Multi vendor shopping carts are gaining popularity all over the world and entrepreneurs know why they are such a huge hit. It gives additional functionality since more than one vendor can open a store and add products to it. With a single admin and multiple sellers selling within the same online marketplace, the browsing experience can only get better since customers don’t have to look elsewhere to buy the products they need. Companies like Amazon, Alibaba and eBay have proved to be very successful with multi-vendor shopping marketplaces. But often, a person who has just begun the entrepreneurial journey has no clue when it comes to selecting the best multi-vendor shopping cart from the ones that exist in the market. This comparison blog will give a new outlook to the important decision that an entrepreneur has to take.
EcommerceMix
Admire from EcommerceMix comes with an elegant user interface and tons of features. Every seller gets his own mobile app for both iOS and Android platforms and multi-language feature covers all languages from Chinese to Portuguese! Apart from that, the admin panel is very responsive and it comes with detailed charts and reports making it easy for the user to run the website on his mobile device. The social media features are designed to bring a flood of traffic to your website. Dispute management helps you to settle any conflict quickly and the built-in newsletter module gives you powerful email marketing facilities to boost your marketing strategies. All brands and stores are indexed so you get a beautiful list of all the stores within the online marketplace.
When compared to other multi-vendor shopping carts, Admire has more features and comes with the full source code and free installation along with lifetime free support. All future version updates are free and comes with a How To library and video tutorials.
Magento’s Multi-vendor Shopping cart
Magento multi-vendor cart is well known and comes with a full set of features for the user. It comes with a beautiful landing page that displays the top 4 sellers with their top 3 products. Also the sellers are assigned separate profiles. All the sellers are indexed and there is an option to view the list of sellers or brands that are selling their products inside the marketplace. It is social media friendly with social media checkboxes for the seller/vendor to use. The admin panel has all power and control. Admin can add the images when the seller adds the product. Admin can set the landing page and the seller profile page. He can also manage the inventory settings.
However this script has some disadvantages. Some customers claim that the script is very hard to customize even though they have lot of plugins. The customization on Magento is difficult and require high tech resources. One other major thing is Magento is not cost effective – their enterprise version is too costly and requires high level coding to customize it.
WooCommerce
The Product Vendors extension for WooCommerce allows you to turn your single vendor marketplace into a multi-vendor marketplace. Sellers can add their own products to the stores or you can assign existing products to the sellers. Suppose you are running a baby products store, then you can add the baby music videos to the seller who sells baby entertainment goods. Although the sellers have dedicated individual stores, the admin can also sell their products in the regular shop pages alongside those of the sellers. Detailed reports are sent to the admin regarding the sales made by the individual vendors. Seamless WordPress integration and PayPal adaptive integrations are some of the other features of Woocommerce.
Disadvantages include not having a front end control for the vendors. Vendors are forced to use the default WordPress dashboard for vendor dashboard functions.
OpenCart
The multi-vendor shopping cart from Opencart is a neat and versatile shopping cart. It’s a readymade solution and all the user has to do is install it and have his online marketplace ready within no time. It comes with many templates that the user can select for his website. Multi-language feature supports many languages from Hungarian to Farsi. It comes with more than 20 payment gateways from PayPal to SagePay and Realex. You can extend the functionality of OpenCart via modules like Bestsellers, Google Analytics, Google Talk etc.
The biggest disadvantage is being unable to edit the program without causing other conflicts within the source code. Users can’t even add a single menu item without making changes to the OpenCart source code.
Bigcommerce
Bigcommerce comes with beautiful and easy-to-use stores that bring in the customers and the traffic you want. It comes with responsive themes and templates built for the mobile shopping enthusiasts. Sellers can add all their products with high resolution images that come with zoom option. Another important feature is a secure checkout process. It comes integrated with analytics that gives you important business insights. Other important features include the availability of hundreds of free apps and SEO optimizations.
Disadvantages are many including a not so good editor through which adding images or videos is a bit clumsy. For mobile ecommerce, Bigcommerce has tall claims of providing ‘customizable’ mobile themes. But again there is no editor to customize the themes or even preview it leaving users frustrated.
The User Interface that comes along with Bigcommerce is too complicated and not designed proficiently. These are some of the disadvantages that may leave the user feeling that he did not get his money’s worth.
Conclusion:
Multi vendor shopping carts have become the norm when it comes to online shopping and marketplaces. The above comparisons are done to help entrepreneurs in the nascent stage of their ecommerce business to take the right decision. While all multi-vendor shopping carts are good, Admire from Ecommerce Mix has an edge over the others with its reasonable pricing and enormous amount of features and customizations. Woocommerce comes a close second with its flexibility and features. Bigcommerce bags the third place for some of the unique features it has.
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