In a multivendor environment, it makes perfect sense that a customer may want to search for a vendor by a variety of criteria, including company name, location or address.
And yet, CS-Cart has a kludgy (at best) tool for locating specific vendors by company name only.
In our shop, customers are coming to purchase the products of vendors they already have a relationship with, but the best we can offer them is a customized advanced search results page showing all vendors and an alpha letters linked list to narrow by company name. We have nearly 500 vendors, so it’s painful user experience for customers to find someone even when they know their name.
We’ve approached SimTechDev to develop something like this, thinking they could just extend the current search routines, but they’re obfuscating and saying it will have significant overhead. Given that our products search run against a much larger database with reasonable peformance it seems baffling to say this - but maybe I’m missing something.
What’s the technical hurdle here?
Anyone ever integrated Elastica or Sphinx search?
Anyone know if Searchinise will search vendor tables?
Totally agree - it makes no sense that there is no support for a basic vendor search in MV. If you ever find a solution, post it here and I will do the same.
We ended up having Webgraphiq customize their dynamic search add-on to offer a toggle-able option to search the company table.
Search results
Who knows, maybe Thomas will release a new version? 
I am looking for an open source solution. Unfortunately Webgraphiq does not do open source and I don’t want to be reliant on the whims of Thomas! That has already cost me money in the past 
!
[quote name=‘camerojo’ timestamp=‘1429634314’ post=‘212263’]
I am looking for an open source solution. Unfortunately Webgraphiq does not do open source and I don’t want to be reliant on the whims of Thomas! That has already cost me money in the past !
[/quote]
We are ready to integrate such a feature for you. We do not encode modifications code. Feel free to contact us
Great! But let's wait and look at what the new CSCart version looks like. It appears that they have done some good work on the vendor page and hopefully that will include a better way to find specific vendors.
If it doesn't, I might be interested in getting a quote from you.
Sure, we will wait for your message. Thank you.
Any news on this? Are there any extensions with Vendor search capability? Is it at least to find products be given vendor? Eg. by adding product feature with vedor name automatically?
Thanks
We had some success with developers WebGraphique - they were able to configure a custom version of their add-on Suggestive Search, that allows our customers to toggle between products and vendors, and see suggestions as they type.
You can see it in action here: oneofakindonlineshop.com
We had some success with developers WebGraphique - they were able to configure a custom version of their add-on Suggestive Search, that allows our customers to toggle between products and vendors, and see suggestions as they type.
You can see it in action here: oneofakindonlineshop.com
Thank you for your feedback, I really appreciate it.
Thank you for your feedback, I really appreciate it.
wow the toggle is really cute! I may have to grab this for my site!
I don't think the toggle is the best solution UX wise. Just FYI what we used was using Live Search addon that allows to index product features and adding Vendors as product features as well. Some hassle (can be set in a bulk, though), but users can use just a single search box to search for either product or vendor.
I don't think the toggle is the best solution UX wise. Just FYI what we used was using Live Search addon that allows to index product features and adding Vendors as product features as well. Some hassle (can be set in a bulk, though), but users can use just a single search box to search for either product or vendor.
How long does the caching cron task take? How many products/vendors do you have?
~1000 products and ~100 vendors (we're just starting). Haven't checked the time, but after clearing the cache the results were almost immediate. The addon is almost maintenance free, so far. The only hassle is to duplicate vendor information using product feature. But it can be updated in bulk easily for each vendor, so not a huge problem.
One caveat - when user enters vendor name in live search box, by default just their products will display, without any indication of the Vendor name for each product. So for some users it may not be immediately obvious what's going on. I think it mostly is obvious, though. Also, the template could be modified to include the vendor name.
But it's not that there's a single "vendor" result with a vendor name linking to vendor page - just matching vendor's products. It's good enough, I guess, as users can go to the Vendors page via the product page.