CS-Cart Multi-Vendor vs. iSpring Market (discontinued)

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

iSpring Market is suited for small organizations with limited staff and limited IT resources. Allowing users to self-register is a huge time-saver for small organizations. SEO, Google Tag Manager and SSO are included and easy to set up. For the most part, the documentation is good and the help desk provides timely customer service. iSpring Market is not the best tool for larger and more sophisticated organization. It's extremely difficult to get global reporting data, it doesn't import data from other systems, and it only exports a limited amount of data for use in other applications such as business intelligence software.

• 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

• It is easy to use.
• It works with Stripe.
• The UI is clean and intuitive for customers.

• 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

• There are few global reporting features. I can get specific information on a user or a course, but there is no easy way to find users who made an account and didn't enroll in a course. You have to look at every user, or download spreadsheets and search.
• There are very few hooks available to Zapier to transfer data to other services.
• You can't transfer data into the iSpring Market using Zapier, so we can't use our member management system to populate courses.

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 picked iSpring Market because of cost, maintenance, and easy of use.

• 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 saved thousands of dollars a year in licensing fees compared with other products we used.
• We have eliminated the need for contractors, to build content for iSpring Market, saving tens of thousands of dollars, because we can publish directly into the system using iSpring Suite.
• We get 80% fewer help desk requests for enrollment and payment compared to the last two products we used.