cs-cart Multi-vendor Ultimate - review

Overview

This is both a review of CS-Cart and a buyers-guide essential to understanding other CS-Cart reviews. There are a number of reviews of CS-Cart out there, but many of them are outdated or don't clearly indicate which CS-Cart product they relate to.  If you don't understand the different cs-cart offerings you may buy the wrong product or perhaps rule out cs-cart because you are not comparing apples with apples. Whilst this review focuses on the cs-cart offerings many points will be relevant to other e-commerce solutions and we do compare the features of some alternitve products.

Buyer Beware

On their site, CS-Cart boasts they have helped 50,000 businesses worldwide to "successfully" grow their businesses. I view this with some skepticism but do believe that in the right circumstances cs-cart offers the best value for money vs feature offering out there. In other circumstances however, if you do not do your research and know what you are buying, you could easily be throwing your money down the drain. 

Cs-cart has a variety product lines, versions, hosting options, support and upgrade options. The offering and terminology used to describe cs-cart has evolved over time, this complicates the understanding of their offering and interpretation of reviews. Previous and current offerings are subtly different but come with significant cost implications. We untangle this in "What is CS-Cart" and "What Does It Cost".

Reviewer Qualification

Over my career, I have had key roles in implementing large-scale, enterprise-wide business systems at national, state, and site levels. This includes a variety of commercial off-the-shelf, tailored, and custom solutions in a variety of public sector environments. I have extensive high level experience in complex business, finance and support/logistics systems, combined with senior roles in project and data management. 

I left the public sector in 2021 after leading the implementation of a annual reporting system for a then $30 billion super fund. My efforts are now self directed to a somewhat more humble but more fullfiling pursuite, that is the founding and managing The Farmers Lot. The Farmers Lot started as a online marketplace but has evolved into a suite of marketplaces and marketplace develoment project management primarily built on CS-Cart Multi-Vendor Ultimate. 

What is CS-Cart?

What is often referred to as "CS-Cart," implying a single product, is actually a variety of e-commerce solutions/configurations. At it's simplest cs-cart it is an option to host and manage an online store which is similar in many ways to shopify at it's most complex cs-cart multivendor ultimate allows you to host online shopping malls with customised shipping and exchange rate settings similar to e-bay. Originating as Russian-built software, CS-Cart continues to grow and develop its offerings with a strong European and Western support network. 

Product Lines (cs-cart store builder vs multi-vendor vs enterprise)

There are three core products/platforms:

• Online Store Builder, commonly referred to as "CS-Cart," which is a single shop solution.
• Marketplace Builder, often referred to as "CS-Cart Multi-Vendor," which allows multiple sellers ("vendors"). I will typically refer to it as multivendor.
• CS-Cart Enterprise, originally referred to as "CS-Cart 5," which is a different codebase, it is new technology but currently offers significantly less features over the other products and will likely require a development team to become fully operational.^

The differences between online store builder and multivendor blur somewhat on the ultimate package. Whilst ultimate offers some key additional features (which we will conver in more detail later) the key 'advantage' of the ultimate package is it allows you to operate additional storefronts, wether that be on different domains or sub-domains. This blurs the lines somewhat because the number of storefronts is unlimited you can achieve similar functionality across product lines with third party addons/development and/or off system administrative controls and processes.

^ It is the opinion of the author that it will ultimately replace CS-Cart Multi-Vendor, but it is marketed as a separate product partially to allow it to be sold to fund it's development. Some have implited that it will ultimately to avoid obligations under earlier versions of Multi-Vendor that were provided with lifetime upgrades. CS-Cart state, "Because CS-Cart and CS-Cart Enterprise are so different (and are meant for different audiences), they are separate products, each with their own development team. Both products will receive updates independently of each other." (cs-cart.com 30 March 2023) and "...Will they ever converge? I won’t say 'never,' but I can say 'not in the foreseeable future' (forum 1 Feb 2023). The suggestion of the term "converge" could suggest that if the current version was abbandoned that it there would be the option to transition to the "enterprise" version.

No Code vs Open Source

These are offered as:

• No Code: This is a cloud based (fully hosted version pre-configured) version where essentially you just add content. It offers limited options for customisation but is perhaps the easiest way to try cs-cart and you can upgrade to other options at a later date. Due to the standard environment upgrading to open source/self hosted options at a later date should allow seamless free content transfer.
• Open Source: At times described as "on premisis" (but no longer due to intergration of hosting options with their licencsing offering) this comes with the full source code. This option allows you to take advantage of an extensive offering of third party add-ons and development services or undertake the customerisations yourself. Most will be able to achieve storefront configuration similar to the no-code version realitively simply. The additional features and administrative access offers both opportunities and risks.

Feature Packages/Pricing Teirs

cs-cart licences are on 2-3 pricing teirs that can be purchased on either a subscription or lifetime licence. The difference between each of the teirs is the features that are included. There is also a significant difference between historical 'lifetime' licenses and the current lifetime licence in that a historical lifetime licence offered version upgrades for life were as now this is limited to bug-fixes only.

Online Store Builder offers the following pricing points

• Plus
• Ultimate

The key difference is that Ulimate includes the provision of warehouses and unlimited storefronts.

Markeplace Builder (multi-vendor) 

• Standard (at time of writing only available on a subscription basis)
• Plus
• Ultimate

My criticisms of cs-cart

I firmly believe cs-cart caters for a flexible and extensive range of store configurations and use cases, I do not believe that any e-commerce solution can cater for all use cases out of the box at an affordable price. During my time cs-cart has continued to improve and extend it's offering.

My criticisims are based on my observations based on my needs and may not be relevant to you or capture features that are lacking for you use case. If you need assistance on determinig if cs-cart is right for you, ask me!

The major reason I upgraded to cs-cart multivendor ultimate was due to the ability to host stores on multiple domains from a single admin panel (the implementation of this feature differs between online store builder and multivendor). With respect to at least the multivendor implementation this feature is let down by,

• When assigning a product to a category you are not able to tell which category the storefront belongs to. There are a few ways around this, include a reference to the storefront in your category structure or a change to core code (that will be overwritten on any version upgrade)
• When a webpage is created it appears on every storefront e.g. if you have an Australian storefront and a US storefront each has a webpage describing the store history, product offering etc will appear on each of the other storefronts.
• Implentation of restricting products/vendors on a storefront. This is possible but requires excessive administration where you want to restrict usage of a vendor by plan to given categories on listed storefront. Whilst you can restrict if a plan is shown on a storefront restricting that plan to that storefront does not in fact stop the vendor from appearing on a that storefront. 
• cs-cart comes with many features that allow Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) however by default the meta description is only a few hundred characters and this significantly restrictive.
• cs-cart ultimate comes packaged with alex-branding unitheme which is an outstanding theme, however it will quickly become corrupted or cease working with cs-cart if you don't seperately maintain subscriptions to cs-cart and the theme, which can be expensive. For a successful international business these costs will be reasonable but for a small operator it may be an unexpected and unafordable cost that is costly to undo (essentially requires exporting data, a fresh installation and configuring a new theme with your imported data).

eCommerce Platform Comparison

The following comparison tabel comes from chat GPT it contains some inaccuracies that I will work through. If any particular feature will influence a buying decision I recommend you confirm it's existance (or not) before proceeding.