There are various website store builders which claim to let you create the marketplace website of your dream but fail miserably to stand true to their say. There are various platforms that lie in two categories of being closed source and open source. A platform like Magento, Shopify, Sharetribe, BigCommerce, CS-Cart, Virtuemart, J2 Store, Prestashop, WooCommerce, Hikamart/Hikashop, X-Cart, and many others lies in the above two categories. But none of them has the potential to be declared as an ideal niche or multi vendor marketplace open source or closed source. All of them are misleading in the format where they claim to provide 100% support and all the essential eCommerce features once the user subscribes to them for free and at minimal cost respectively.
A platform like CS-Cart doesn’t aim to offer a frustration-free user flow and doesn’t aim to offer a well-thought customer journey. In fact, the customer support of such platforms is not free of cost. This company tends to charge their customer through the credit points which the subscriber has to buy through them. Even for the smallest of the small queries of yours, they will charge many credit points. Therefore, such platforms absolutely deserve a ‘No’ from their site visitors at a first glance. Platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce don’t provide the accessibility to their subscribers or site visitors to even create a multi-vendor marketplace open source. You have to highly depend either on the third-party development service providers like CS-Cart development service providers or on the third-party plugins.
There are various gaps in the e-commerce applications industry which are mentioned below.
1. Integrated eCommerce solutions:
With the advent of digital India and more focus towards digitalization in the mode of payment, buy and sell, the eCommerce industry is facing many challenges out of which one is the unavailability of a reliable Joomla shopping cart development platform. Trust issues can be usually witnessed when buying through various online channels like social media, web app, desktop app, or any other channel.
2. Lack of Scalable Solution Providers:
The current platforms available in the market don’t provide scalable solutions which can be either scaled down or up as and when required. All you can do is subscribe to the premium version and leverage fewer freedoms of their eCommerce features. All the companies, be it small or a large enterprise, desire to work in a flexible, agile, and scalable pattern where they will be only charged for the resources which are actually consumed. If your current business is not built through a platform that provides scalable solutions and you were unaware or unconscious of it.
3. Visibility and Availability of a mass solution platform:
In the e-commerce applications industry, there was a time where there was no, not single ecommerce platform development tool that could guarantee to be future proof, provide a solution to almost all the evolving market problems and concerns, and was efficient to cater all the dynamic and ever-changing requirements of a store owner.
Therefore, all the marketplace owners were doing was to fluctuate from one platform to another in the thirst of the most appropriate platform. Such inconsistency is set to be a huge drawback for the owners as a major section of their time is spent on such activities. Switching also caused a lot of compatibility issues, unresponsive design elements, and backend functionality disability. Thus increased level of satisfaction for the site visitors and shoppers.
All such challenges were there before the arrival of Sellacious in the industry. This platform has more than 5000 essential ecommerce features with which you can not only create and host your web store within 15 minutes but also let your vendor create their own mini web store and display their offerings in compliance to the overall platform design and standards. If the administrator wants they could also allow the vendor to give the vendor access to stylize their own webstore as per their wish.
Moreover, the store owner can define and confine roles and permissions respectively for their marketplace. You as a store owner can upload as many products as you want in the enterprise version and up to 200K+ products and their variants in the lifetime version. You as a store owner or administrator can create breadth and depth of categories and sub-categories respectively and also can identify the best design pattern to showcase data and thus aim to offer fluid navigation to your user with this platform.