Which shopping cart?

B

bettersales

try the cube cart. Perhaps the most important attribute of good shopping cart software is the information and help the application provides. The help is quite poor. They offer a help forum, which is designed to answer all your needs. Most of your questions go unanswered or you might get a poor response.
 
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R

Royalty-Free-Music

YOu need to choose which cart depending on what exactly you want to do on the web. I use x-cart because it has a good encrypted and automated download system for electronic files purchased online. There's some better (apparently) carts out there but they dont get near this functionality so I can not seriously consider them.

Also, you might want to consider the availability of reliable and good developers to develop the cart to meet your exact specification, thus helping you develop your USP and thus your competitive edge.

X-cart did this for me, although I met a few dodgy developers along the way who promised but half delivered on work and left me high and dry (anyway, once bitten.. etc).

So take some time to work out what features are really important for your business, then go see which ones deliver these.

Hope this helps.:)
 
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antropy

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    TotalWebSolutions

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    Sep 29, 2009
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    Plenty of good open source solutions out there such as OpenCart, Magento, ZenCart and TomatoCart but also hosted solutions such as OpenMindCommerce and ekmPowershop. We have a comprehensive list on the payment processing section of our website so feel free to click the link in my signature to view the list and visit each cart page.

    Thanks,

    Simon
     
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    Optegris

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    You may also want to consider commercial alternatives such as our eCommerce software. Not only do you get a full featured store but also the ability to pick up the phone and talk to the developer who actually wrote the application.

    This is probably the biggest USP over going down the open source route...
     
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    I have tried several shopping cart programs, including magento, prestashop, zencart, opencart, TomatoCart.

    I must admit magento is obvious the most powerful one. But I will not recommend it to green hand and if you have no coding knowledge, I think you'd be better to forget about it.

    Zen Cart is too old and I don't like the back office design, out of order and messy.I don't like it.

    TomatoCart is new but very promising. The admin panel is the most user friendly to beginners of ecommerce, similar to a desktop, clean and nice. The feature is comprehensive as well. I would like to recommend it to all small or medium shop owners. But the team is busy developing core feature, the forum is lacking support at present.

    OpenCart is also promising, which is awarded with TomatoCart in 2010 Open Source Awards, but the feature is limited.

    Prestashop, nice design with enough features. But the extensions are too expensive. If I choose an open source shopping cart, I will not pay a lot to get a payment gateways or a features which is available in other shopping carts.
     
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    F

    Flying Hippy

    Hi,

    What products is are you wishing to sell ? need a bit more info ? do you mind paying for functionality or do you prefer so called free software that requires more time spent of developing ?

    A Lot to consider when choosing the right cart.
     
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    opencart

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    Sep 26, 2010
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    Hi Daniel the developer of OpenCart here.

    Not only was OpenCart the runner up in packetpub's openc source ecommerce awards but it was also the fastest growing ecommerce solution.

    Plus I'm from the UK.

    wait to you see all the features I have added to 1.5.0.
     
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    opencart

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    There is an unfinished version of opencart 1.5.0 coming out tomorrow or the day after on svn. I got abit annoyed its taken so long and thought i better get something out.

    some things missing like, add to cart, product compare, add to wishlist, css things still todo. but should only take a few more days to finish.
     
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    Viewfax

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    Jun 23, 2010
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    I've installed oscommerce for our online shop and although it is functioning as expected we are already realising several limitations and looking at our alternatives.

    In order to get our site to function in a satisfactory way the code has been heavily modified from its stock state.

    From the research I've done so far, it looks like we'll probably choose to use Ubercart on a Drupal installation when we upgrade.

    One of our biggest problems is access control for the staff; we wan't them to be able to create/amend products, check/change orders but we don't want them to be able to accidentally alter critical shop-wide settings. Drupal's versatile roles/permissions system makes it possible for us to do this easily.

    Other advantages are things like incorporating our blog in a neat manner, at the moment we have a seperate Wordpress installation and use code I've written that parses the RSS feeds from posts and displays them in an infobox on our front page. Creating the same result in an Ubercart/Drupal install would have been many times easier, and significantly faster to implement.

    In summary, I feel that oscommerce is a good simple solution that has benefits (the main one being speed, oscommerce installs generally navigate very fast) but I suspect that many shop owners will outgrow it quickly.

    Hope this is of some help,
    Tim.
     
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    edmondscommerce

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    Yep, oscommerce is long in the tooth now.

    You can roll out a decent osCommerce store by using a pre loaded version such as CRELoaded, or going for ZenCart

    CRELoaded is great in terms of lots of features included as standard.

    Compared to more modern systems like OpenCart and Magento though, its still very dated and is likely to be outgrown fairly quickly for most businesses.

    I still have a lot of time for osCommerce though. Having spent so much time with it I can roll out osCommerce customisations etc very quickly in comparison to every other cart. Other developers find it an absolute pain to work on though, generally not helped by the fact that they do tend to be so very heavily customised and often with contributions that are not particularly well written.
     
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    Viewfax

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    Jun 23, 2010
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    My experience ties in exactly with what you've said.

    One issue that regularly concerns me is removing mods/contribs - the nature of our oscommerce installation means that mods are installed on top of other mods and even with detailed development documentation, removing something further back along the chain could have big knock-on effects. More and more I'm feeling frozen by our oscommerce install.

    On the other hand I'd still consider it for sole-trader type enterprises, I just feel it doesn't lend itself to regular tinkering!

    Tim. :D
     
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    edmondscommerce

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    To be honest I have worked on some amazingly powerful osCommerce based sites.

    The point is that osCommerce installs often become the foundation of what can best be described as a bespoke system.

    It has its shortcomings and people customise and extend the codebase to suit their requirements. Need it to handle over 100k products, no problem.. want sub 0.2 second page load times.. no problem.

    The big problem is that you do get locked into osCommerce, specifically your heavily customised version of it.

    I wouldn't build a new site for anyone based on osCommerce anymore unless I was pretty confident that they are not really going to need anything above and beyond what it already does. It's simply not worth it.

    There are loads of legacy sites still out there though and I do still get a fair bit of osCommerce work. I quite like it to be honest - a bit of a blast from the past :)
     
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    There numerous shopping cart software in the market today and all of them are claiming to be the best. Doing a test run for every shopping cart software will be a very daunting task and a waste of time/money/effort--so to speak. The best way to save yourself from committing mistakes in choosing what shopping cart software solution fits your business is to compare them. It is best to look at the shopping cart software comparison chart to have a greater idea of what each shopping cart software will bring you and your business.
     
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    R

    Royalty-Free-Music

    Just did a check on this comparison and the owner of the comparison chart needs to check the detail again as it is inaccurate in terms of my experience with X-Cart, so I dont know how good it is with the rest.

    Guy



    There numerous shopping cart software in the market today and all of them are claiming to be the best. Doing a test run for every shopping cart software will be a very daunting task and a waste of time/money/effort--so to speak. The best way to save yourself from committing mistakes in choosing what shopping cart software solution fits your business is to compare them. It is best to look at the shopping cart software comparison chart to have a greater idea of what each shopping cart software will bring you and your business.
     
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    edmondscommerce

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    Nov 11, 2008
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    Just did a check on this comparison and the owner of the comparison chart needs to check the detail again as it is inaccurate in terms of my experience with X-Cart, so I dont know how good it is with the rest.

    Guy

    Same for Magento - no tick against free templates???

    Shame, this kind of comparison table would actually be really useful, if it was actually accurate.
     
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