Friendly Vendor Pannel

General General Questions
41

Hi guys, 6 days ago I received an email from CS-Cart with a subject: Decide the roadmap of Multi-Vendor. If you received the same, it is now your chance as well to raise the things you want to be revamped and changes to be done for the Multivendor or forever keep your silence. Since the majority of us are on the same page when in terms of disliking the outdated vendor panel which includes the admin/vendor landing page login. There's no assurance though that CS-Cart will listen even they receive our consolidated response at least we tried to let them know what is lacking with the CS-Cart MV.

cheers,

42

Yes , I have received it and answered it, also linked this topic onto it for reference (to show there is a common demand and interest into the vendor panel current state. )

43

dont forget actual product for common products based lower price or vendor rating..

44

Yes that by itself is a great start. Hopefully they will come up with a great solution and soon.

And from my end this is what I requested them and hopefully you all are on the same page, if I have missed something or any of you feel it needs to be in a different way.. ADD that to my list so all will be in one place for CS cart to see.

I focused more on A: Create Easy & Simple (for even non techies) work flow for both Admin and Vendor's ability to set up various

With extra emphasis on Product Set up

1: Products ....

Create all tabs linking various essential all in one drop down place .

Products .. Active Products ... Add Products ... Add Bulk Products

It is absolutely SO scattered ...

2: Create a easy way for Admin to map fields for their own Bulk Preset Forms for vendors to download and Upload

A Simple interface to have all this on one page

3: Set up work flow for Features and Variations ... And create better documentation step x step instruction with screen shots..

Even create better Youtube videos to show how Admin can set up and How vendor can set up

4: Marketplace (Add-on) .. going through that is like going through a flea market.... so many of those are outdated but no way to knowing what many of those are applicable for a 4.12.2 version. (Define a clear whats included and what needs to be bought for those extra features).

We need a few add-ons, completely fine with paying, but they too look so outdated.

5: Easy instruction on being able to set up what CS cart advertises when selling their licenses : How to integrate Tax , Shipstation, QB, etc. etc. that makes our business offerings to vendors more worthwhile.

6: Customer Service, (By the way I did get a response from Nail to my suggestion) but he completely missed the point and sticks to his explanation that : They are very busy.

Busy maybe due to the complexity created by poor design....

But when we open a ticket, we get auto emails : We are busy will .. as soon as we can.

I have opened and cancelled tickets from 3 weeks ago. Just getting someone to answer them now just out of the blue? When the ticket was closed.

1 ticket, I have open two weeks ago, still waiting for a response...

So not sure how they can improve this if they do not see it from their customers standpoint.

....

Hi guys, 6 days ago I received an email from CS-Cart with a subject: Decide the roadmap of Multi-Vendor. If you received the same, it is now your chance as well to raise the things you want to be revamped and changes to be done for the Multivendor or forever keep your silence. Since the majority of us are on the same page when in terms of disliking the outdated vendor panel which includes the admin/vendor landing page login. There's no assurance though that CS-Cart will listen even they receive our consolidated response at least we tried to let them know what is lacking with the CS-Cart MV.

cheers,

45

Yes that by itself is a great start. Hopefully they will come up with a great solution and soon.

And from my end this is what I requested them and hopefully you all are on the same page, if I have missed something or any of you feel it needs to be in a different way.. ADD that to my list so all will be in one place for CS cart to see.

I focused more on A: Create Easy & Simple (for even non techies) work flow for both Admin and Vendor's ability to set up various

With extra emphasis on Product Set up

1: Products ....

Create all tabs linking various essential all in one drop down place .

Products .. Active Products ... Add Products ... Add Bulk Products

It is absolutely SO scattered ...

2: Create a easy way for Admin to map fields for their own Bulk Preset Forms for vendors to download and Upload

A Simple interface to have all this on one page

3: Set up work flow for Features and Variations ... And create better documentation step x step instruction with screen shots..

Even create better Youtube videos to show how Admin can set up and How vendor can set up

4: Marketplace (Add-on) .. going through that is like going through a flea market.... so many of those are outdated but no way to knowing what many of those are applicable for a 4.12.2 version. (Define a clear whats included and what needs to be bought for those extra features).

We need a few add-ons, completely fine with paying, but they too look so outdated.

5: Easy instruction on being able to set up what CS cart advertises when selling their licenses : How to integrate Tax , Shipstation, QB, etc. etc. that makes our business offerings to vendors more worthwhile.

6: Customer Service, (By the way I did get a response from Nail to my suggestion) but he completely missed the point and sticks to his explanation that : They are very busy.

Busy maybe due to the complexity created by poor design....

But when we open a ticket, we get auto emails : We are busy will .. as soon as we can.

I have opened and cancelled tickets from 3 weeks ago. Just getting someone to answer them now just out of the blue? When the ticket was closed.

1 ticket, I have open two weeks ago, still waiting for a response...

So not sure how they can improve this if they do not see it from their customers standpoint.

....

My suggestion was simple: copy whatever Etsy is doing on vendor backend and vendor onboarding :mrgreen:

46

We are very close to launching our cscart marketplace 4.12.1, and it has been very stressful with the vendor onboarding. We had to create a "Getting Started" menu on the vendor admin panel because the vendors would literally stare at the screen trying to figure out where to go next. The other concern is the confusion between FEATURES, VARIATIONS, OPTIONS. Product setup should really be a drag and drop experience. The real-time shipping methods work when they want to. PayPal Commerce has been a bit of a pain getting this setup. This has been the biggest learning curve for my team, let alone our vendors. It's almost impossible to compete with Shopify Marketplace, Woocommerce Marketplace, and others. The admin dashboard is very outdated, and our savvy vendors are not going to be patient to learn this product. I've spent hours with each vendor trying to get them to manually upload their products. And, they would freak out if they saw how hard the product import process looks like. If I could easily swap all of the work we put in to another marketplace, I would. But, I've already spent SO much money just trying to get this thing to work. Venting here.

47

Has anyone received an email for a meeting phone call with CS cart CEO here ? Just so I know if Its relevant i go through every talking points, or if individually you would have done so already.

TES : Your last message will be very helpful

48

Has anyone received an email for a meeting phone call with CS cart CEO here ? Just so I know if Its relevant i go through every talking points, or if individually you would have done so already.

TES : Your last message will be very helpful

Not me..

49

Has anyone received an email for a meeting phone call with CS cart CEO here ? Just so I know if Its relevant i go through every talking points, or if individually you would have done so already.

TES : Your last message will be very helpful

Thanks Saltwater, Hopefully someone from CS cart will see it.

50

We recently launched our multi-vendor marketplace and are running into a lot of similar issues. We've had about 30 vendors sign up so far however only 5 have actually listed any products. We even have it set up so once we approve a vendor to pending status, it fires off an email to walk them through setting up their Stripe account and first steps. The feedback I get is that the dashboard is too confusing. Of the 5 we have listed, we set up the product listings for those clients. This (and a couple other minor reasons) has me completely reevaluating our choice with CS-Cart and I'm actively exploring other options. CS-Cart has a lot of good things going for them and I would prefer to stay with them but if the system itself drives away the people we are trying to attract, no amount of goodwill is going to fix that.

51

The best advice I can say is CS-Cart is what I would consider an MVP of a marketplace. It gives you a head start in launching a marketplace vs. building one from scratch....but you still need to do ALOT of your own custom development to "make it your own".

We have invested about $30,000 in the past year customizing the solution to meet the needs of our vendors. It's gotten us to an "ok" place, but we still have a lot more work to do.

Also, a bunch of our development was HIDING things we didn't want vendors to see. CS-Cart shows everything by default to the Vendor even if the functionality is useless to them. This makes the vendor admin panel more confusing. We feel "less is more" and you should only show the vendors what they need to use. When you start showing them things like user groups it just makes them scared and they run away.

52

Hi!

This topic has been around for a while. Unfortunately, we can't respond to every comment at this forum; its purpose is different. But despite our silence here, we keep track of conversations and of the requests that come through other channels. And we finally have something to show.

The new and improved vendor panel is already in the works. It will be included in version 4.14.1. To make it as useful to you as possible on release, we're looking forward to your feedback. You can already try the new vendor panel and share your thoughts.

I'll close this topic to keep all feedback in one place — it will help us when we look into future improvements of the vendor panel. We still have at least a month or two before the release of 4.14.1, so some things about the vendor panel might change before the release (depending on what the majority requests, and how complex the changes are).