Advice on shopping cart

[Nutkins]

Hi all,

I know this topic has been done many times and this is somewhat of a re-post, but was hoping for some advice on my particular circumstances. Myself and my business partner are soon launching a piece of software that we will be selling on a subscription basis, via repeat card payments, maybe paypal too. So basically we will only have one product (perhaps expanding to say max 5 products in the future).

The site only needs to be pretty simple with a home page - detailed product page - forums - Purchase page, news page, plus the usual terms and conditions / privacy stuff.

I'm looking for recommendations on the best Shopping cart to software to use to drive the site. We'd decided on Magento on the basis than in the future we may do a more traditional on-line store with lots of products, so though it would be good to get to know what seems to be becoming the industry standard. However having played around with it a fair bit now, it seems a bit overkill for what we need. We're looking to probably use a template (free or modest cost) for the site, but all the Magento ones are geared to having lots of products and pages.. It seems to take a good while stripping stuff out you don't want. Having to find the location for the footer links / header links etc etc. I'm getting quite used to it but it's just taking too long. I'm not a web designer or even an expert, but know enough to be able to manipulate a template or even copy a design of another site. That's assuming it's not as pre-structured as Magento and some \ most of the templates out there. We're trying to keep costs down so don't want to pay someone to do a site.

So any recommendations for Cart software that is very lightweight and easy to customize (and of course solid SEO potential)? In theory I guess as the site is so simple we wouldn't necessarily need full shopping cart software.. But we want the features such as customer management / newsletters etc so it makes sense to use one. Also we're going to be accepting card payments via our own site so it's probably necessary from that perspective. We're probably going to be using a SagePay / Elavon combo if that's relevant..

So in Summary we need:-

• Easy to customize and set-up design wise / won't break if you remove things from the front end.
• Ideally plenty of free templates around
• Good / easy to set-up SEO
• Standard CMS features like Newsletters and a Customer database
• Only selling one product (in the future Max 5) so doesn't need to be too advanced.
• Compatible with Elavon / SagePay.

Sorry for the long post and thanks for any advice anyone can give!

 

[irishguru]

Simple. Go with Zencart.

The best is Magento though for what you want definitely Zencart.

Easy to do just about anything with and has lots of documentation out there on the WWW.


I also hope if you're only selling one product that you will be using a keyword laiden domain and it is a quite unique product name otherwise you're going to have a hard job getting any love from the Search engines.

Regards

 

[edmondscommerce]

If you have the choice I would choose Magento - its the best platform to be investing in right now..

Its the only one that is unarguably "on the up" meaning you will be able to take advantage of not only what it can do now, but what it will be able to do in the future.

If budget is a primary concern I would recommend other carts, but that is the only reason I am not recommending Magento these days.

 

[Nutkins]

Thanks guys - I will have a look at Zencart.

RE Magento - I can see from having had a good play with it that's it's good / feature rich. Just all the xml content blocks and all the rest it of seem a bit overkill in terms of time I need to spend with it and learning it. Are the other shopping carts based around similar technology in terms of the front end? Or are they easier to manipulate?

 

[edmondscommerce]

other ones to look at are prestashop and open cart - both also open source

that said Zen is a good cart - as is CRE Loaded - they are both osCommerce spin offs which is simplicity itself to work on if you like procedural code (and table based layouts)

 

[irishguru]

Thanks guys - I will have a look at Zencart.

RE Magento - I can see from having had a good play with it that's it's good / feature rich. Just all the xml content blocks and all the rest it of seem a bit overkill in terms of time I need to spend with it and learning it. Are the other shopping carts based around similar technology in terms of the front end? Or are they easier to manipulate?

You'll kill yourself on that platform. They haven't made it easy to customise design just like vbulletin haven't with their forum software. I wish they both didn't do this or I'd definitely use them.

 

[Nutkins]

I also hope if you're only selling one product that you will be using a keyword laiden domain and it is a quite unique product name otherwise you're going to have a hard job getting any love from the Search engines.

Regards

It's fairly niche I would say yes. We stuck up a holding / coming soon page with just the title and some metatags / keywords and I think it hit page 7 on google for our favoured search term. We're hoping once it has some genine content / inbound links etc it will work it's way up the rankings.

 

[edmondscommerce]

Once you get the hang of it I think its a better design customisation system - allows for much more flexibility in terms of design rather than the usual "all look roughly the same" that can be an issue with some carts.

Each to their own tho!

 

[Nutkins]

You'll kill yourself on that platform. They haven't made it easy to customise design just like vbulletin haven't with their forum software. I wish they both didn't do this or I'd definitely use them.

It did give me a few headaches, thing is I imagine once you come to terms with it, maybe do a couple of sites, it does seem very logical and pretty clever. We just dont have the time / money to invest at the moment and as the site is going to be so simple I think something else would be better for now.

 

[irishguru]

Once you get the hang of it I think its a better design customisation system - allows for much more flexibility in terms of design rather than the usual "all look roughly the same" that can be an issue with some carts.

Each to their own tho!

I cannot for the life of me get the hang of either vbulletin or magento design.

I think it's possibly down to the lack of info on the www about how it all works. If I could see a systematic breakdown of the process I would prob give it a go.

 

[edmondscommerce]

there is a bit of a learning curve I agree

as for a systematic breakdown well no there isn't one as such but there are some good books etc out now so compared to 18 months ago things have got a lot easier for aspiring Magento developers/designers.