lol...by the time cs-cart will do this, the world would have moved on to Bootstrap 6 or something higher....
Well, they are planning everything for CS-Cart 5 (Post CSS, Bootstrap 5, etc.) and not updating the current release candidate. Which is both a good and bad thing.
Can you let us know what shopping carts as even we would like to move on to something as lightweight as cs-cart but also has a lot of developers available easily....
Several of my established cs-cart clients are moving on to other shopping carts. I guess it’s time to start learning a new one. Cs-cart was a good solution over the last 10 years. I am not sure I can say that anymore.
The smaller the pool of users, the less time will be spent developing add ons, themes, etc for the platform. Look at WordPress - millions of users equates to millions of plugins, themes, etc available for it. Unless CS Cart gets to a mass adoption rate, it is likely it won't ever get to the point where you are hoping it would be.
With the kind of ethics they have, they never would be the a top selling cart.
I love cs-cart for its light weight and minimal usage of resources but lack of local developers available. Today I posted a question in the General Forums asking for an alternative to cs-cart which has local developer support and I listed some alternatives which has local developers available and requested for some suggestions. The thread was deleted in a few hours..Now I am taking a screenshot and if they do it again, I will have the screenshot of what I am posting it here...
In fairness, this is a cs-cart user community forum.
Removing posts that inspire people to move away from cs-cart is not really in the community's interest.
They've generally been okay at leaving posts that are critical of the product and/or business practices. But direct references to competitors (when not used as an example feature enhancement) have always been moderated.
I think you will find the same practices at other "user/community forums" for other businesses.
I agree that the CS-Cart has a certain feel of being dated, when comparing to some of the others which somehow has a slicker feel.
But I honestly think it comes down to what you need out of your site. If yours is a simple store, minimal payment options, and easy shipping calculators, then you have the benefit of being able to choose based on design.
For a more complicated store, I have still stuck with CS-Cart. I look at competitors yearly (around the time my licence is about to expire), but still can't find any that includes the same options.
So one thing I'd definitely advice when trying out different sites, is to imagine what your final site should be, taking into account your company expansions, etc.
As for the design, I honestly thing at the end of the day, a good design might get customers to browse, but it still comes down to your products, service pricing.
Just 2 cent comment, and I've stated this for 10 years here....
Don't fool yourself into thinking your site is either your main marketing tool or your sales tool. You should have people ready to purchase from other marketing methods by the time they reach your site. It is a closing tool (get their commitment fast and easy).
The role of your site is to make the buying experience as pain-free as possible and to up sell other products/accessories/services for sale. I.e. tell them (or show them) what they're buying and why they should buy it from you. Then make that process as easy as possible.
The vast majority of cs-cart merchants are never going to compete with Amazon so you better figure out what makes you different to your customers if you sell the same products. The customer should be ready to buy when they hit your site. You are never going to become the premier online shopping experience, so focus on getting the customer fulfilled in as few clicks as possible without overwhelming them with information.
Look at your own buying habits. How do you find what you're looking for? What makes you buy from example.com versus otherexample.com? Do you know anything about who you're buying from? Or are you judging the book by its cover? Once customers are at your site, can you incent them in any way to buy more products/services than they intended? (promotions, discounts, free-shipping, BOGO, etc.). Can you offer them any incentive during checkout summary to return to your site and buy from you again?
Marketing priorities are generally (product/service dependent):
1) Word of mouth
2) Organic search
3) Email marketing
4) Shopping aggregators
Customers are most sensitive to (decreasing priority)
1) total cost including shipping
2) product cost
3) shipping cost
4) Any response from any customer service request
5) Assumptions about customer service including return policies, etc.
6) Ease of navigation on the site
7) Ease of checkout (clarity, double-entry, automation, payment methods)
8) Impression of site security
Other than that, it's all easy! :-)
Just 2 cent comment, and I've stated this for 10 years here....
Don't fool yourself into thinking your site is either your main marketing tool or your sales tool. You should have people ready to purchase from other marketing methods by the time they reach your site. It is a closing tool (get their commitment fast and easy).
The role of your site is to make the buying experience as pain-free as possible and to up sell other products/accessories/services for sale. I.e. tell them (or show them) what they're buying and why they should buy it from you. Then make that process as easy as possible.
The vast majority of cs-cart merchants are never going to compete with Amazon so you better figure out what makes you different to your customers if you sell the same products. The customer should be ready to buy when they hit your site. You are never going to become the premier online shopping experience, so focus on getting the customer fulfilled in as few clicks as possible without overwhelming them with information.
Look at your own buying habits. How do you find what you're looking for? What makes you buy from example.com versus otherexample.com? Do you know anything about who you're buying from? Or are you judging the book by its cover? Once customers are at your site, can you incent them in any way to buy more products/services than they intended? (promotions, discounts, free-shipping, BOGO, etc.). Can you offer them any incentive during checkout summary to return to your site and buy from you again?
Marketing priorities are generally (product/service dependent):
1) Word of mouth
2) Organic search
3) Email marketing
4) Shopping aggregators
Customers are most sensitive to (decreasing priority)
1) total cost including shipping
2) product cost
3) shipping cost
4) Any response from any customer service request
5) Assumptions about customer service including return policies, etc.
6) Ease of navigation on the site
7) Ease of checkout (clarity, double-entry, automation, payment methods)
8) Impression of site security
Other than that, it's all easy! :-)
You nailed it....Summed up so well with absolutely no BS...Your contribution to this community is invaluable...
Removing posts that inspire people to move away from cs-cart is not really in the community's interest.
I thought also in the same way but recent fines imposed on Google made me revise this attitude... When it comes to business, the ethics seems to be different.
As for the best design for e-commerce, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. I like the latest templates of Prestashop, Alexbranding would refer to them as erratic, while many designers from India for instance, find Youpi and Uni to be far from the ideal of e-commerce. Truth is that there is not much choice on the cs-cart market, so I would prefer to stay with the default responsive for now. If there is some development to make it more "bootstrappy" and mobile easy, then there will be no much reason to go away from it. Now it is not in the green zone of the Google Insights - neither of the CS-Cart themes is.
I thought also in the same way but recent fines imposed on Google made me revise this attitude... When it comes to business, the ethics seems to be different.
As for the best design for e-commerce, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. I like the latest templates of Prestashop, Alexbranding would refer to them as erratic, while many designers from India for instance, find Youpi and Uni to be far from the ideal of e-commerce. Truth is that there is not much choice on the cs-cart market, so I would prefer to stay with the default responsive for now. If there is some development to make it more "bootstrappy" and mobile easy, then there will be no much reason to go away from it. Now it is not in the green zone of the Google Insights - neither of the CS-Cart themes is.
We do have plans to launch a new theme some time soon (it is a 100% rework, everything has been done from scratch). We already have a number of stores running it as a beta (activestyle.eu). However, we are trying to decide whether we should rework the JS used in CS-Cart.
I have dropped this site before but here we go again, this is the most elegantly designed website with minimalistic approach yet very functional, notice the cart on the right, no use of back button or link and mainly pictures driven story telling...This is also a kinda multivendor site..
https://www.faire.com/retailer/r_1meji4m7l6/brand/b_a9b3b023/1
I don't really see the issue. You can make already make beautiful sites with cs-cart currents setup and using the responsive template as a base. It's mostly about leaving things out, having a nice font, and really good photos.
That faire.com site looks indeed nice, and I think it shouldn't be a problem to recreate 90% of it in cs-cart without too much trouble, although I can't see the cart on the right.
If you think your design is the thing that sells, think again. I've seen incredibly old-fashioned sites sell like crazy, only to loose 30% of their sales after modernization. I've also seen beautiful new websites not sell a thing. Owners that obessed about every detail, but forgot about how to actually get customers and sell unique things.
This is not to say you should have an ugly website, I just mean to say, don't stare yourself blind on having a beautiful template, especially not in the beginning.
I don't really see the issue. You can make already make beautiful sites with cs-cart currents setup and using the responsive template as a base. It's mostly about leaving things out, having a nice font, and really good photos.
That faire.com site looks indeed nice, and I think it shouldn't be a problem to recreate 90% of it in cs-cart without too much trouble, although I can't see the cart on the right.
If you think your design is the thing that sells, think again. I've seen incredibly old-fashioned sites sell like crazy, only to loose 30% of their sales after modernization. I've also seen beautiful new websites not sell a thing. Owners that obessed about every detail, but forgot about how to actually get customers and sell unique things.
This is not to say you should have an ugly website, I just mean to say, don't stare yourself blind on having a beautiful template, especially not in the beginning.
Agree with most of what you said, at the end of the day its your products and price will get you sales, however there is a reason why Amazons and eBay have spent hundreds of hours and millions of dollars perfecting the user interface to make the sale as frictionless as possible from a color of buy button to placement of the button, to size and clarity of the picture, every detail matters..not to mention brands like Apple puts considerable amount of resources in designing the products.
We do have plans to launch a new theme some time soon (it is a 100% rework, everything has been done from scratch). We already have a number of stores running it as a beta (activestyle.eu). However, we are trying to decide whether we should rework the JS used in CS-Cart.
Seriously? No drop downs from main menu? To get to 3rd category deep takes 3 separate page loads?
Otherwise, agree with Flow. Everything I saw there from a cursory review can be done out of the box with the responsive theme in cs-cart. I'm not a front-end designer/developer, but I didn't see any "wow" effect that distinguished that example from any other ecommerce site.
And every store owner needs to also invest in their primary sales mechanism tailoring it to their specific product and business needs. If you expect to distinguish yourself with out of box solutions, then you just be another box on the cereal row in the grocery store.
Seriously? No drop downs from main menu? To get to 3rd category deep takes 3 separate page loads?
Otherwise, agree with Flow. Everything I saw there from a cursory review can be done out of the box with the responsive theme in cs-cart. I'm not a front-end designer/developer, but I didn't see any "wow" effect that distinguished that example from any other ecommerce site.
And every store owner needs to also invest in their primary sales mechanism tailoring it to their specific product and business needs. If you expect to distinguish yourself with out of box solutions, then you just be another box on the cereal row in the grocery store.
It is supported, and has intelligent prediciting of the users' cursor. However, this website chose not to enable it because they think filtering is easier for the user. We will soon launch a demostore with all the functionality presented.
Agree with most of what you said, at the end of the day its your products and price will get you sales, however there is a reason why Amazons and eBay have spent hundreds of hours and millions of dollars perfecting the user interface to make the sale as frictionless as possible from a color of buy button to placement of the button, to size and clarity of the picture, every detail matters..not to mention brands like Apple puts considerable amount of resources in designing the products.
And still ebay is one of the worst sites to use IMO :)
There is one more thing I would like to mention. A lot of people here open a store, and that store sells products. They run some addwords and then hope that because of their lower price people will buy from them.
Very rarely I see things like: stories about the owner, why was the store started, what do you offer that sets you apart from others? That is what people want to know, what they tell their friends about, what bloggers and press writes about. In short I say, treat your store as being a brand, not as a pickup point!
if you have a need to edit the website interface. or upgrade the bootstrap css you can refer to my side. We will get you a free to complete cs-cart shop.
CS-Cart is realy one of the easiest platfroms out there to customize the look
You only need to work on the hooks system and css. you can literaly do what ever you want with it.
- Change buttons with icons
- change grid look with more data like descriptions, availabitliy, hover effects on butons and images
- multi size blocks for the first page with banners
- footer look with many rows and columns
- fullwidth blocks
etc
you have so many differnt menus at the moment so this is also not a problem anymore.
Banner sliders awith fullwudth is also no problem any more with so many third party addons
And after all with layout manager you are abel to cutomize the look of any page, even for a specific one.
I think if you just invest a bit more time on default theme and work only with css you can realy have a very different result
Thats not an option for a novice user, but then again CS-Cart is not for novice eshopers. They go woocommerce or anyother free platfrom.
CS-Cart is a complete solution and you need to know your staff before you use it. If you are new in e-commerce you will not use more than 10% of its capabilities ending up complaining about the themes, when this is not a major factor.
Most of the major shop out there (see amazon for example) have a very simple almost plain design.
Its the ease of use and navigation, that makes the difference. There is also another 25% from banners and overall graphics. The rest is the theme,
I believe CS-Cart can continue with the advanced theme and layout manager, but give more tips on how to achieve niceandclean results.
Hi, I agree with you that a Theme is basically just good pictures and can be improved. The issue with CS cart is the back end where for multivendor the VENDOR SELLER is the most valuable asset. No products no customers....
Having said this , as we know the success is to have max sellers, majority of the sellers around the world an US are basically small businesses and individual who do not have technical expertise nor Core PHP staff working for them. The Product uploading is very convoluted the way it is now.
YES even with the 4.12.2 version. Granted at least there is a bulk preset now. My project is on hold and I just cannot see how we can launch the site and solicit sellers when I myself do not feel easy loading and setting up products.
Kindly share anything you can to help make this crucial journey as easy as possible.
Also keep in mind I have seen parties develop themes for other platforms that cost alot more than IMHO a decent responsive theme for CS Cart.