jlinc

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.

Just had our THIRD vendor cancel today because the vendor admin panel is too hard to use. This isn't to pile salt in the CS-Cart wound, but this certainly does hurt:

Here's the screenshot

https://ibb.co/f1R3KKs

Along with my last post about people on Etsy Forums we just got this email this morning. We get about 1 a day like this with vendors who sign up and then cancel quickly because of the difficulty building their store.

Not trying to rub salt in the CS-Cart wound. I just thought given the conversation here I would back it up with the actual experience vendors have trying to us the CS-Cart Multi-Vendor Admin Panel

https://ibb.co/bsNsYzP

saltwater,

I finally got our Paypal Account Manager to contact us and our Paypal Commerce Platform integration is now working. You should try to get your Paypal account manager to help you.

Ivan,

I would recommend people DO NOT try 4.12.1 yet since 4.11.5 has some major issues with Multi-Vendor. 

V.4.11.5 doesn't allow vendors to pay their marketplace fees and when they click the "Pay the Fees" button it slows down the site incredibly. Since we upgraded over a week ago we are getting non-stop complaints from customers and vendors on the sites poor performance and slowness. Some buyers have emailed us they abandoned making a purchase because of the slowness.

We place a ticket with CS-Cart support a week ago, but have gotten two responses without any urgency to help us. We are at the ready to work with the support team to fix our issues but every time we respond to them they say it will take "2-3 Business Days" to get back to us. Really? They respond, we try their suggestion within an hour then respond back...and have to wait 3 MORE DAYS to get another response?

I understand when you first place a ticket you need to wait in line...but once you are engaged with the support team why do they walk away after one comment that didn't fix the issue?

Considering the urgency of this issue it's disappointing that CS-Cart doesn't seem to care our business is suffering.

I apologize for posting this in this thread, but I'm not sure how to get someone at CS-Cart to realize we are having a major issue with V.4.11.5 and need help.

Thank you.

I just wanted to warn everyone that the latest version of CS- Cart Multi-Vendor (V.4.11.5) is giving us major issues. They all seem to relate to vendors in our Multi-Vendor site. We upgraded our site on Monday and we now experience the following:

• - Vendors are not able to pay their marketplace fees. When a vendor click the "Pay the Fees" button it loops until it times out and crashes. Nobody is able to pay their fees

• - Once someone clicks the "Pay the Fees" button things spike and the website slows to a crawl. So, the site is frequently slowing down.

• - Many of our vendors are no longer able to log into their Vendor Admin panel. With 1,000 shops in our marketplace we are getting a number of complaints as you can imagine.

We placed a ticket on Tuesday with CS-Cart support, they got back to us Wednesday and when we immediately replied we got a notice that it will take two more days for them to get back to us.

Is anyone else facing problems with V.4.11.5? 

We learned that vendors in Multi-Vendor aren't able to create coupons codes. It seems CS-Cart designed it so when "Vendor A" creates a discount code it applies the Vendor A discount to Vendor B's products at checkout as well. So, if you have a cart with multiple products from different vendors a coupon code created by one vendor will work on all the products at checkout.

Obviously, vendors shouldn't be able to create coupons for other vendors. With this design a sneaky vendor could create a "100% Off" coupon and purchase everything in our marketplace for free.    

CS-Cart support said vendor coupons will work correctly with the Direct Customer to Vendors Payments addon enabled. Although, that addon means buyers need to check out from every vendor individually instead of checking out once for all products from multiple vendors. Modern Marketplaces haven't worked like this for over a decade and it sounds like a bad buyer experience to make someone check out multiple times when purchasing something from one website.

I would like to propose CS-Cart fix Promotions so that if a Vendor creates a Discount Coupon it will work only on the products within that vendors catalog and not on every product in the marketplace.

Gert and Beads,

I tested this in our test environment and, yes, it crops the vendor images. That said, I don't recommend buying this addon yet. Every time I try to activate it in our marketplace it crashes the site from runaway php processes. Our marketplace has TONS of images (which is expected in a marketplace) and I'm not sure if this addon is designed in a way to handle scale without slowing down the site or crashing it.

I'm currently working with Cart-Power development to see if they can resolve the issue. They tried once already and it didn't work.

I'll report back with an update. I'm holding out hope they can fix it because we would really like to use it if it works properly without slowing things down.

spminfosol

The issue was that a shipping method wasn't available for the product. So the client couldn't complete an order.

It's unfortunate that cs-cart allows products to be posted on the marketplace even if they can't be purchased. There 'should' be a check to make sure the product has a payment method and shipping method available otherwise the product shouldn't appear in the marketplace.

We are facing this problem frequently since we have thousands of vendors and it's hard to make sure they all set up shipping properly before making a product active.

Are there any video training of the Variations functionality? I've been trying to use it, but it's confusing between Features, Feature Groups, Variations, etc.

I've read the materials, but a training video showing how to use Variations would be super helpful.

THANK YOU

Memel,

Thank you. I understand that we need to use Paypal for Marketplaces....but CS-Cart is actively telling us NOT to use Paypal for Marketplaces.

So, Paypal won't let us use Adaptive Payments....and CS-Cart hasn't certified Paypal for Marketplaces.

Thus...CS-Cart Multi Vendor does not work with Paypal.

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