Dokan plugin for WordPress vs. one of the best multi vendor ecommerce platforms - CS-Cart Multi-Vendor: Review & Comparison 2020

As you can see, many entrepreneurs in the USA have chosen CS-Cart or CS-Cart Multi-Vendor for their projects. But there are only verified business locations.

Dokan was released in March 2014 as a theme for WooCommerce and as a plugin for WordPress in September 2014. The developer team, weDevs, is located in Bangladesh.

Unfortunately, Dokan is not recognized by builtwith.com as a standalone platform - Dokan based marketplaces are shown as WooCommerce shops. But according to information on developers website, it has more than 8000 active installations.

However, there are no facts to testify that. The developer said that he can't reveal clients personal data. So, I couldn't find too much of online marketplaces based on Dokan.

Dokan has 4 translations: English, Catalan, Chinese (Taiwan), and Dutch. Thus, firstly Dokan is used in countries where these languages are spoken.

By the way, both of these marketplace platforms are based on PHP. It's good, because about 80% of platforms are PHP based, so no problems with looking for developer or support team in both cases.

On our website, you may find more examples, such as www.mode.co.nz, www.countryculture.com.au, forktofork.org.au and many others.

Unfortunately, I've found only these three examples on developers website and all of them have poor Amazon Alexa rank. I asked the developer where could I see more examples, but he answered he can't provide me more examples because he doesn't have permission to do it from shop owners. The developer gave me just one more example - https://www.mygypsystore.com/.

Also, the developer says that they have 5000+ users of the "Pro" version. So let's consider this version as the most popular version of Dokan. We will compare this exact version to the CS-Cart marketplace website builder.

CS-Cart Multi-Vendor has an intuitive and user-friendly admin panel. Let's take a closer look.

The home page of admin panel contains menus and statistics. Dokan uses WordPress admin panel to operate, so if you are familiar with it, there won't be a problem for you.

To be more objective, I'll quote a few CS-Cart and Dokan reviews from respected observers.

Thus, both of multi vendor software solutions have convenient admin panel with separate dashboards for each vendor. So I suggest you test them by yourself.

Also, there is an opportunity to use Stripe Connect Payments. Available in CS-Cart Multi-Vendor and Dokan from Professional version.

In Dokan, you can only specify cost, amount of products, period, admin commission, and vendor category. CS-Cart Multi-Vendor in addition to these features allows you to specify vendor max revenue and set if a vendor can use his own micro-store with a separate address like "yourstore.com/vendorname" where are the products from this vendor only.

Also, the search in only vendors store is available in this case. Oh, and you can set different transaction fees for each vendor plan in CS-Cart Multi-Vendor. With Dokan, you have to set transaction fees manually for each vendor.

Dokan has this feature too, but you can't distribute privileges by yourself, only choose role:

Dokan plugin doesn't provide this feature.

This feature is not available on Dokan.

Dokan provides vendor panel based on storefront account panel:

By the way, CS-Cart Multi-Vendor allows a vendor to create their own pages, polls, forms, and links. Dokan plugin doesn't.

CS-Cart Multi-Vendor gives you this feature. Dokan doesn't.

The marketplace playthemove.com working on Dokan plugin marketplace shows good results in the number of products - about 100.000 SKUs. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to find out how many vendors there are.

Speaking of performance, CS-Cart developers made a high load demo, which contains 200.000 SKUs. Just check it out.

It's hard to measure page speed and performance of the marketplace software objectively because it strongly depends on hosting capacity and content optimization. If we compare a few shops on each e-commerce platform with Google PageSpeed tool, we will see that the results are contradictory: some web shops on CS-Cart Multi-Vendor show great page speed, others are not so good in it. The same is about Dokan.

We can compare demos of each platform.

The Dokan's result on the desktop is not satisfactory. Maybe it's because of not optimized content on the demo.

By the way, let's test the CS-Cart high load demo I've mentioned before:

Very impressive result! It shows the capabilities of CS-Cart Multi-Vendor platform and it's up to you to make your virtual shop be in the green zone.

With the СS-Cart marketplace website builder you don't need a special template for page mobile view. It gives you full scalable design out of the box which provides great appearance on any screen.

I couldn't manage to find information about mobile friendliness on Dokan. However, 2 of 3 shop examples are mobile friendly. Probably it depends on a theme used in store. Dokan supports any of WooCommerce theme by the way.

None of our contestants have a mobile app for customers and it's not good. However, the mobile app for CS-Cart Multi-Vendor is in development and will be released soon.

CS-Cart Multi-Vendor usually has 4-6 updates annually. The update always contains new features and security improvement if needed.

You can update your virtual store on CS-Cart Multi-Vendor through the admin panel. Make a backup before update. Just in case. Also, you can check the update on the test installation, which is allowed according to a license agreement.

Dokan plugin had 6 updates for the last 2,5 months. It's not that bad - some issues are being fixed, new features are being added. But just imagine how many times you have to backup and check the update on test installation to have your marketplace version up-to-date.

CS-Cart Multi-Vendor provides 3 months of free technical support after purchase the license. In practice, it's enough period for launching your marketplace and start to engage vendors. During this time you will solve most of the tasks with your store with help of support.

CS-Cart marketplace platform support is based on the ticket system. You ask a question in your HelpDesk account and the technical support solves your problem.

If it won't be enough for you there is an opportunity to buy support credits for having qualified technical support. Here you will know more about it. By the way, if there will be a software bug technical support won't charge you and fix it for free. And it's very rare case.

Dokan support is also ticket based and lasts for 1 year. For the users of Enterprise version ($999 per year) the live chat with support is available. The developer claims that in that case, the support is a priority.

Unfortunately, I've found so many comments on several sites where people say that technical support of Dokan is not so fast as expected and sometimes doesn't help at all.

Yes, it's always a bunch of people who complain in any case, but those comments were on plenty of sites dedicated to e-commerce.

For example, the comments on Dokan review on wpmayor.com:

Just to be honest, there are negative comments on CS-Cart technical support also, but not many.

CS-Cart Multi-Vendor platform has 300+ partners and resellers worldwide, so as a rule there is no problem to choose one in your country if you need any e-commerce software modification or expect qualified technical support personally.

Speaking of Dokan, I've found 2 partners mentioned on their website. But if I got it right, you may ask the developer himself for any modifications. He told me this in his email.

The product community may affect further product development. And in case with CS-Cart Multi-Vendor, it is really like this. For the online marketplace owners, there is an opportunity to vote for the required functionality on the UserVoice portal.

By the way, instead of writing a ticket to technical support you can ask your question on the forum if you're having any issue with CS-Cart Multi-Vendor.

Besides, there are YouTube Channel, Facebook and Twitter accounts of CS-Cart. Also, you can read the blog.

Unfortunately, I didn't find on Dokan website any sign of something that looks like the forum where users can discuss their issues. The only place is WordPress official website I guess.

Now let's talk about the situation when you know nothing about how to create, open and manage your web marketplace. In this case, you have two ways.

The first way is to order turnkey project from one of CS-Cart partners, so all issues with development, design and start they take upon themselves.

The second way for you to do those things by yourself. And in this situation, the more informative and useful the tutorial is, the more successful and fast your start will be.

CS-Cart Multi-Vendor has user guide with more than 400 articles explaining all features of the software. Also, Core API documentation and Developer guide are available.

And there are video tutorials. 60 lessons concerning to CS-Cart marketplace software and 10 extra for CS-Cart Multi-Vendor. All of them are informative and useful for a Multi-Vendor user.

Dokan has user documentation with 90+ articles and it's quite useful. Also, don't forget about WordPress documentation on the official site.

As I mentioned before CS-Cart Multi-Vendor has 300+ developer companies. So they provide any service concerning to the multi vendor ecommerce platform from CS-Cart. But also they make modifications which are on sale as add-ons.

Customer experience, site management, marketing, integrations, themes. Plenty of powerful modules that make your store on CS-Cart Multi-Vendor more competitive and successful you may find on Marketplace.

Dokan doesn't have a marketplace. There is a page on the site with the list of additional modules. Almost all of them are available in mentioned versions and aren't sold separately.

So, properly speaking Dokan has 2 add-ons which you can buy: booking module and auction module. They are highly specific.

There is 30-day free trial on CS-Cart Multi-Vendor. The functionality is unlimited, and you can check all features during this period. After 30 days the access to the admin panel will be blocked until you enter the license key. That means you can save this trial installation for you real Internet store.

30 days of free trial is more than enough for the one who has a goal. But CS-Cart Multi-Vendor has even more - 30-day money back guarantee. You can have a full refund within 30 days after the purchase. No catch.

After purchasing the license you will have 1 year of free updates. You can prolong the update plan after this free period and it will be $385 a year, and if you do it in a month after expiring the subscription it will be $245. But it's your decision to do it. Your web store will work even without updates.

Also, don't forget about 90 days of qualified technical support with license purchase.

As I mentioned before the most popular version among Dokan users is Professional ($249) according to information provided by the developer. It's much cheaper than CS-Cart Multi-Vendor. But the price is for one year. Of course, the expenses will catch up CS-Cart Multi-Vendor after 6 years only, but the difference in functionality is very significant.

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Dokan plugin also has a refund policy. You can have a money back within 14 days after the purchase. But only in case when you issued a serious problem and the technical support was unable to solve it.

Dokan plugin is a good choice to start, when you don't have any experience, your budget is small, and you will be satisfied by a pretty small marketplace. You may start even for free.

Unfortunately, scalability on WordPress is not that simple thing. So if your Dokan store becomes bigger you'll face issues concerning to modifications in speed performance or even choosing another software, which is painful.

There is a problem with developers on Dokan platform. Only 2 partners except for Dokan developer himself are mentioned on the website. What if you'll need modification? With almost the lack of competition between partners and developer, the prices might be too high. Also, I've found too many negative comments about Dokan support.

On the other side, there is CS-Cart Multi-Vendor. The product price of $1450 is higher than Dokans'. But the advantages that you get with one of the best multi vendor ecommerce platforms that CS-Cart offers can outweigh this.

It's feature packed, so the most of users don't need to buy add-ons. But if they do, there is a marketplace with 300+ developers ready to offer their solutions to make CS-Cart Multi-Vendor more powerful.

One of the most significant things is that it's very scalable, just look at shopclues.com.

So if you are planning a long-lasting and durable project, CS-Cart Multi-Vendor is your choice. Don't believe me? Sign up for 15-day personal demo and make sure of it by yourself.