Good base but requires simplification
CS Cart MVE can probably be a great and satisfying product. It is just not for everyone, which should be mentioned at the very beginning of the sales process. If you know programming/have a developer on board, or you are ready to invest in hiring one, CS Cart becomes an excellent platform, opening tons of possibilities for creating a great marketplace. If you face any problem, there’s an excellent CS Cart support team, responding quickly and clearly. There's also a nice community on a forum, which is really helpful. However, if you don’t have such resources, CS Cart may disappoint you in many areas, and unfortunately it has been our case. Although we are quite tech-savyy business people, with a front-end developer on board, customizing CS Cart, so it looks at least quite modern and user friendly, has been a challenge and a really time-consuming process. Even though you get a free trial before buying, you just can’t test everything and many issues come out later. Most important pros: - great support team; - quite extensive and very helpful community on forum; - if you are ready to invest a lot in custom development, it’s probably one of the most robust platforms on the market. I also heard from professionals that it’s very stable regarding the security, but it’s hard for me to assess this; - many add-ons to choose from. Most important cons: - rather impossible to be configured by non-tech people, since it’s really complicated and non-intuitive. It doesn’t need to be a con, however it’s worth to mention it in the sales process, so there's no disappointment; - requires a LOT of custom development to become aesthetic and user friendly - even the design themes that you can buy additionally are still not very modern; - vendor panel - old-fashioned in design, and very hard to navigate for vendors. It needs add-ons or back-end works to make it at least decent; - updates don’t consider most important needs of the users - I have an impression that they are not based on users’ feedback; - be prepared that for some markets the customization (like payment provider etc.) will cost you much more that the platform itself; My overall rate is average, because it was rather disappointing for us, but I believe it can be just excellent for others.
By Paulina