is really very very important for every marketplaces like exactly you said. from my research I can said that, currently your multivendor software is not good on this. you need think strategic way for long term.[background=#ffffff] [/background]


[background=#ffffff]Sphinx is more about infrastructure, and it is server side. As I mentioned spending a lot of time on including it into Muti-Vendor is not what we need right now. Keeping in mind that we need not just sphinx but a fast relevant search leads me to idea that Sphinx won’t help much.[/background]
Still I would like to thank you for the idea and detailed explanation. We have a good Ansible script: https://github.com/cscart/server-ansible-playbooks that prepares CS-Cart/Multi-Vendor environment, so probably we consider adding Sphinx to this script.

23

Believe me, If you include it as much as big subdomain system like I mentioned above, people(your customers, the website owners) will use it. because the Google gives extra power for it on the ranking system. for that reason, the vendors will love it and website owners will loves it too. for you will be more more sales.

Think like this; In Canada, people love to eat fish, because 40% of fish in the world is in Canada. but in Altai/Mongolia, people don't eat fish and for that reason they don't sell fish? is that correct? the answer is, NO! it's WRONG!

When business people started to sell fish in Altai/Mongolia, Mongolian people first tried it. some of them says it's kind of soft meat, some of them says it's not tasty, some of them says something. but after while, they get used to it and currently loves it. so, if you offer it, your paid customers will appreciate you. on the other hands, like I said before, many website owners don't know internet/IT very well. they just know how to operate the CS-CART. if they know importance of subdomain, they will request the feature from you.

Another example; in North America, here they have a called "Black Friday Day" events, which sells products on sale for cheap price and people love it. but in china, they didn't have it before. but the alibaba group did bring it to china with their version of it. it's called "11.11" which is November 11, for one day they will sell their products for very cheap price. you know what? when alibaba started to make 11.11 events, many people called them stupid, because no body believed that it will work. but now they loves it and no body says anything opposite to it.

Just do better subdomain system, people will love it.

Can not agree with you regarding extra point from google for subdomain:
https://moz.com/community/q/the-great-subdomain-vs-subfolder-debate-what-is-the-best-answer

I believe subdomains for vendor store is not critical at the begining. Again, the most important thing is own store for each vendor, with ability to customize it and manage from vendor area - this feature that costs a lot if you want it to be implemented from scratch. Whereas linking subdomains to vendor store is rather easy to implement but it can vary depending on server configuration and business model.

please check this SphinX addon for magento; https://mirasvit.com...inx-search.html

people already made it ready for other multivendor system. also there are already around 40 reviews, take a look.

I am suggesting you include SphinX to your multivendor system, because it is very important part for any big website. what will happen if you include or not include? you just compare it by yourself.

You provided example for the 3rd party add-on. And there is a reason why this not in the core. It cost extra money exactly because it requires attention. You see the first one is $249 and it has the most of reviews and installations.Each Sphinx installation will requires us extra efforts because different of server configuration.

I agree this would be nice to have feature, but because of the difficulty this won't get much profit to the product at the end. We spent time on this means we spent less time on other important features.

Important to note that I explained why these features are not #1 priority right now. But this does not mean we won't implement them at all. It's just about that I can not give you any commitments on their implementation right now.

As I mentioned we considering subdomains feature and gathering data on how many Multi-Vendor owners need it. Sphinx can be implemented in our environment also and added this as a possible feature for future.