I would love to hear your thoughts and recommendations on the various shopping carts out there

 

i'm hoping to find one which;

will work with an htaccess mod re-write so i can keep the URLs i already have

 

i wanted something which i can have complete design control of the front end and all parts the customer will see, design is important to me and being able to produce something distinct is a must

 

i wanted something that once set up isnt too time consuming, ie i can add products easily, changes prices and exchange rates in a few clicks, download orders straight into quickbooks etc

 

one that wont diminish all my seo work

 

one that i have complete control of the sales funnel, ie i choose what procedures my customers do or dont have to go through

 

Finally i wanted one which if not easy to set up has a good support network to help me through the learning curve or uses techniques which i can learn in a php or relevant text book

I think you'll be lucky to find one where you can match your current URL's 100%, but you might be lucky!

 

All decent modern carts run on templates so you have complete control over design and presentation. The templating system might vary from cart to cart - ie Smarty or another tagging system - but the principles are the same.

 

From your spec list these carts are worth looking at...

 

Jshop

Interspire

Squirrelcart

Sunshop

Viart

digiShop

Pinnaclecart

thanks bluedreamer, of any of those do you have any particular leanings to anyone in particular

 

also any thoughts on oscommece, zen cart and presta. are the above questions possible with those carts, the reason i was drawn to them is they all seem to have massive support forums

I'd have to add CubeCart onto that list too.

 

Very easy to reskin, easy to develop with and easy for the client to use too!

Have any of you had much experience with http://www.magentocommerce.com/?

 

I look at the feature list and it's capabilities and it sounds a great product, though have never had a need to use it as yet, just wondered peoples thoughts are with this open source product

I have an associate that is looking to use Magento as like you've said, the features list promise a lot. I couldn't really get on with it though, but I didn't really spend more than a couple of hours looking underneath the hood.

 

When the clocks ticking, I like to get up and running asap!

thanks bluedreamer, of any of those do you have any particular leanings to anyone in particular

 

also any thoughts on oscommece, zen cart and presta. are the above questions possible with those carts, the reason i was drawn to them is they all seem to have massive support forums

 

I use Jshop a lot as it's my cart of choice because it suits the vast majority of my clients needs. It's very flexible and adaptable as well! The other carts I mentioned are ones that I have bookmarked just in case they are needed for a particular project.

 

OSCommece is a dead duck, Zen cart is a fork of OSC - have tried it on some customers but they hated it! Prestashop I've never used.

 

I'd suggest locating as many carts as you can then looking at them in detail to see which ones have the features you need. You should then be able to whittle them down to a shortlist of possible candidates. My personal preference would be to go with a cart that doesn't need a dozen plugins/modules!

thanks guys

 

so plugins and modules are bad, is that because they have lots of bugs or just take longer to download and slow customers down

Not all plugins/modules are bad - if they're made by the cart developers they're usually fine but some 3rd party plugins can be a bit flaky. That's where doing some research on forums etc comes in. If a particular module/plugin is problematic it will usually have been discussed at length!

 

To add a bit more about choosing a shopping cart. It always pays to get the right one for the needs of the product, the site and whoever is going to maintain it. Setting up any business requires time and investment, "free" carts are great if they work for you, but you'd be kicking yourself later if you found that by investing, say, £200 in a commercial cart you'd cut your admin costs in half!

Joomla with Virtemart installed.

Hi,

I just started designing a site with Cartweaver & Coldfusion....I am a newbie at this but I will let you know when i got it finished...2012, I think...LOL

Bye,

W.A.

I quite like CS Cart (PHP) , www.cs-cart.com. I have used it on 3-4 customers and its very powerful out of the box (it costs about £160 for the first license and then £90/license after that) Its easy to turn off features & modules you don't need which allows you to keep the design simple if necessary. On the cs-cart web site you can have a look at the demo but be sure to have a look at live site examples - it will show you what can be done with the template system.

 

 

Regards

ola