New Vendor Dashboard And Improved Vendor Onboarding

Hey everybody,

We are now developing a new dashboard for vendors. It is supposed to be more intuitive and easy to manage. It is not ready yet, and we wanted to show it to a few of our clients first—to see if the new version does the job better and if we have to add or modify something. Your feedback will allow us to develop precisely the functionality you need and avoid the development of unnecessary features.

The new vendor dashboard will consist of three main sections:

  • To-do list
  • Vendor onboarding guide
  • Analytics and charts

Variants of Dashboard

We are considering 2 variants of the dashboard and will have to select one of them. They differ in how the analytics is handled.

  1. With all the analytics at the end of the page

    This variant has a simple structure—the sections follow each other: to-do list, followed by the onboarding guide, and then analytics.

  2. With some of the analytics moved to a sidebar

    This variant divides analytics into two parts. Analytics that depends on the selected dates will occupy the right sidebar. The analytics in the main section will only cover things that aren’t affected by the selected dates.

*Please leave a comment below on what variant of the dashboard you prefer better.

New Dashboard Structure

To-Do List

This section will contain a day-to-day list of things to do. It will update automatically, depending on what needs doing. For example, vendors will see if their products haven’t passed moderation and require changes. Or they’ll see how many messages are awaiting a reply in the message center. If a vendor owes money to the marketplace, this is where the vendor will first find out about it.

Seller Onboarding Section

This is a section for your vendors to start selling as easily and fast as possible. You’ll be able to outline what your sellers need to do and guide them to your manuals, videos, or other resources. This also allows you to avoid long-lasting explanations on how to use the vendor panel that sometimes administrators have to face. The section will be customizable so you can specify your own steps for vendors. Once a seller completes the step, he or she will be able to hide it from the dashboard through the “Dismiss” functionality.

Analytics Section

The analytics gives your sellers a few basic metrics by which they can determine the success of their business. Data in some blocks may depend on the date range that vendors select. For example, your vendors will be able to see analytics of past sales, but the section with latest orders isn’t affected by dates.

Customizing the Dashboard

The dashboard will be customizable. You will be able to:

  • edit any texts
  • add announcements at the top, bottom, or between the sections
  • hide some of the blocks
  • configure the vendor onboarding section with custom steps

It would be amazing if you take part in the development by leaving your feedback here.

Please, answer the following questions:

  1. What type of dashboard do you prefer? 1 or 2?
  2. Is there anything that you would like to add to the dashboard?
  3. Is there anything you consider unnecessary?

Feel free to leave your comments and ideas. It will help us to make your experience more smooth and more pleasant. Thank you!

1 Like

Hello CS-Cart Architects

#1 seems good, as analytics has bigger view, it's important.

It's very important that you have to include full analytics for vendors. for any marketplace, it's same logic, if any vendor wants to join your marketplace, they want to know exactly how their performance is going on.

example alibaba, made-in-china, dhgate, taobao or aliexpress, they have vendor analytics that the vendor can do measure which method of their job works better for their business. what they want is, how many total visitors for their micro store, which products has how many view, which and how their products sells better, if link to their website from the marketplace, then how many visitor they got from the marketplace to their website, and if visitors press/click vendor's phone number, then how many total phone call they got and which product/page has most of the call, and as well all full analytics they want to know/see.

without measurements and analytics data, vendors will do try/join as gambling/guessing, which isn't much focused on success. when you give this kind of ability on the marketplace, vendors love it and they will join/try more to the marketplace.

I recommend you to include full analytics for vendors and that way the marketplace owners will get more success. if you want more successful marketplace owners, then you can sell more license. it's marketplace owner and cs-cart company have related jobs. if people can make money with your system/products, they will do real ads/talk/believe that works the best for your cs-cart company.

1 Like

Thank you for your feedback!

For CS-Cart Multi-Vendor 4.16.1, we're planning to make the vendor panel menus more customizable, and you'll be able to give vendors access to the sales reports (just like the ones you have in the admin panel now). Anything beyond that we'll consider for future versions.

P.S. We've also added a poll where you can vote for the variant of the dashboard that you prefer.

1 Like

Hi

The dashboard looks nice and a lot more of what should be expected in 2022! Well done!

However, I am most interested to know if there are any improvements for sellers and platform admin to set up shipping and taxes

and improvement for sellers on adding products, as currently, it is not user intuitive, and this has been raised for a few years.

do you have anything to share about this?

Thank you

The

1 Like

New vendor dashboard would be great for adding a section about Vendor Legal Contracts/ Agreements Management between marketplace and vendor where Vendor can see, sign or approve ( has to sign before proceeding with products upload and the rest) and receive notification if the contract has been changed by the marketplace. This part is missing currently from cs-cart and i think is a big improvement.

Please discuss internally and let us know about it.