quality shopping cart recommendations

better than x-cart please

[shinyblue]

I've worked with X-cart and LiteCommerce and both the code and the customer service leave a lot to be desired. I'm looking for a higher quality cart made by a business that is solid and is developer-friendly.

Needs:
- PHP/MySQL. the more object-oriented the better.
- well-written and commented code base
- fully-featured for building high-end small business carts, ie not "enterprise level", but with robust features like conditional promotions, wishlists, newsletters, export to Quickbooks
- good customer service, English speaking
- easy to customize, both in terms of extending the features and customizing the design

I'm not looking for a free or the cheapest option. Ideally it would be under $1500, but the chief considerations are solid code and excellent customer support.

Any suggestions and experience greatly appreciated!

[Corey Bryant]

You might contact sitetutor and ask to check out their cart. They have a pretty good hosted cart
-Corey

[shinyblue]

I need to be able to get in and customize the cart, add any custom features that might be needed for individual clients, etc. I'm not sure a hosted solution would ever allow that kind of flexibility.

[CernyM]

If you find such a beast, let me know...

[flyerguy]

My tip: ditch PHP.

Check out LINE9, their ASP cart is -fully- tricked out and they offer great support to boot.

Have been using their cart for a year now and it performs flawlessly. Seamless integration with all major payment gateways, etc. etc. Full featured.

You can find an ASP host just as easy as a PHP host (line9 will even host it for you), and the install and admin definitely does not require ASP skills.

Not to mention they have an affil program for reselling to clients.

[edited by: lorax at 2:20 am (utc) on Mar. 16, 2005]
[edit reason] removed DN [/edit]

[ricoche]

Hello,

Does the LINE9 shopping cart create spider friendly URLS for all the products entered into the database? I am looking for a shopping cart that is search engine friendly. According to the LINE9 website, it doesn't appear so, but I thought I would ask.

We have over 10,000 part items that we want to get listed on Google or Yahoo. Just having the shopping cart homepage listed is not good enough in our warehouse business.

Thanks very much.

[incrediBILL]

Check out LINE9, their ASP cart is -fully- tricked out and they offer great support to boot.

Only problem with ASP, unless it's very generic and runs on Linux, is the thing is shackled to a slow old Windows server. If you anticipate a heavy load for your store the Windows box will collapse under the visitor strain far sooner than a single Linux server will.

[flyerguy]

:)

I did not intend to start a Windows/Linux debate.

All I can say is I want to the best technical school in Canada to study Microsoft technologies, and have worked with it for on large corporate intranets (AT&T, Group Telecom, Canadian Government) tied in with Oracle DBs, etc., and it does not 'crap out' unless you are a poor admin. Anyways.. enough of that, back to the cart.

Ricoche,

I have been running with 'unfriendly' URL's for a year now, however just last week I used a popular IIS ISAPI rewrite utility to rename the store URL's on the fly. Works great, and although it's too early to report on the results, it should be like night and day in terms of search robot food. I will sticky you the details.

[ricoche]

Thanks flyerguy! I'll be very interested to know how your URLS get spidered. Please let me know in due time. Much appreciated.

I also run both Linux and Windows Server dedicated machines. I agree. I good admin can pretty much make anything work on these machines. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, but overall I have found both will get the job done. I do find Windows more taxing on the finances of course. <grin>

Take it easy,

Ricoche

[Corey Bryant]

Ricoche - you might want to contact sitetutor - they have a shopping cart & their hosting offers URL re-write

-Corey