CS-Cart Multi-Vendor vs. DigitalOcean App Platform

Great for a quick and easy setup of a multi-vendor solution, supporting multiple stores / languages / payment options. Will probably need some tuning if you have 1 million products or so. Great if you have a PHP dev or team, probably not the best option if you don't know the language and need to customise backend logic.

Incentivized

It can help you to host your virtual appliance or serverless application at very low cost. DigitalOcean marketplace also helps you to deploy the serverless app or virtual appliance effortlessly. It is suitable for small-scale deployment and the process to set up an account and rolling out your app via the marketplace is easy and cheap.

Incentivized

• Easy to use
• No third party control
• Great support
• Lost of [an] add-on to make it [a] more vast platform
• Can sale [almost] any product

• Hosting of serverless application
• Hosting of load balancer
• Hosting of virtual appliances

Incentivized

• update subscription
• 3rd party theme & addons subscriptions (its not sure that you have also updates in 2 years)
• expensive license prices (if everything is cheaper, more peoples will buy it)

Incentivized

• The company has not been very communicative as of lately. Not much news, no apparent work on missing features.
• Some components are incomplete as far as some critical features. For example, I use RethinkDB as my database and it's missing critical features like backup and clustering, so It is unusable and they should have made that clear from the get go.
• The pricing on the support plan is vague. I do have the feeling it is actually well worth the money, but it's hard to form a decisions based without more predictable specific.
• Seems to me like the platform's future is unclear.

Incentivized

The software consists of most of all e-commerce related features. Also, there are plenty of third party addons are available in the market which can improve our business. There are a lot of powerful themes available in the cs cart market which improve the look and feel on the front store. If CS-cart adjusted the price on their software license cost, controlling the third party addon cost and provide more freelancers with cheaper hourly rate for the customization on the cs-cart multi vendor software, the cs-cart company can be a master among other e-commerce software companies in the world.

I've had very good support over the years. They've helped solve some issues here and there that were difficult to track down. Thumbs up.

Incentivized

Mostly extremely easy to implement, both back-end logic as well as styling. Great addon marketplace helped, particularly around payment options.

Incentivized

For big vision in doing something in online marketplace, I think CS-Cart can help to scale up and run business smoothly. CS-Cart started their business in 2005 and since [then has been] running successfully worldwide. It means they have a large scale of experience in implementing online marketplace based software and we can rely on them.

Incentivized

The ability to choose your own cloud provider is huge, especially for a small start up like I have. We have a lot of free credit from AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Azure, etc... The data layer is baked into the system which is better for integration then an external provider. There are also a lot fewer differences between environment as everything is Docker based which gives me the confidence that what works on my machine is going to work in production. Heroku doesn't have good support for Docker containers yet and although Heroku has served me well in the past, it is limited in some aspects.

Incentivized

• From an investment point of view, it is naturally much more profitable to purchase CS-Cart Multi-Vendor than to assemble a team of developers and try to create such a platform from scratch.
• Creating a marketplace is a rather risky business. If you don't know a lot about marketplace building technologies, consider investing in a different business. But if you have already decided on the idea, and all you have to do is find a suitable platform, then CS-Cart Multi-Vendor will probably be a profitable investment. And if your sales go at least half a year after purchasing this platform, then you will quickly enough recoup these several thousand dollars.

• The platform is saving me a lot of time I would have been wasting on operations instead of development.
• The platform is saving me a lot of money as I can easily switch between cloud providers to find the best price.
• I am worried though for the price I might have to pay in case of an unexpected system issue.
• Hopefully I will be able to pay the support plan before that.

Incentivized