Marketplace Features in CS-Cart Multi-Vendor

Check out of the key components of the marketplace features in CS-Cart Multi-Vendor
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Marketplace Management System

Split all the marketplace users into groups. User groups allow you to grant different rights to different users. Let your sales manager only access the order management page, content manager—product pages and blog, designer—the look and feel section.
User Groups and Admin Levels
Every day, the marketplace admins and vendors add new pages, post on the blog, and write descriptions. Multi-Vendor comes with a modern and easy-to-use CMS to create a copy and format it to your liking, add pictures, videos, and custom HTML elements.
Powerful CMS
Build a business ecosystem around your marketplace without coding. Zapier allows you to connect your marketplace with over 5,000 third-party business applications. With professional business apps connected, you can greatly automate your workflow.
Connection with more than 5000 apps through Zapier
PayPal Commerce Platform and Stripe Connect automate money flow on your marketplace. These payment methods split money for orders automatically between you and your sellers. These liberate you from too much accounting and manual payout routine.
Split payments for marketplaces
Communication is essential for establishing healthy relationships with your customers and sellers. We simplified the communication management by creating a dedicated message center right in the admin panel of your marketplace.
Message Center
Make the design of your storefront that perfectly fits your brand style. You can do it on the fly without any coding skills. You have 3 storefront customization tools: the Layout editor, the Theme editor, and a fully-customizable checkout page.
Storefront Customization
Sell worldwide: 26 built-in translations allow you to attract vendors from different countries. All translations are available for the storefront, admin, and vendor panels. It is a community-driven translation made by native speakers.
26 Built-In Languages
Multi-Vendor comes with a wizard that guides you through settings just in a few screens. For example, the Business Model screen lets you determine how you accept payments, installs the necessary add-ons, and creates payment methods if necessary.
Initial setup wizard
The admin panel pages have a button with a "question" mark. This button opens a Help section with the links to relevant documentation and videos lessons on marketplace management. Learn more about the section of the admin panel you're in right now.
Help Center
The notifications center is a single place where all records about the emails, pop-ups, messages, etc, are collected and stored. In the Notification center, you see the notifications about the messages sent to you, customers, and vendors.
Notification center
Running a large-scale marketplace is much easier when delegating certain duties to your staff members. Set different levels of access for your employees. For instance, your web designer can work on the look-and-feel while sales guys process orders.
Administrator access levels
With 45 search parameters, you will easily locate the required product among thousands of items. Besides, you can save search parameters for the future. Advanced search works for products, categories, orders, customers, and vendors.
Advanced search
It is impossible to run a successful marketplace without deep analysis based on statistics and reports. The Multi-Vendor system is integrated with Google Analytics and has built-on sales reports with convenient graphical and tabular charts.
Detailed statistics and reports
It may be a good idea to make periodic database backups—that way you can always roll back to the previous state if something goes wrong. This tool allows you to easily back up the whole database of your marketplace and restore it from a backup copy.
Database backup / restore tool
Take the most of the mobile sales. Responsive design themes make your marketplace convenient on any device. Thanks to the responsive themes, Google will rank your marketplace higher for customers browsing from smartphones and tablets.
Responsive design
Update the content on your marketplace in a visual mode. You can see the storefront with all the editable interface elements. It is possible to navigate through the interface just as if you were using the regular mode.
On-site content editing
To simplify the ordering process for customers, your sellers can get incoming requests called "Buy now with 1-click". When a customer clicks the "Buy now with 1-click" on a product page, a new order is created for the vendor.
Call requests
Create an unlimited number of templates for product pages to diversify them. A vendor who sells jewelry chooses a product template with a large product image to show small items in detail. Vendors who sell car parts prefer larger descriptions.
Multiple product page templates
Attract vendors from all over the world as the CS-Cart Multi-Vendor marketplace management system can be used in any country. Vendors can choose local currencies and taxes pre-set by the marketplace administrator.
Multiple currencies
You can enable the admin authentication by Google accounts. This is a great means of protection from unauthorized access to the admin panel of your marketplace. Only users with the company's Google accounts will be able to access the admin panel.
Back-end sign-in via Google
This feature simplifies the supplier management (not same as vendors). Supplier accounts are used in the database to flag products that belong to third-party providers. Products from different suppliers can have different shipping methods.
Suppliers
The General Data Protection Regulation's primary aim is to give individuals control over their personal data and to simplify the regulatory environment for international business by unifying the regulation within the EU. CS-Cart is GDPR-compliant.
GDPR compliance
Multi-Vendor integrates with Google Analytics by default. This service generates detailed statistics about your website visitors. It gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness.
Google Analytics
The CS-Cart Multi-Vendor marketplace system integrates with maps from Google to show physical stores and pickup points, vendor locations, and other objects on the map.
Google Maps

Merchant Administration System

Create a custom guide for your sellers on the important steps they need to take to start selling quickly. You can create instructions, documentation, images, and video guides. This feature greatly speeds up and simplifies onboarding for sellers.
Vendor onboarding guide
Make navigation convenient for your sellers. In the vendor dashboard, you can rearrange side menu: add menu items, edit their names, change their positions, and even create menu items that lead to a specific page or even a different site.
Customisable menus in vendor panel
Set custom look and feel for vendor dashboards. Use ready color schemes or make your own. This feature helps attract sellers and make their onboarding process smoother. Create the look and feel that perfectly matches your brand.
Customisable looks of the vendor panel
On a CS-Cart-based marketplace, sellers can receive all the money for orders and pay out to the marketplace on a certain date. Sellers can pay simply with a payment method built in to the marketplace.
Vendor to admin payments
The Vendor rating feature allows you to automatically split merchants into tiers: bronze, silver, and gold. There are many criteria, and you can specify your own formula based on them.
Vendor rating
In your marketplace, you can take a payment from the sellers for doing business on your platform. This is what the vendor plans for. Create subscription plans for your merchants with privileges and limitations, and earn extra with recurring payments.
Vendor plans
Make your marketplace catalog look nice, clean, and uniform. With the Common Products for Vendors feature, you can forbid your vendors from creating new products. Enable them to only use listings created and designed by you.
Common products for vendors
Multi-Vendor allows your vendors to import products in CSV and XML files. Once you teach Multi-Vendor how to interpret a file, then any vendor will be able to import a similar file without issue. You can set up common import presets for all vendors.
Simplified product import for vendors
You have moderation options: 1. allow your merchants to showcase products without moderation; 2. check every product added by a merchant; 3. allow certain merchants to add products without moderation.
Vendor data moderation
Each seller on your marketplace gets their own backend panel just like the one you have. In this panel, vendors manage their settings, products, and orders. Vendor panels include just what merchants need and are allowed to modify in your marketplace.
Separate vendor panel
Attract more vendors on your marketplace by offering affordable commissions on low-margin products. Set a lower commission for low-margin product categories and a higher commission for high-margin products and get more income from your vendors.
Category commissions
Take full control over a merchant's marketplace backend panel—enable and disable menus and set privileges. This way you can hide unnecessary menus and interface elements in the vendor panel and leave only those that are frequently used by a merchant.
Advanced vendor restrictions
Your customers find local sellers on a map and buy from them. This way, customers get their orders sooner and can support local companies. Merchants receive more orders from local customers, which is good for them and the economy of the region.
Vendor locations
Increase your income by assigning certain product categories to individual sellers. For example, you can allot one category of products to a vendor and charge them extra payment for it. Several vendors can sell their products in one category as well.
Vendor-specific categories
Help your vendors learn how to add products or update their company descriptions on the marketplace. This feature allows you to log in under vendors. For instance, you can show sellers how to manage shipping methods inside their vendor panels.
Act on behalf of a vendor
Sellers can have their own micro store inside your marketplace. The micro store URL contains the vendor company name. Micro stores have vendor company description, logo, products, and product filters for vendor items.
Separate micro store for every vendor
Give your vendors more opportunities to boost their sales. Vendors can create their own promotions—offer free shipping, discounts, free products, coupon codes, and access to VIP user groups.
Promotions for vendors
Set up the checkout in a way that customers pay for products from different vendors separately. For example, if a customer puts two products from different vendors to the cart and wants to buy one of them now, and another—later, this is the case.
Separate checkout by vendors
Give your vendors an advanced analytics tool. They can view detailed statistics on their sales in your marketplace in graphical or tabular charts. Vendors can view their account balance and sales stats: total and per period.
Vendor balance, reports & statistics
Let your vendors add more content. In Multi-Vendor, sellers can create not only products, but publish pages with texts, images, and videos. Also, they can add polls and forms, such as contact forms.
Informational pages for vendors
Encourage customers to buy more and shop regularly. Your sellers can launch loyalty programs via a built-in "Reward points" system. It lets customers earn and spend points for purchases.
Loyalty program
Take legal matters into account. Multi-Vendor allows vendors to specify terms and conditions for customers to agree with when buying on your marketplace.
Vendor's terms and conditions
You are free to create multiple vendor groups with different privileges. Why not promote the most active sellers by granting them extra privileges? Or motivate newcomers to sell more to enter a VIP user group? This feature makes it all possible.
Vendor privileges

Product Information Management

Filling up the catalog with products and product information can be very time consuming, especially if a seller has thousands of products. That's why Multi-Vendor has a convenient product import tool with presets for different import file formats.
Convenient Product Import
A seller can have multiple physical shops, and not all of them have the product in stock. A seller might have the product, but it takes some extra time to get it to the store or ship it. The Warehouses function informs customers about such things.
Warehouses
Product variations are a perfect tool to effectively demonstrate your product range to the customers and help them pick the right product from a range of similar products. Show variations as separate items or group them under the parent product.
Product Variations
This feature allows your vendors to sell digital products along with physical or digital ones only. You can start a marketplace of digital art, 3D models, video courses, software, music, and whatnot!
Downloadable Products
Get extra leads from shopping directories like Google Product Search, Shopzilla, Shopping.com, etc. With Data feeds, you can export any number of custom product feeds of different formats to shopping directories.
Data feeds
Your customers will find the right product in a few clicks. Customers can filter by the properties like the price range, brand, and others, as well as custom product features like size, color, and any other feature that you set for your products.
Flexible Product Filters
Vendors can track product inventory with options to see the exact number of items in stock. If a product is out of stock, vendors can hide it, allow customers to buy in advance, and to sign up for an in-stock notification.
Stock control, low stock notifications
The Age verification feature in CS-Cart Multi-Vendor enables you to restrict customers' access to certain products and categories on the basis of their age. This one comes in handy in case your vendors sell products not intended for children.
Age verification
Save your time while updating product information globally. 45 product data parameters can be edited in bulk for hundreds or thousands of products listed in your marketplace in a few mouse clicks.
Bulk product editing
The Catalog mode feature enables you to set products to be displayed only in the catalog mode with product information and a direct link to an external website where the products are actually sold.
Catalog mode
The eBay synchronization feature enables you to exchange products, their data, and orders with eBay, an online auction and shopping website. This is a great tool for multi-channel commerce and an effective method of getting new audiences.
eBay synchronization
This function empowers you to generate and publish your product information in the PDF and XLS formats. For example, you can send price lists to your customers by their request or make it a bonus that is only available for VIP customers.
Price list

Order Management System

Customers don't need to place multiple orders to buy goods from several vendors. They place only one order and make a single payment. In the admin panel, two orders are created, and each vendor can see an order that contains only their products.
Advanced Order Management
Returns happen during a normal business operation. The order management system in CS-Cart has an RMA feature to conveniently manage order returns and minimize the negative impact on the seller-customer relationship.
Return Merchandise Authorization
Order statuses simplify the order management. This is useful when you (or your vendors) have multiple managers who process orders. Statuses allow you to avoid confusions, failed orders, and as a result—minimize the number of unsatisfied customers.
Custom Order Statuses
After a customer places an order, the CS-Cart system automatically generates an invoice. The customer can download and print the invoice from his or her account. You are free to modify the invoice content and look through the built-in document editor.
Invoice Creation
Knowing when your customers abandon their carts can help you detect and eliminate bottlenecks on their way to checkout, improving their shopping experience and your profits.
Abandoned Carts
A vendor can accept an order by a phone call. In this case, a vendor can easily create an order manually for the customer right in the admin panel. This is convenient for customers as they buy with one click.
Manual order creation
Avoid delays with order processing and shipment. With automatic email notifications, each vendor gets an instant email about new orders. Customers receive email notifications about the order statuses as well.
Order email notifications
The order management system in CS-Car provides the ability to add barcodes to invoices. A barcode is a machine-readable representation of data that is printed on the invoices and contain information about the orders.
Order barcode

Marketing and SEO

Those who say "SEO is dead" just don't know how to do it right :-) By optimizing your marketplace, you can reach customers through Google way more effectively. Your marketplace will take top ranks in online search results with CS-Cart's SEO tools.
SEO tools
Show complementary and recommended products on any page of your marketplace. Draw your customers' attention to Bestsellers, Newest products, Most popular, Recently viewed, On-sale, Similar, Featured, and Recommended products.
Cross-selling, upselling
Product reviews are an important part of building trust on your marketplace. Customers' reviews not only help other buyers choose high-quality products but they also help you identify bad products and sellers and take precautions.
Product reviews
Promotions are one of the most effective ways to sell particular products, boost sales, and make your marketplace more attractive for buyers. Well-thought and precisely-timed promotion campaigns help you increase your revenue pretty quickly.
Vendors' Promotions
Boost your sales by increasing the average order receipt. Product bundles can motivate customers to buy more. Discounted sets of products allow customers to save their money, and administrators—to increase the average receipt.
Product bundles
This feature enables your customers to purchase and use gift certificates in your marketplace. A gift certificate is the best solution for customers who don't know what to buy as a present. You can set up custom parameters for certificates.
Gift certificates
Bring customers back and persuade them to complete the order. Abandoned carts section keeps personal lists of products that your store visitors left in their carts and wish lists.
Abandoned carts
The Banners functionality allows you to add custom text and visual banners on any page of your storefront. Need to promote a particular product? No problem—just ask your designer to create a promo banner and place it on your marketplace home page.
Banners
Promotions are a powerful part of the marketing toolkit in CS-Cart Multi-Vendor. Promotions allow you to offer various bonuses to your customers. You just choose conditions that customers should meet and the bonus they get.
Promotions
Engage customers and keep contact with them. With Multi-Vendor, you can create a fully functional blog inside your marketplace. In your blog, you can publish news, special offers, announcements, and SEO articles to achieve a search boost.
Built-in blog
Encourage customers to buy more and shop regularly. Your sellers can launch loyalty programs via a built-in "Reward points" system. It lets customers earn and spend points for purchases.
Loyalty program
CS-Cart Multi-Vendor has native tools to conduct newsletter campaigns and synchronize your subscribers with Mad Mimi and MailChimp.
Newsletters and Email marketing

Payment System

A wide variety of payment options make your marketplace more attractive for buyers, especially if you sell worldwide. In different countries and regions, consumers prefer different payment methods. CS-Cart integrates with over 70 payment gateways.
Over 70 Integrated Payment Methods
See all →
On your marketplace, you can arrange payouts to sellers in two ways: manually or automatically. Take all the money for orders and pay out to sellers manually via bank transfer. Or split payments automatically with Stripe or PayPal.
Manual and Automatic Payouts
Stripe Checkout allows you to use Afterpay and Klarna to enable payments in installments. These payment methods are convenient for making big, expensive purchases. Customers pay a small amount right away, get the product now, and pay later the rest.
Buy now, pay later
On a CS-Cart-based marketplace, sellers can receive all the money for orders and pay out to the marketplace on a certain date. Sellers can pay simply with a payment method built in to the marketplace.
Vendor to Admin Payments
Mobile payments such as Apple Pay and Google Pay are super popular. These methods are easy to use, don't require entering any credentials, and can be used to pay for orders in just one touch. Your customers can freely use these payment options.
Apple Pay, Google Pay
The Taxes management system allows you to flexibly set up taxes for different countries. You can apply taxes to all the products, to specific products, or to shipping methods.
Taxes
Thanks to the Payment dependencies feature, sellers can assign their own payment methods to shipping methods of your marketplace. You too can bind any payment method to any shipping method.
Payment dependencies
CS-Cart Multi-Vendor Ultimate has the Payments by country function. It allows you to show or hide a payment method, depending on the country that the customer has selected. It comes in handy for large marketplaces that work all over the world.
Payments by country

Delivery of Products

Multi-Vendor integrates with the world's largest logistics operators and hundreds of delivery options they offer. Your marketplace calculates shipping rates for them in real time. Custom address delivery and pickup points are available as well.
Integrated Delivery Methods
See all →
The Fulfillment feature handles the situation when the marketplace takes care of delivery for vendors. It suits the marketplaces that collect products from all vendors and ship those products to customers together.
Fulfillment
By default, CS-Cart Multi-Vendor integrates with the world's 8 largest delivery services: USPS, UPS, DHL, FedEx, Canada Post, Australia Post, Swiss Post, and Temando. They offer delivery options with real-time rate calculation.
Realtime shipping rates