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As we approach the release of the new Multi-Vendor 4.10, let us recall the bright features of the version 4.9.3, Multi-Vendor and Multi-Vendor Plus.
Multi-Vendor is an eCommerce platform to build online marketplace, gathering multiple merchants who offer their goods and services. They retail their products in your online shop and you get profit as a storekeeper.
This paradigm can be applied to any business area, whether you are running a rental, legal, or cleaning company, providing health care, online training or selling physical items. The share of such digital multisellers’ platforms grows incrementally together with the global trend to digitize as much as possible.
Multi-Vendor is entirely open source relying on the top-notch development practices, PHP code, CSS layouts, MySQL databases, Smarty template engine, and AJAX. Moreover, it is regularly updated to include new features and improve the overall performance of the eCommerce platform itself. The Simtech Development Company, a certified partner of the CS-Cart original developer, keeps an eye on the latest trends in eCommerce development to let you stay ahead of the time.
When you are launching a virtual mall, you explore all available platforms, weigh strengths and weaknesses and eventually choose based on your particular requirements. Let us see in detail what Multi-Vendor can offer to you here.
Easy to finetune
You don’t have to be a technical guru to learn how to set up and manage Multi-Vendor. The interface is intuitive to get the logic behind settings and understand the meaning of the menu tree.
Furthermore, you won’t lack guides and manuals on your way of mastering the software. Both video and text tutorials will lead you through the process of getting your platform up and running.
Read this article to get a step-by-step guide on getting started with Multi-Vendor.
Proven efficiency
The cases from our clients confirm that the quality of the Simtech Development teamwork is not only words. Just dive in these life stories to get the evidence.
Sometimes we get bad reviews, and know what? We thank our customers for their adherence to the result. If nothing happens, this is stagnation. When we get worse feedback, we break our necks to make progress.
Ability to grow over time
The Multi-Vendor is the core that you can extend with additional functionality. When you start, you don’t know whether you need anything else. So, you don’t pay for extra perks that you didn’t even ask for. While growing, more features are required and you can scale your project progressively.
The default software comes up with many third-party services: more than 70 real-time payment systems, 8 shipping carriers, marketing services such as MailChimp, etc. Multi-Vendor is highly customizable marketplace platform software and any modifications are done without affecting the source code. In case Multi-Vendor advanced features are not enough for you, you can always integrate some other software, that you think is more suitable for your accounting, fulfillment or marketing.
You can expand your business to Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping, and Facebook simply exporting your products to these worldwide known online marketplaces.
Going global you will appreciate the multi-lingual and multi-currency features by default. You will have translations to 41 languages and will be able to complete them or add new languages if necessary using Crowdin.
And of course, scalability means the unlimited number of customers, vendors, and products. When we say that you can build your own Amazon with the Multi-Vendor marketplace script, we mean it. Take a look at www.shopclues.com, 53 million of products…
Key Features
Multi-Vendor is a feature-packed eCommerce platform. It incorporates more than 500 features right out-of-the-box.
Key features for the administrator
#1 Configurable vendor plans. Create subscription plans with different conditions and a new online vendor just picks the most suitable option. Your profit will be either the fixed commissions from vendor sales or a monthly fee for selling in your web marketplace.
#2 Multiple levels of administrative access. Free yourself of some duties by delegating them to your staff members. However, to be on the safe side, provide your employees with different levels of access to your Internet store. Your web designer can work on the look-and-feel of the virtual marketplace, for example, while managers add products and process orders.
#3 Flexible product approval system. Let your vendors showcase products without moderation or check every product added by vendors or allow certain vendors to add products without moderation. It’s all up to you!
#4 Advanced order management system.
In Multi-Vendor: Products from different online vendors can be bought within one order. Each vendor can see an order with his/her own products only.
In Multi-Vendor Plus: With “Common Products for Vendors” feature, you can create a common product base and allow your vendors to only sell these products, forbidding them from creating their own listings. The vendors will only be able to set prices, quantity, and shipping information for products from the common base. This way you’ll avoid duplicates and keep product pages nice, clean, and uniform.
#5 Advanced vendor payout system.
In Multi-Vendor: Automatic payouts are carried out via a built-in “PayPal Adaptive payments” functionality. PayPal Adaptive distributes the payment between vendors and sends commissions to your account.
In Multi-Vendor Plus: Separate Vendor Checkout allows your customers to pay for products from different vendors separately at eCommerce checkout. The vendors create their own payment methods and all the payments go straight to their accounts.
#6 Detailed statistics and reports. The Multi-Vendor open source marketplace platform is integrated with Google Analytics, the most powerful web analytics service nowadays. This service generates detailed statistics about your website visitors, gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. The “Sales reports” feature gives you detailed statistics on the sales in your marketplace, which can be represented in a form of graphical or tabular charts.
Key features for vendors
#7 Separate vendor panel: each vendor has a separate admin panel to manage their own settings and products. Vendor panels include the exact entities the vendors are allowed to modify in your virtual marketplace. Vendors do not interfere with each other. In Multi-Vendor your merchants can:
#8 Ability to manage orders, products, filters, options, and features. You can add vendor administrators with different access levels to the vendor panel. Or:
- Add different informational pages, polls, forms, and links;
- View vendor account balance;
- Set shipping methods and taxes;
- Choose currency and language;
- Import or export products and orders;
- In Multi-Vendor Plus they can additionally design their storefronts.
#9 Separate mini-store for every vendor.
In Multi-Vendor: vendors can view their account balance to track all payouts and commissions taken by the store administrator. Sellers can also review the income and expenditure statistics: total and per period.
Sellers can have a micro-store inside your marketplace. The micro store URL contains the vendor company name. Micro stores contain:
- vendor company description;
- logo;
- products;
- product filter for vendor items;
- features of a shopping mall.
In Multi-Vendor Plus: vendors can additionnally change the design of their stores.
Other online store features
#10 SEO optimization. Edit page meta information and set up SEO-friendly URLs to reach the potential users via search engines. Powered by a built-in sitemap generation tool, your web store will take top ranks in online search results! Google rich snippets and 301 redirects will also be effective in getting high ranking.
#11 Blog. Create a fully-featured blog inside your store to generate more SEO-friendly content and attract more customers.
#12 Mobile friendliness. A Multi-Vendor by CS-Cart has both responsive design themes for customer area to make any virtual store look properly on any device, and also a responsive administration panel.
#13 Mobile app.
For Multi-Vendor: mobile application for Multi-Vendor shopping cart software can be acquired on the CS-Cart official website: whether buying the source code or purchasing a subscription.
For Multi-Vendor Plus: mobile app is already included in the pack.
#14 Editable layout. The built-in layout editor makes it easy for you to create different layouts for different pages. Also, it allows arranging data blocks in your storefront by simple drag & drop.
#15 Promotions & discounts. When it comes to promotions, Multi-Vendors allow you to set up an option to attract and hold the customers. Promotions can be a catalog or cart-based, discounted flat or percent, and more. Using cross & up-selling tools you can show bestsellers, on-sale, similar and newest products.
License
The license comes with 1-year access to new Multi-Vendor or Multi-Vendor Plus releases and upgrades packages. After the access to upgrades is over, you can renew it. However, if you are not going to upgrade, you can leave it up. That’s nothing, you just refuse updates and improvements as you feel good with what you’ve got.
Hosting
The hosting you need and its price will depend on the number of products you have and the applications you are going to use. The price range starts from 69 USD/month but you are free to choose among the compatible pricing plans or find another company that suits your needs.
Closing
We have reviewed some features of the Multi-Vendor and Multi-Vendor Plus marketplaces. There are a lot more to learn on the official website or ask at [email protected]. The new version will inherit all the great features and will improve product variations and checkout processes. You can get acquainted with the full list of improvements here.
And if you need our help in upgrading in order to be safely transitioned, the Simtech Development Company is here for you.
