Multi Vendor Marketplace Solution options

KpsCowley

Hi,

I am looking to start a multi vendor marketplace website. The marketplace will be for niche specific physical items, will need good category/filtering (especially searching by region/country), work well on mobile devices, and have direct payment commission functionality (such as Paypal chained adaptive payments/ Stripe).

I am looking for a turn key solution rather than a scratch build (overpriced and headaches), such as a wordpress plug in or some standalone CMS. But I am having a bit of a time of it getting through the BS. Wow these companies push their products hard. I've had to go to Google page 5 to find an actual independent review in some cases, and even at that 'independent' is hard to verify. A lot of the youtube explainer videos have comments disabled too which is worrying.

So I have been looking through some of the solution out there. Here is my experience so far:

Etsyclone/Getsy - Nicely laid out, but full of spelling/grammar mistakes, not very flexible and everything seems to be a problem.
Sharetribe - Too basic in functionality, no statistical information, no available plugins, but it does seem to have been built with practicality in mind.

The rest I do not have practical experience with, but have been reading whatever reviews I could find.
Marketify - Wordpress plugin on top of woocommerce. Very modern layout, but it is a little unintuitive. Its cheap and responsive. Could be a solution for me.
Dakon - Wordpress plugin on top of woocommerce. Nice merchant dashboard, but apparently its buggy.
Magento - They have a marketplace solution with two tiers, a basic for 300 and pro for 1800 aprox. I have been finding it hard to get good information on this, but it seems to be a little old style?
Prestashop - they have a multi vendor solution, but Ive used prestashop before and would like something different.
Then there are a few other Wordpress plugins/themes - Squarecode, Marketica, Makery, Checkout. All difficult to get actual good information on rather than a sales pitch.

I need a solution that has been through the mill. Here is an example of what I can not deal with anymore - After jumping into sharetribe, I soon found out that it did not even have a function for merchants to give multiple shipping prices pending on shipping zones, nightmare.

If anyone here has any experience or advice on the best way to move forward I would really appreciate it.

My experience is - basic html/css, basic Ruby/Rails through Git/Heroku. I have employed Irish developers for php/server implementation etc. who are expensive, and also outsourced recently which is much cheaper but comes with its own difficulties.

Regards,
Kevin.

devildriver

Have a look at CS Cart:

http://www.cs-cart.com/multivendor.html

I checked it out a few years ago for a client, the project never got approved so I don't have real world experience with it.

From what I remember it was fairly capable if a little clunky sometimes and problems are fairly well documented in the forums.

You can get a free hosted demo to give it run.

KpsCowley

Thanks devildriver,

I have looked at cs-cart, they look very good. But it is hard to tell without actual experience of using it.

Kevin.