Hey Everyone, On Sunday I was contacted by a client and they said the needed a shopping cart up by Monday. Since they needed this cart up so fast I went to the easiest solution I knew, Open Source Shopping Carts. I browsed through tons of shopping carts and put together a list of only the best carts. The list is below.
I came across ZenCart awhile back while still hosting with dreamhost (they have it as one of their one-click installs). Eventually I used it for my first eCommerce project because it was open source, and dreamhost recommended it.
Its great to hear from everyone. The shopping cart I chose was Magento because of the code it outputs and its has so many great features. I look forward to hearing what others have to say about these shopping carts.
If you wish to create a complex re-design ( look of the site ) and only use it as a shopping cart engine, think again. The simplest change needed, will yield you hours of modifications to the code, for most with minor knowledge, prepare to pay for lots of hours to your favorite coder.
For all people interested in zen-cart that are scared off by the template/code nightmare, there is an alternative storefront with a much simpler structure and and a growing number of plugins: ZenMagick! (http:/www.zenmagick.org)
I was checking out this site to look for an alternative to Zen Cart and osCommerce and found out that they both made the top 8 list? I advise anyone reading not to use them or use them at your own risk. I have had so many un-happy clients with using them. The only positive I found was that it was very easy to set-up and get going, after that it was all down hill.
Yes Magento is an amazingly really nice shopping cart system built in a strong coding. The back end as well show many more features than osCommerce.
I was doing e-commerce website since 2000, and now I use only this system.
I have my own store made in Magento:
this software is a NIGHTMARE. Customising anything is a 5 min job that takes a day. AAAAGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. I set this up for a client and lost a week of my life. I will NEVER EVER EVER EVER use it again. Please take it off your list.
Anyone can briefly compare Magento vs. aspdotnetstorefront? I am not talking about PHP vs ASP.NET or free s/w vs. $1500, but from the end-user point of view. Which offers better features, user-experience etc.? Any comments about integration with ERP like SAP B1 will also be appreciated.
DO NOT USE ZENCART! It requires all your buyers to login and there is no option to disable it. Also the admin interface is terribly terribly complicated and frankly excessive. It is definitely not the simple solution.
I find OpenCart the easiest to template up and mod. The cart functionality is pretty simple but it does all the basics well. I have built sites with Magento which offers more functionality but is a bitch to amend and be creative with.
The next version of ZenMagick will also easily allow to customize the storefront in a way that no initial address is required to register. This might be useful in cases where the store is also used as master user repository for other 4rd party apps like forum, blog, etc.
I have just started working for a company that uses ZenCart, and IMO it really does suck!!! We are however using an older version. The database has so many redundancies it is unbelievable. The layout from a developers point of view is all over the place. Just my two cents.
@Peuge:
Agreed! There is a table related to attributes that I still do not understand ?
The database API in ZenMagick tries to hide a lot of that and makes the data available in a more structured way (I think).
Hmm, I setup a zencart site and it seemed easy to start with.
Then I tried to change templates and such and add paypal and google checkout. Paypal went in nice but google checkout is a pain to install. I enter 1800 products for sale. What a task.
I fought with pictures and other small things that should work but do not work and spent tons of time online trying to find a way around them.
Does anyone have any experience making a shopping cart compliant with SAP and their Catalog integration punch out? It requires a post from their system to do a generic login, and a hook_url to get information back from the system for checkout.
If you are looking for a full ERP system with e-commerce, order processing/fulfillment and integrations with most the major payment processors I would recommend the Apache Open For Business Project (OFBiz). Being one of the creators, I am quite biased, but I do believe it is one of the most powerful open source solutions available. Check it out at
I am currently using Oscommerce for my store. It came with my template and the code is hacked and makes installing some of the contributions a bit challenging. However, maintaining products and such is fairly easy. Just be prepared to modify php files. I do like the oscommerce support system and community. I have had no problem finding information for modifications.
I am also working with zen cart, which has a similar feel to oscommerce. I am not using a template for my testing. So far, I have no major complaints except for figuring out how to set up the ability to download virtual products. Zen Cart, like oscommerce has a fairly good support community as well.
So, after reading the positive reviews of Magento I thought I would give it a try. It is much slower and is very difficult to manage categories and products. The demo store looks nice but, I have not been able to get a product listed on it yet. I am almost ready to give up on this one.
I think Open Cart is ace! I use all other carts and found opencart is the best. Opencart code is clean, powerful and easy to handle. BTW, the new version is excellent! highy recommend to all developer and shop owner!
Good list of useful resources. I think its good post for selecting suitable shopping cart for e-store. FMEOS.COM Offers e-commerce shopping cart packages based on Open Source, have look at -solutions/os-php-shopping-cart-software/
hi
all,
good list of open source shopping cart scripts,
but unfortunately you all forgot about
joomla and virtuemart combinition,
its excelent ecommerce package,
joomla is one of the most stable and popular open source cms and virtuemart is one of the most used ecommerce component
I try chromium cart and opencart, I will say opencart is much better and more powerful! Being user friendly and with easy to learn adjustments to templates and features, plus the sleek design and interface, it is all what i need! Everybody should try!
Few months back I was in search of affordable or open source shopping cart solution and one of my friend refer me to as he is running their solution from more than a year, Initially I think their packages are costly but when I make calculations based on hosted solutions (like yahoo stores, shopify, 1shoppingcart, volusion) they charge about $25-$500 per month with transaction fee 1.5%-3% with each order, when I calculated 1 year cost according to my products its way high (almost 10x) what I get from FMEOS.COM for one time fee.
From my personal experience I highly recommend FMEOS.COM for e-commerce website development, they have a professional staff for shopping cart development.
here is link for their e-commerce solutions
-solutions/
Do yourself a major favor: It really is FREE and is awesome. Create a MySQL data space on your web server. The, install the software on that space you created using your FTP upload program. Bam! Do some fine tuning but it will work and soooo worth it.
I really depend on your needs, free sometimes will help you at times you will need to pay, all of them are good but will it work for you? Million Dollar Question.
I personally recommend Xcart about $115, Cs Cart $265.
Get a programmer to customized this two cards
Add CRM to it with bonus add synchronization with QuickBooks
You will win big time
My advice as far as Magento is concerned is stay well away!! The reason is that the designers have over complicated the database and the code, and as a result, runs VERY slowly (even on my dedicated server).
Having used ZenCart for an ecommerce build, I can say that is is very good, but the code would make Chef Boy-ar-dee proud. You do have to know PHP/HTML/CSS and be prepared to dig around in it if you want to get the most benefit from it.
Prestashop has serious email issues.
Many people are lost because there
is no help available. At least
competent help. So we had no choice
other than look for another software.
Hopefully they can admit the problem
and come up with a solution.
Thanks
i have used ubercart for all my web projects, so far this is the most flexible shopping cart, since it works with drupal CMS as core CMS, ubercart support multiple payment system, shipping method and other customized you can imagine,
I have used Ubercart many times and I have to say it does what it promises. A few times I have tried to make it do things it was not designed to do and it got a little frustrating but having Drupal as a development platform makes all the difference. If Drupal is good enough for the whitehouse.gov then it is good enough for me.
After evaluating ZenCart and osCommerce I finally found OpenCart which I found to be great. However, after realizing that OpenCart was to limited I found a cart software that is state of the art. I have converted ALL my shops to run this software now. And the name? PrestaShop!
PrestaShop is really a state of the art software. It has everything you need, stock handling, payment modules, localisation editor and so on and so forth, the list of features is so long that you need to check it out yourself. It is VERY nice indeed!
A SINGLE database (mysql, postgres, even ORACLE!) handles all the ecommerce, accounting, inventory, stock, EVERYTHING. If you need to update the stock inventory, you just go into the catalog manager, update the stock/price and poof, the website has the new information. You want to take a telephone order.. Or you have a brick and morter shop? Well, use the built-in Point OF Sale (POS) terminal that is automatically integrated with your (global) catalog manager. You need to call a customer? Built-in.
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