Is CS-Cart a good ecommerce platform?

[SFD]

I've been looking around for an ecommerce platform and found cs-cart.com

It looks quite good to me and does a lot of what I want it to do right out of the box.

I've read lots of reviews and these seem to say either 'brilliant, very easy to use' or 'looks good but very slow + hard to edit'

Does anyone on these forums have any experience of it?

 

[jamie1183]

I currently work on 5 websites for a large client, they all run on CS-Cart so I suppose I have experience with it

In my personal opinion, it is a good platform, yes you pay for it so you get ok support, the forum is quite good if you are stuck.

BUT
I would go for Magento, it has as many features if not more, there are alot more available plugins, the support may be harder as magento don't offer support to the community edition but you will find developers alot easier and the forums are ok for support.

Like I said I work on 5 CS-Cart websites I also build many Magento sites for clients on a weekly basis, personally Magento would win everytime, I am currently in the process of migrating the CS-Cart websites to magento, not just because I prefer Magento but also for future developments it will save on costs as you have to buy the licence.

Ive also now developed a central management tool that will connect all the magento websites together so the client has one system for all the sites.

Hope this helps, if you need any advice drop me an email

 

[kulture]

It looks quite good to me and does a lot of what I want it to do right out of the box.

This is the key statement. Look at Magento, as suggested, and see if it ticks as many points as CS-Cart for YOU.

Magento is the newer cart and functionally superior, BUT if CS-Cart does more for you, then go for it.

 

[jamieclick]

Hi,

Not going to say that I have looked at CS Cart properly but what I can see it looks very much liek OpenCart layout which is free.

We have been using OpenCart for a while now and it seems great.

Do feel free to email, [email protected] and I can show some other options. WordPress can be good. It all depends what your needs are. Dont worry, I will be doing it as a favour also

Jamie

 

[SFD]

I've taken a look at Magento before and it seems overly complicated for what I initially need, however, these may be things I need in the future.

Thanks for mentioning opencart, I've taken a quick look and while I can see they look similar, cs cart just appears a lot more polished, especially the admin part.

 

[kulture]

For me, the admin part is less important than the front end. A cart has to look polished and professional to customers. So long as the admin lets me do what I want, then its look is immaterial. If it is clunky, then you need to work out the cost implications of having to spend longer administering the orders etc than using a polished admin. BUT that is just a cost consideration and not a look and feel.

Magento is very feature rich for the front end. The admin is OK but has limitations. The biggest one for me is splitting orders (you cannot, but you can part deliver)

 

[WebDomainsPro]

CS-cart can run slowly if you have all the add-ons enabled.

 

[cody44]

I am working on a site now using Magento. Did find it difficult at first but suppose only because never used the system before. Works well and as it is open source there is a lot of help on the Magento forums. You need to decide the criteria for the shopping cart and tick the boxes and see which one comes out tops. Othersd I looked at was Joomla and os commerce. Sure they all do the job.

Mark

 

[Page]

If it is your first shop and only shop then cs-cart is probably a much better start point for you.

Magento has a higher learning curve and heavier hosting requirements and so will cost you more when not selling much

cs-cart is a delight to use and very good for smaller set ups

The cost is pretty low and the community very good and helpful

Okay Magento is free but you will be up and selling faster than with magento so unless you price your time very low you will still be better off with cs-cart and then on going hosting is lower since it is less resource hungry

Magento has a much much bigger add on developer community but no real active helping each other community which is maybe what you might need

Hang around on both forums and see how active cs-cart is compared with magento
Wait until you are stuck and make that forum post and get no reply for a week then you will wish you were with cs-cart

If it is your second site and you have lots of experience and the $$ are flowing in then it is different and Magento might be more suited

No one cart is perfect so I hope the above helps you think about it

 

[Alicatt]

This site uses cs-cart:

Celebration Print

I like it. The up-front costs are less than Magento - good if you are just testing a concept - but it has lots of very useful features. It also runs OK on a decent, but by no means top of the range, shared hosting.

But as others have said, does it tick the boxes which are important to you?

If you have a specific question, feel free to PM me.

Alison

 

[TotalWebSolutions]

We have several merchants using CS-Cart with our EcomMerchant Payment Gateway. All of which seem happy with it.