CS-Cart Multi-Vendor vs. inkFrog

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

inkFrog really helps us out with eBay and reduces our overhead with it since it is nowhere near as labor-intensive as it used to be. It tracks our inventory from BigCommerce which really helps because it prevents us from over-selling items. However, sometimes it is a bit lacking. The user interface does take some getting used to and as stated before it can be a bit buggy.

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

• Flexibility - there are a huge number of options for how to design your eBay store and display, price, list and sell your items on eBay. If you like having options for every eventuality, then Inkfrog is good with that! However, for us this is a double-edged sword - more about this on the next question.
• Inkfrog sits within the admin area of my website, I like not having to leave my website to attend to eBay. And although it doesn't at all feel like it's part of my website, and ultimately I would have preferred a direct integration, this is a good next-best option.
• Fabulous bulk upload options - you really can upload ALL of your inventory to eBay with just a few clicks. Such a time saver.
• Good price point.

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

• inkFrog can be a little buggy, however. Sometimes orders will not import into BigCommerce correctly and only show up in our BigCommerce store as a customer called 'Not Available' with no shipping or contact information. This is not common but it does happen enough to be a bit of an annoyance.
• We would like to see the ability to offer the 'make an offer' functionality on items with variants. Currently, if it is an item that we want to use the 'make an offer' functionality we have to create a separate listing for each variant of that product.
• Sometimes the customer service is a bit lacking. It is only done through email and you end up just getting a lot of automated responses. It would be really nice to talk to an actual person to describe issues as they can somewhat complex.

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

We looked at Sellbrite. We really liked Sellbrite in view of its glowing reviews and integration with Etsy. However we didn't fully trial the program so I am not able to comment here more than to say that Inkfrog is by far the most economical option. We currently pay around $10 per month, whereas Sellbrite is nearly $50.

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.

• InkFrog had a positive effect on our management of eBay, which was a large hassle to deal with via just their eBay store.
• InkFrog also gave us a good ROI in terms of its pricing structure, which is very affordable
• InkFrog has given us the freedom that comes with scheduling listings for future dates. That way we don't have to be glued to eBay all day.

Incentivized