Which Open Source Cart?

[crazydiamond]

Hi everyone, this is my first post, it has been several years since my last confession.

Right...Where to start?

I have basically managed to grab a career making contract in The Middle East...India's second largest mall-style retailer, has asked my company to provide a scaleable version of the UK's Ocado business model (which I consulted on)...Heavy stuff eh?...In order to integrate what will be India's first home shopping facility.

Believe it or not, they won't invest the budget to have the program built from the ground up, so I have been trawling the web for a soultion that I can adapt to the home shopping model they require.

The best I've found is at americommerce.com ...It seems to do everything I want, although I'm not sure it utilises dot lang files (so I can make the site front-end, viewable in two languages)...Also, it's not provided as open source, meaning I have to stomach their hosting platform, which will leave us well short on bandwidth.

I am looking for some open source kit that fulfills the following requirements (aswell as what americommerce offers)...If you own a business that can provide such software, or know of some good stuff that's out there, I would be very glad to hear from you.


Can power unlimited multiple storefronts from a central hub / db
Support multi-languge / multi-currency
Scaleable to at least 50 000 products, with drill-down to weight, size, colour etc.
Supports offline payment methods, like COD, Phone in, Credit Note, voucher etc.
Full back end integration with analystics and purchasing histories, down to store (or regional) level.We have a relatively large budget, but not mental, as the chore revenue will be earned against the success of the project.

Any pointers you are able to give will be gratefully received.

Regards

Danny

[da8iwr]

Hi Danny, this kind of question always opens a can of worms as it is 99% personal preference.

There are a few options for you,

Oscommerce
ZenCart
Xcart

All three of them are based on oscommerce.

There is also

Joomla and Virtuemart

Joomla is a full CMS system with the additional Virtuemart shopping system added. This is by far the most scalable and best choice if in the future you need it to do many things.

here are 2 sites i built recently with Joomla and VM

http://www.nutriculture.com/
http://www.spot-ontv.co.uk/

Look at the URLs of these. They use a Mod ReWrite system which actually changes the URL to suit the page title and content. This improves the chances of it being shown in Google by 100s of percents.

It would take me about 2 days to make the top one from scratch and about 1 day for the bottom site.

Joomla/Virtuemart is valitable with the W3 validator, Oscomerce isn't.
Joomla/Virtuemart is part of a large CMS, allowing you to add forums, unlimited pages, galleries, Chat Rooms, etc - Oscommerce doesn't do any of that.
And if you really want Oscommerce as part of your project, you can use a modified version which will embed into Joomla as a component.The next is commercial eCommerce software. The best i know of on the market which is "Out of the box" is www.tradingeye.com (http://www.tradingeye.com). Its the only commercial ecom software which will validate 100% to XHTML strict and conforms to some of the most tight DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) regs out there. It was reviewed by .NET mag as superb and has very little going against it.

It also has the same mod-rewrite engine as virtuemart above and a whole host of support and extras.

Your going to get a load of people voting on here for Oscommerce as they haven't tried the most recent version of VM, but you have to remember, Osc is an excellent system, but is a pure shop only and not able to be upgraded to take extra pages, or forums etc, which VM can when you need the site to expand.

Regards
Ian

[Cornish Steve]

Ian,

I'd like to be clear on some of the points in your message and to ask some dumb questions:

- Are OSCommerce and Joomla both open source software?

- Why would someone pay for commercial software (you mentioned tradingeye) when open source software is free?

- Is a professional needed to build the shopping site in all cases or does commercial software allow technical ignoramuses (such as myself) to put something together?

- What level of flexibility does each product offer? For example, must there be product pictures? Can the same products be listed by different criteria (e.g., by make, or by price, or by function)? Can the same products be included in more than one category (e.g., camera and video recorder)?

- Can prices be quoted in different currencies and descriptions be presented in different languages depending on the site visitor (asked in the original post)?

- Do these products support standard interfaces to credit card processing sites?

[da8iwr]

goldctrsteve,

Yerp Joomla is an open source software product, you can download it for free from joomla.org.

Why would people pay for commercial when open source does the same?
Well i have been using Joomla now for about 3 or 4 years and have a very good reputation in the Joomla community with hacking and using it. But there are still many occasions where i become stuck as my client wants to do something that i cant do.

But as its open source i cant just call the company who made it and ask them to alter it. So instead i either have to learn how to do it with help from forums and tutorial sites, or pay a third party company/person to do it for me.

With a commercial package, you call them up tell them what you want, and they give you a cost and hey presto, its done.

Also if your site is hacked by a hacker (which happens to even the best sites) then you have major troubles trying to find what they have done or trying to fix it. They have a habit of adding a few files that you don't know about, which could send a copy of all email addresses and user info to the hacker and unless you find that file or even one line of code in the thousands of pages, it will do it for ever.

But open source is actually usually safer than commercial, as you have thousands/millions of people using it, and if any of them find an error or security risk they drop a line to the core programmers and some thing is done about it as a fix. I'm not saying commercial software isn't good, I'm just defending open source.

A joomla site can be very simple to put together.


You can choose a template (the design of the site) from somewhere like www.rockettheme.com (http://www.rockettheme.com) or www.joomlart.com (http://www.joomlart.com) which you simple add through the admin, its very simple.
You can download a joomla installation which already has the latest version of virtue mart installed from www.virtuemart.com (http://www.virtuemart.com) (go to downloads)
You simply use the admin system to build the site from there. There are many tutorials that i have built in flash video to help, here are a few
http://www.salyris.com/joomla_tutorial_center.html
http://www.newworlddesigns.co.uk/joomla/tutorials
http://www.newworlddesigns.co.uk/site/tutorials/intro.htm
Watch the latter first.
The level of flexibility is unreal for VM, you can add categories in categories which are endless. So it will go
shop > TVs > flat screens > 17" - 21" > remote control > colour > ...
and so on.
Joomla uses something called modules, which show content in certain key areas on the page.
http://www.newworlddesigns.co.uk/site/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=56&Itemid=73
You can see here how my template for my website is built up. Each area like "User 1" is where you can display modules. For example i have chosen to show the "Search bar" in "User 6", but i could change it to anywhere i want by a drop down menu. I would simply choose the "Search Module" and then choose a new area like "User 1", which would then show the search bar above the main content in the "User1" red box.Its really that simple, but it does take a bit of time to get your head around it. All my clients now use the system without asking me for help, and don't have any trouble. I was away last week for a week, and had one client asking me for help. I simply told them to have a play as i had no way of helping them. 10 Min's later i got a text saying "Its ok mate i fixed it" from a non techy shop keeper.

None of that stuff up there mind you can be done in Oscommerce without some serious PHP hacking. As you cant swap around where the content is going to live, you cant add in modules, and you cant add new pages, which is why I'm strongly advising this direction.

And if you get stuck completely you could ask me or UK Programmer Phil Taylor (he is a joomla core programmer, bit arrogant but good at what he does) to help out at http://www.phil-taylor.com/FixMySite/

My fingers are aching so ill stop now lol

Regards
Ian

[RedEvo]

Phil Taylor is actually a thoroughly decent bloke.....

d

[awebapart.com]

I am looking for some open source kit that fulfills the following requirements (aswell as what americommerce offers)...

Can power unlimited multiple storefronts from a central hub / db
Support multi-languge / multi-currency
Scaleable to at least 50 000 products, with drill-down to weight, size, colour etc.
Supports offline payment methods, like COD, Phone in, Credit Note, voucher etc.
Full back end integration with analystics and purchasing histories, down to store (or regional) level.
My company has an e-commerce sitebuilder solution which is partially based on our own custom version of osCommerce. I can say straight away that our solution is not appropriate for you, and if you are thinking of osCommerce or Zencart, then you will have a lot of development to do to get the system scaling to 50 000 products and supporting multiple storefronts.

You might read that a shop system like osCommerce supports unlimited number of products, but there is always a practical limit depending on how easy it is to manage those products within the system.

As for multiple storefronts, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this, it could involve a lot of further requirements, it could be a can of worms, e.g. do you want different people managing their own storefront, with different logins. Out of the box, osCommerce does not support this, it's architecture is very much one osCommerce system = multiple currencies, multiple languages, but really only one shop, and I'm guessing most of the open source systems are like this.

One thing to always check for when an established retail company is thinking of adding ecommerce, is who does their epos system, since it might be the case that their epos supplier also has an ecommerce offering, which would simplify things greatly (i.e. one central product, stock, accounting system).

[da8iwr]

Phil Taylor is actually a thoroughly decent bloke.....

I never said he wasn't a nice guy, i said he was a bit arrogant, but I'm also an opinionated, arrogant person as well.

But just to prove to you what i meant, take a look at his page
http://www.phil-taylor.com/About_Us/

Phil Taylor MBCS
I have a masters in advertising and an Honorary degree based on my portfolio and work to the local community, but this is the first time i have ever posted it on the net.

I don't hold back in saying this, I am considered to be the leading developer of Commercial Joomla Components in the world!

I have been paid to travel to North America, Europe and Asia, to talk about my photography in lectures and exhibitions, but you wont find this wrote on any of my websites anywhere apart from this thread, as i don't need to. If somebody is looking for somebody to do work, they will either eventually find me by referral, or find somebody else. In the same way as i just popped his name on to this thread as an experienced guy.

One of my clients owns www.bodymetrics.com (http://www.bodymetrics.com) and for the first 6 months that i knew his, i had no idea about his status. Then by accident i found he is a Professor for Oxford University, has an OBE for his outstanding contributions to his local community and is one of the wealthiest people in the UK as he invented some software for detecting money laundering in banks used by nearly every bank in the world. I only found this info out by accident as i searched for his address and post code to add to a contract, and it popped up in a Google search. But none of it is wrote anywhere on his site, and he never told me.

I think the words "A bit arrogant" is justified however nice a person Phil is.

[da8iwr]

you can also have a look for the kind of cart I have in www.tata888.com (http://www.tata888.com)
Pm me for the price, I guarantee that would be the best price you can get

Isn't your site just Oscommerce or something based around it? It has very little SEO work done to it, and the design is going to be very dificult to change, as the links at the top are static images and not able to cope with anymore links without a lot of coding.

Also Awebapart, your right, there isn't any open-source systems that do the multi vendor which i know of.

http://virtuemart.net/documentation/User_Manual/Vendor_Administration.html

VM is still building a part of the system to do this, but has loads of bugs. I have seen somebody who has cleaned it up and actually got it working, but that will need to be done via a third party company.

It basically acts like a shopping system that any seller can login to and sell their products through it. I haven't looked into it to much, but i heard it will be released in Version 1.1 which is in Beta at the moment and hopefully to be released in the next couple of months.

Both Osc and VM are in their infancy, and it will be interesting to see what they will release in the next 2 or 3 years. I think it will rival any commercial software package, looking at what they have accomplished in the past 12-24 months.