CS-Cart Multi-Vendor vs. Shift4Shop

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

At this point I would recommend looking elsewhere - 8 years with a platform and finally have to switch due to the unreliability is not something a business likes to do! They should sell the platform to a company that actually cares about owning an ecommerce builder. Research Shift4 - the parent

• 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

• 3dcart is a more basic website tool that can get customers started quickly.
• It only has a certain amount of options, making it an ok tool to use if you don't need a particularly large website.

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

• 3dcart does not connect to many of the POS systems my clients use so we need to manually update inventory daily/weekly.
• There are many modules available to do many different things, but it makes you feel like you are being tickled and died to death to get the site to do exactly what you want. Also can be confusing if you don't know what you actually need.
• It's a little difficult/confusing to upload products with multiple variations - ie: color and size - especially if there are multiples colors and multiple sizes.

Incentivized

Because they are, in my experience, unable to maintain a working environment . Client contact us telling us the site is not letting them place orders . We have to check multiple times a day our store is still working . In my experience, they have removed email support , and we had to find a 3rd party to use it with our store at an extra cost , let alone the resource to make it happen. In my experience, they basically abandon you and send you instruction on how to make it work .

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.

If you are looking for ultra basic interface ...

regular updates braking our site

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

You always manage to fins someone, but, in my experience, resolving issues are not an easy task. Why do we pay for a service , and then spend time trouble shooting constantly with them ?? In my experience, they eliminate features , send you an email what you can use instead, with instructions most people cant do without an IT guy . It feel more like an open source than a true integrated service.

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

Incentivized

Initially it was difficult to manage the UI to the client, and then hard to change anything , unless you used the boring and too generic templates . Their template selection is very limited , that are basically all the same with different background images and colours . If you are unfortunate to have been a long-time client, you will have to completely rebuild your store, because old templates are not supported anymore

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

I would put 3dcart (now Shift4Shop) on the same level of AspDotNetStorefront. Its primitive, old hat, but still works. Lightspeed and Pinnacle cart are a little better, as they are a little more polished but also not as fine-tuned as an Enterprise System. Squarespace and WooCommerce are very simple to use, but also require some additional integrations to make fully functional. BigCommerce has most of the functionality built in for an ecommerce site, but comes with an enterprise price. If you're on a budget, you're better with going off something widely supported, but budget-minded.

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.

• We have seen an increase in sales of 440% since starting with 3D cart.
• We find that the 3D features of promotions, coupon codes, rewards points all make customers want to come to us or come back to us.
• They made mobile conversion pretty easy, and our mobile traffic went from 33% to 54%.

Incentivized