Shopping Cart Community

I received an email from CS-Cart to announce a new multi-vendor edition.
The email contained a link to the following page: http://www.cs-cart.com/multivendor.html

I can't imagine there would be much demand for a product like this. I'm guessing that's why ISC killed theirs. Does anyone know of any live sites using a multi-vendor shopping cart?

kurt wrote:I can't imagine there would be much demand for a product like this. I'm guessing that's why ISC killed theirs. Does anyone know of any live sites using a multi-vendor shopping cart?

Big Commerce?

I'm pretty sure the Multi Vendor system was killed because Interspire realised it could compete with BG and having read on the ISC forums it seems there were at least 3 customers using it.

Always room for a multi-vendor system. We built one about 8 years ago for hand crafted goods where each 'craftsperson' managed their own back-end.

What will make them money is a multiple fronted system with the same engine. The ability to have multiple stores each branded differently, with different product sets but one order management system/payment system/inventory will be excellent.

A few American eCommerce systems have this option but implementation is poon. If CS Cart do it it could be a winner.

I'll second this. It would be great if we could have multiple store fronts on different domains all feeding into the same back end.

Running multiple instances of ISC and sorting out separate payment gateways, updating everything separately is a bit of a pain...

bart wrote:I'll second this. It would be great if we could have multiple store fronts on different domains all feeding into the same back end.

See Magento - this functionality is already there.

Just had a bit of a look around Magento. Looks like a bit more complex than ISC. Thanks for the tip

I have also just stumbled across a website called Cart2Cart http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com/ that claims to convert all your data across from one cart to another. They have quite a few carts covered including ISC. If only they had an import across to MyIdealCart...

I've tried using Cart2Cart for ISC > Magento and ISC > CS-Cart, both demo's produced horrible transfer data - I contacted support numerous times and received a poorly written reply which was barely understandable - that was about 12-18 months ago. Not sure if anything has changed, but in the end, I used my own custom export script to transfer the data.

Magento is very complex in comparison with ISC, but the functionalities are (almost) endless, there's 3rd party plugins for almost everything which the cart doesn't already have. However, would I advise a business to use Magento without an onsite developer? No. I certaintly wouldn't advise any clients to use Magento especially if they have no 'technical' knowledge.

Regarding multiple store fronts with one back end - I have been working with a client to get this working in Magento.

On a shared hosting environment like cPanel, its next to impossible for this reason...

Each 'site' will need an SSL, therefore its own IP. By definition this is not possible on a cPanel server and I dont think its possible on a Plesk server, meaning that a custom webserver will be required - Major PITA for the end client.

Of course, the alternative is to have a common 'secure' domain for all the stores, but that defeats the purpose.

I would love to hear from anyone who has experienced this and found a work around.