Recommended Shopping Cart systems?

We HATE Miva and need to find something else

[limitup]

We've been using MIVA Merchant for about a year now and can't stand it any longer. The guy who helped setup the store before I was around pushed them towards it, and I've been putting off moving to something else just because we've been so busy and it will be a lot of work, but it's time to make the move. Are there 1 or more shopping cart/ecommerce systems that are generally considered to be the best? Ideally I'd like something that uses PHP/Perl and MySQL.

[julesn]

As you have the experience from the past year to draw on when making the new choice (ie reasons why you hate miva, what you would change in it etc), a good start would be to come up with a list of requirements for your new cart. Maybe seperate it into "needs to have.." and "would be nice if..".

Challenge yourself on your requirements - is a preference for perl or mySQL going to discount a cart that would in all other respects be the best solution for your business?

Then you've got the basis of a document which you can send to various cart vendors describing your requirements and any other questions you may have. You'll quickly get a good idea of which vendors are confident their product meets your needs and are interested in your business, and their responses will also probably trigger further questions..

I went through this process about 18 months ago and it took a long time (a couple of months to make the decision and a few more months to implement it) but it was well worth it.

I have a load more info somewhere, I'll see what I can dig out, theres also lots of previous threads on WW to search through (that was part of my process that helped be build a list of requirements and of vendors).

jules.

[abkbww2]

I like OSCommerce

[TimmyMagic]

I've been using Click Cart Pro for a few years now. This is a perl based cart. I am switching to X-Cart though, which is PHP based.

The reason I have switched is I wanted some more custom work to be done and there are very few developers for CCP. I've had X-Cart since about October and the site is not live yet. At the moment I would say it is better than CCP (although i still like CCP).

However like most carts, the basic packages are not always enough. I have spent a lot of money getting modifications to make them work just how I want. This is understandable since not every online business is the same. But it is something to bear in mind when looking for a new cart.

Good luck in your search for a new cart.

[lakelandprinting]

I've used oscommerce on two stores. It has a great back-end that has many tools. The search engines seem to love them too. There are a ton of addons on http://www.oscommerce.com .
One cart I do not recommend is ezcart. I use that for one of my sites and it's been a nightmare.

I used to work for a company that sells seafood online. They rarely update their site, and they don't have many backlinks but the search engines indexed the crap out of it and they have a PR of 4, which isn't bad. They get alot of traffic from keyword phrases.

[edited by: encyclo at 4:31 pm (utc) on Jan. 22, 2007]

[edited by: lorax at 9:05 pm (utc) on Jan. 30, 2007]
[edit reason] no URLs please, see TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[philbish]

osCommerce was OK for a while, but I grew out of it and built my own

[lorax]

[webmasterworld.com...]

[cploonker]

I like zencart and squirrel cart. Problem is zencart does not have as great a code quality as squirrel cart but squirrel cart does not have all the features of zencart.

Here are my 2 cents based upon my research.
Shopping Carts

* Squirrel Cart
o No latest products in the center of the page
o No support for multi-currency
o Different hierarchical view for Category/products editing.
o Only cart which has a server license. $1000 we can have infinite stores on a single server.
o Very intuitive interface especially for admin
o Very simple code and good design
o Can easily be maintained with single copy of store.
o Support unregistered purchase
* Cubecart
o WILL BECOME PAID SHOPPING CART FROM V3.1.0 EXPECTED IN 2007
o No breadcrumb navigation
o No advanced search. ie. Search within a category
o No latest products in the centre of the page
o No hierarchical view for Category/products editing.
o Specifying the order of category list not allowed
o Smarty template
o Googlebase feed available
o Search stats
o Various admin permissions
o Multi-currency
o Support unregistered purchase
* Creloaded
o No latest products in the center of the page
o Multi-currency
o Support unregistered purchase
* Zencart
o Template folder is spread out in various directories of the store.
o Does not support unregistered purchase
o Much better help and guide than CREloaded
o Simpler than CRELoaded but not as simple as it can be.
o Categorywise latest product in the centre of the page.
o Multi-currency

I have posted some of my comments at (search for "loonker") scriptygoddess

[edited by: lorax at 2:30 pm (utc) on Jan. 28, 2007]
[edit reason] no URLs please [/edit]

[derekwong28]

I will put my vote for x-cart as well. It has to be the cart to beat as much as low priced carts are concerned. You should also look at its brother litecommerce which is the cart I used.

The most important factor for me is that the support is always excellent and always there. Morover, it is very cheap. If you use open source solutions like OS Commerce and Zencart, nobody is obligated to give you support.

[pbradish]

I love cs-cart.

It has been a breeze to modify and their support has been great as well.

[edited by: lorax at 2:30 pm (utc) on Jan. 28, 2007]
[edit reason] no URLs please [/edit]

[Peter Cornstalk]

Another problem with osCommerce based carts and Zen-Cart is that they are bad for Search Engines because of the way they have duplicate URLs and forward links that are different than back links in their pagination. They also don't enforce query string name/value pair orders. Even if you use SEO URL contributions, they still have the duplicate problems as before.

The administration is horrible! It is amazing how much more I can get done with SoftSlate Commerce.

They have no encryption of customer information and no login security levels. It is nice to be able to keep people out of the settings and catalog in the Admin when they only need to access customer information and vice-versa.

The old HTML mixed with spaghetti PHP code is way behind the times too. ;)