Development projects

• The most priority feature to our artisans is improved tags, collections, and categorizations for Discoverability.
• While supporters are able to add products from multiple vendors to their carts easily, Artisans want more controls in configuring shipping, managing orders, and effectively communicating fulfillment of multi-vendor orders. We need more intuitive tools for designing storefronts, managing product listings, and ensuring reviews are being solicited and made prominently visible.
• Our capacity to develop and refine our features is controlled by third party developers of our existing off-the-shelf technology. Funding supports our ability to take ownership over our marketplaces development and responsiveness to the needs of our members.
• We’re seeking $30k to replace our off-the-shelf technology with solutions that enable critical feature development while beginning development of a hand-built-in-house marketplace platform.

Team Tech spends a lot of time trying to figure out why Shopify/MVM and
their respective apps don’t work as expected. When there’s an issue with
the software, we can’t fix it. We have to beg the vendor (usually
Webkul, the makers of MVM) to fix it. This usually takes many emails
over several days/weeks/months, frequently doesn’t result in any fix,
and they seldom acknowledge that there was a problem even when they do
fix things. It’s a huge drain on our small team.

Team Service can tell you all about the issues people face with the
current platform, both buyers and sellers alike. The fact that we need
custom guides that go on for pages and pages to document all the quirks
about the platform really shows how difficult it is to use.

Team Money has to spend time tracking down financial numbers that don’t
match and we can’t look at the code to determine how it’s coming up with
the numbers. After hours of investigation it frequently turns out to be
rounding errors, and again, Webkul often doesn’t fix them. Beyond that,
Webkul makes surprise changes that make their job more difficult. Most
recently it was making payouts more time consuming.

Team Marketing’s job is more difficult when the platform doesn’t work
well. They go through all the work of bringing in new members, buyers,
and sellers.. we want those people to come back.

All of these problems puts more strain on all our teams, and that
affects Team People. It’s hard enough to find people willing to dedicate
their time as it is, and having to grind our gears with technical issues
that we’re powerless to fix is exhausting.

And these are just the problems that I’m aware of; I’m sure there are
many more that people have been workings around for a long time and we
just accept it as the way it is.

Perhaps most importantly though, is that our entire cooperative was
founded on having a marketplace that WE control. We do largely have that
in terms of being able to set and enforce our policies, but we have very
little of that when it comes to the technical underpinnings (we can’t
see server logs, look at the code, make changes, etc.). Getting that
control is the very core of our mission.

That’s why we are exploring CS-Cart.

# Differences

CS-Cart will undoubtedly come with its own challenges, but it addresses
many of the problems outlined above.

1. We have the source code. When it does something unexpected, we can
just open up the code and it will be much easier to figure out why it
works the way it does.

2. We run the server. That means we have access to error logs, which are
extremely valuable when we’re trying to figure out what happened.

3. We can fix issues ourselves. We don’t need to beg someone else to do
it. We don’t need anyone’s permission. We can just dive in and fix the
problem.

4. We can have a test instance to experiment instead of making changes
in production and hoping for the best. We don’t currently have two
instances because configuring one instance is enough work

5. The documentation is better. This means we can largely just reference
the official docs instead of having to write and update our own copy.

6. Based on our limited testing so far, the seller experience is far
better. Things are organized in a menu that makes sense. There’s still
an order of operations (e.g. set up shipping before adding a product)
but I haven’t see it lose information I entered just because I failed to
fill out a required field as happens to me all the time with MVM.

7. CS-Cart is better designed. What we use now is a hodgepodge of
technologies. Shopify doesn’t have any concept of multiple sellers, nor
does the search app (Boost)

8. It is actually less expensive than our current platform. It’d likely
save us $5,000-7,000/year

9. Their support team understood my question, and gave me a complete and
concise answer on the first reply. This is basically the opposite
experience of what we have now when we try to get help from the software
suppliers.

We have moved out blog from an expensive, for-profit corporation (IONOS)
to be hosted by a cooperative. We did the same with our email and DNS
hosting, allowing us to close our account with IONOS entirely.

We have also switched our domain registration from a for-profit
corporation (EnCirca) which was cumbersome to use, over to a fellow
cooperative. There was no downtime in the process, and we’ll be able to
close our account with EnCirca now too.

We have moved away from a corporate shared password manager (Bitwarden)
to our own self-hosted one. This allowed us to give everyone their own
login to the password manager, use it for two-factor authentication
(2FA) codes, and limit people’s access to just what they need to carry
out their work. This is a significant security improvement, and arguably
an even bigger improvement in terms of usability because it means we
don’t have to coordinate with the one person who has access to the phone
which is needed for 2FA codes.

Making these changes does take a significant amount of effort, and
sometimes there are snags in the transition, but these systems are more
capable, less expensive, we get better support when we do run into
issues, and we get to live our values, not just talk about them!

We appreciate the patience and understanding of all the other teams who
were involved in these changes, both technical systems and in terms of
processes. We are collectively in a better place now.

And we aren’t stopping here. In fact, we’re doubling down. We are
currently in the process of a huge migration from a whole bunch of
internal systems that are hosted with a variety of companies over to a
unified, self-hosted system (CiviCRM). This will save us money, but FAR
more important that that, it will save us TIME and EFFORT. Things will
be less likely to break because there will be fewer third party
integrations. We will spend less time troubleshooting problems and
trying to track down which component isn’t working right. It will be a
system that we control.

Once this transition is complete, it will free us up to make even bigger
improvements. Currently, we’re making sure our internal systems are
working smoothly, but our next projects will improve the experience of
both buyers and sellers on our marketplace.

-Tech Team