We recently launched this project www.moskomtorg.ru based on cs-cart multivendor. For the time being it targets Russian market only but possibly (and easily) will extend the borders in the future.
The main goal of this project is to attract vendors already participating in Yandex.market, Torg.mail.ru and similar marketplaces as those vendors have already prepared XML productfeeds to export their products. So every one of them is ready to submit all the products to our shop as well.
The add-on we mastered is able to parse XML (CSV and Excel as well) productfeed and import the products into cs-cart database. We currently accept XML format of Yandex (YML) and Mail.ru, but with little effort it may be adapted for virtually any marketplace format.
The add-on scans the productfeeds submitted by vendors regularly and imports new products, updates or deletes the existing ones.
As Yandex exploits only limited number of fields we suggest our clients extend their productfeeds XML with additional fields to enrich products info e.g. 'special price', or some options like comments on product page, or actually anything.
The rate of import and total number of productfeeds to be scanned depends mainly on internet connection rate and server characteristics.
Almost everything is automated during the import, but we currently perform the following things manually:[list]
[]Categories mapping of newly submitted feed or in case a new category is detected in the feed during scanning.
[]Some product features (attributes) are created manually (only those features that will be used for filtering). While feature variants will be inserted automatically, except for new Manufacturer names where the correct spelling (and case sensitivity) is important.
[*]New product options are assigned manually during initial setup by vendor or by us for the entire feed (except for Size and Color, that are accepted by default).
[/list]
So that the approval and setting up a new product feed takes a few minutes to a couple of hours depending on number of categories and specific characteristics of products
Because the interface of admin area of cs-cart may seem not quite intuitive and many vendors may not be familiar with such a control panel we added Help pages for vendors. Help menu is located in the admin area and the content of Help can be reed by vendors and read/modified by admin.
There are a lot of other great features, but many more are being developed
Hello,
Very good work done, my congratulations! I'm sure with a good promotion this project will get a high popularity in Russia.
We are always glad to see big CS-Cart projects in action.
Best regards, Alt-team