Sponsored Products for Vendors

No payment gateway is involved. Ads are paid from the vendor balance that the marketplace already holds: the charges are posted to Vendors → Accounting as Payout rows, so they are deducted from the next payout. With the Vendor debt payout add-on, vendors can also top up their balance to keep advertising.

No. Every charge is checked under a lock against the daily budget, the total budget and the amount available above the minimum balance you keep. When the next click would not fit, the campaign pauses (until midnight for the daily budget, until the balance grows for the balance).

Repeated clicks of the same visitor within the set time, clicks from crawlers and tools, clicks of your administrators and of the vendor's own team, and clicks beyond the per-IP limits are not charged. They are counted as invalid clicks in the statistics.

The amount available for ads drops at once with each charge. The vendor balance in Accounting changes when the charges are posted: once a day (or every hour), or when you click Post now.

Yes. The slots have a "Sponsored products" heading, every card carries a "Sponsored" label and the vendor's name, and the links use rel="sponsored".

Yes. The slots are the same for every guest and are cached with the page; impressions and clicks are sent to an endpoint that is never cached. Changes to campaigns purge the cached pages.

The search strip is printed under the page title of the main content block. If your theme uses another wrapper for the main content, place the Sponsored products block on the search results layout instead. Category and product page strips use template hooks that every Responsive- or Nova-based theme keeps.

Orders placed within the attribution window (7 days by default) after a sponsored click, by the same visitor (cookie) or signed-in customer, for the sponsored product or another variation of it, without failed, declined and cancelled orders.

Yes, but such vendors receive the order money directly and usually have no positive balance. Their campaigns pause for not enough balance until they top up (Vendor debt payout) or you allow a negative balance with Minimum vendor balance to keep.

Yes. Vendors promote their own offers; links lead to the product page with the vendor's offer selected. A product page never shows its own offers or variations as sponsored products, and an order of another variation of a sponsored product counts for the campaign.

The add-on's tables (campaigns, statistics, click log, charges, posting records), settings, privileges and language variables. Charges already posted stay in vendor accounting. Post the open charges first (Posted charges → Post now).

No. The add-on needs vendors and vendor balances; CS-Cart Standard and Ultimate refuse the installation.

Without a valid license (no key after the 14-day start period, an invalid or revoked key, a domain the license does not cover, or no successful check for 14 days), sponsored slots disappear from the storefront and no impressions, clicks or charges are recorded. Campaigns, statistics and vendor balances stay as they are; charges recorded earlier are posted after the license is valid again. Once the license is valid again, everything is back.

Open Add-ons → Manage add-ons → Sponsored Products for Vendors → Settings → License. The status line says what is wrong: no key, a key for another add-on, a revoked license, or a domain that the license does not cover. Fix it and click Check now. See License.

Yes. Subdomains of your licensed domain (for example staging.yourstore.com) and local development hosts (localhost, private IP addresses, .local, .test) are covered by the same license. Clear Show sponsored products on the storefront on copies, so a copy never charges vendors.

Nothing changes for 14 days: the add-on keeps working and retries every hour. Only if no check succeeds for 14 days is it switched off until the next successful check.

No. The check runs in the admin panel or from cron, once a day. The storefront never runs it.