Building the storefront is the easy part of a marketplace. The hard parts are vendor onboarding, who gets paid what, and what happens when a customer returns something three weeks after a vendor was paid out.
We build on CS-Cart Multi-Vendor and Multi-Vendor Plus, and we’ve had to solve those problems on live marketplaces.
Self-service signup with progress saved between sessions, document upload, approval workflow, and a payment-provider connect step. The alternative is your team setting up every vendor by hand, which stops being viable at around vendor thirty.
The commission base, shipping, tax, discounts, refunds, negative balances and reserves. We’ll ask you to decide these before we build, because changing the payout model after launch is one of the more expensive things you can do. We have written up where the money goes in Multi-Vendor.
Product management, bulk import, order handling, shipping labels, messaging with customers, and a statement showing exactly what they were paid and for which orders. Most payout disputes aren’t about money. They’re about vendors not being able to see the working.
Connecting vendor catalogues to Shopify, TikTok Shop, eBay, WooCommerce, Etsy and BigCommerce. We build these on a shared framework, so the sixth channel costs a fraction of the first.
Not every gateway can divide a payment between vendors, and availability depends on your vendors’ countries. We check this on day one against the gateways we already support. More on choosing a gateway by market.
Read the marketplace case studies for the builds behind this: multichannel connectors on a shared framework, headless storefronts, licence-gated healthcare catalogues and B2B marketplaces wired into an ERP.
Fixed price per phase, not one number for the whole thing. Marketplaces change shape as you learn what vendors actually need, and a single fixed price for an eighteen-month build is either padded or going to be renegotiated.
We scope phase one properly, quote it, build it, and scope the next one with what we both learned.
Depends on vendor count, storefronts and the features you need. We'll tell you which, and we'd rather you bought the cheaper licence if it does the job. We're an authorised reseller, so we can supply either.
Yes. That's the channel integration work above.
Very common, and it's a normal build: balances tracked in CS-Cart, payouts on a schedule by bank transfer or a local provider, with an export in the format your bank accepts.
A focused first phase is usually a few months. Anyone quoting a full marketplace in four weeks is describing a demo.
Your complete CS-Cart team: add-ons, development and support from an official partner.
