I trust you’re all doing great. I wanted to take a moment to share some thoughts about our experiences with CS-Cart. We all have our fair share of complaints and concerns, whether it’s about certain features, user interface, or any other aspect of the platform.
However, amidst our grievances, it’s important to recognize the value that CS-Cart brings to our businesses. The platform plays a crucial role in helping us conduct our business smoothly, and it provides a solid foundation for our e-commerce ventures.
Yes, there might be issues that we face, and it’s only natural to express our concerns. But let’s not forget to appreciate the hard work and dedication that the CS-Cart team puts into continuously improving and maintaining the platform.
In the end, CS-Cart contributes significantly to our success, enabling us to navigate the complexities of e-commerce. So, here’s a big thank you to the CS-Cart team for their ongoing efforts and the positive impact they have on our businesses.
Feel free to share your thoughts and experiences as well. Let’s keep the conversation constructive and collaborative.
I haven’t noticed many grievances aired, that is not to say none, but certainly a fraction of posts. Not sure why we need to give them a shout-out though, cs-cart is a business, I expect them to strive to improve their product. I will give a balanced review though.
When I had a cs-cart support service I found it pretty good, there are a couple of particularly good operators, balanced at the other end unfortunetly. I found it frustrating that third party add-ons often the cause of issues, or functioning as intended when that is a low bar. I was also dissapointed that except for a couple of occassions over the year the minor modificaitons included in the support package were very basic with many of my requests rejected for complexity.
The benefit of support for me, given the cost I always asked a question rather than look for the answer myself or even test something I knew how to do, it was good time saver and allowed me to focus on other things and I didn’t have to worry about breaking stuff or refreshing my development environment. That said given my size and given the lmitations of support descrived above I couldn’t justify keeping it.
The product has some brilliant features, with MVE ultimate providing stores, pick-up points, warehouses and multiple shopfronts. You do pay a premium for these features but it does mean you provide a diverse offering of marketplaces e.g. electronicsUSA.example and electronicsUK.example as well as www.newcars.example and www.pretyclothes.example all from the same admin panel, i.e. once you have one successful store you can really leverage the platform.
There are a few let downs though, particularly when I don’t want to invest in third party add-ons (because the 5 or more I purchased have all had issues^ irronically free ones from ecomlabs have been excellent, and if they sold one I wanted I would probably buy it from them).
To my mind lacking features are (some more relevant in a ultimate environment)
blogs/web pages are replicated for each shopfront, meaning
— your prettyclothes blog will appear on you electronics and newcar storefronts.
— your content is not unique (as search engines see it on multiple sites)
you aren’t able to turn shipping on/off at product level
you can’t filter on vendors who “deliver to my house”
categories are on one storefront or all (not a selection, so you couldn’t share a product across electronicsUSA and electronicsUK without it also showing on prettyclothes
if some vendors use stripe and some use paypal then the marketplace must distribute the funds manually (potentially it could at least one group of vendors with the marketplace to distribute the remainder).
^ (maybe cs-cart could offer a add-on partner program where cs-cart partner with developers. Once developers meet cs-carts documentation requriements they enter into a SLA where cs-cart answer some questions/provide some support to third pary addons and forwards other to the developer to resolve who then responds backto cs-cart within an agree timeframe)
It’s really nice to get informative comments about the product and its features. It is indeed important to improve, that’s our main focus along with the customer success and your comments help us find the growth points for the future.
Let me introduce myself shortly - I’m Ariana, CS-Cart Community Manager. I’m the person you can contact directly in case you have any questions, suggestions or feedback about the product, the ecosystem, the educational materials. I’m also open to the questions about collaboration, just in case you don’t mind us sharing posts and details about your website and experience.
Additionally, here is a big thank you in return, for your kind words. It means a lot that you chose us and that you find the product trustworthy.
Wishing you good luck with the project from all of the team!
I wish cs-cart default theme would get a modern touch eventually, at least once every 10 years or so, current one dates 6 or 7 years now.
Basically it would be nice if cs-cart.com would use its products default theme, in such case you guys would be more interested upgrading it more often.
Currently, the default design is one of the biggest challenges. We receive great support from the third-party developers that help us by providing their own themes and designs. This way the customers are not limited by the default templates only.
Hope this is something we can fix in the future for a better customer experience. Thanks again for sharing the feedback!