Good free shopping cart?

[johnnie]

Hi,

I am considering to build my own webshop. However, I would like to use a pre-built shopping cart system to prevent me from having to deal with sessions etc. Can anybody recommend me some solid, free shopping cart systems? What I am looking for is a cart only, so no storefront CMS or anything like that. Just the cart functionality.

I've already looked at jcart and it seems promising, but if anybody can point me to some good alternatives for completeness sake, i would be most grateful.

[lorax]

Open Source Shopping Carts [google.com].

[g1smd]

I'd keep clear of osCommerce, as it's now a bit old. ZenCart has a lot of nice features, but some core design decisions and the URL structure seem to have led to many ZC sites being blown away by Google's recent and now infamous Mayday update. If you can use a well-designed URL rewriting module with it, you can alleviate some of the shortcomings, but not all.

[ShaunJ]

I've been using Pretashop as my eCommerce solution. It is open source freeware with a robust back office and is supposed to be SEO friendly.
I'm quite new to all of this and won't pretend to be an expert, but for a complete novice like me when I started this a year ago, it has not been that hard to get the shop up and running.

[SEO_Shruti]

You can use any of the following open source ecommerce solution for your shopping cart.

Magento
OsCommerce
X-Cart
VirtueMart or Joomla
ZenCart
Prestashop
Drupal
DashCommerce


I suggest you for Magento. As its the mostly used shopping cart used in these days.

[wyweb]

I've used noop cart in the past. It's freeware, opensource and javascript based.

The author withdrew support years ago but it's still a viable product. Easy to install.

Hard to find though.

[wyweb]

I've been using Pretashop as my eCommerce solution

I've been hearing good things about Prestashop. No personal experience but colleagues have responded positively.

[ShaunJ]

For someone that does not have much experience in eCommerce and web related stuff, Prestashop was my solution. Don't get me wrong, there have been bugs that have frustrated the hell out of me, but overall it's pretty quick to get it up an running. They are going from strengh to strengh with the latest stable version 1.3.1.
Prestashop supports multi-language and multi currency functionality (developed in France), which is handy for people shipping to other countries.
I read the Prestashop forum a lot, a common theme seems to be people that have tried Magento, say it is a lot harder to get going than Prestashop. Personally, I have only used PS and so I can't speak from personal experience regarding Magento.
As with everything, do your research, play around with the demo sites and see what best suits your needs before jumping in there. Good luck :-)

[wyweb]

As with everything, do your research, play around with the demo sites and see what best suits your needs before jumping in there.

Excellent advice.

[jakab]

I Suggest you can check for Zeuscart which is a free GPL Open Source Shopping Cart Software.

[zeuscart.com ]

[morehawes]

duplicate post in error... deleted

[edited by: morehawes at 11:07 am (utc) on Aug 24, 2010]

[morehawes]

I suggest you for Magento. As its the mostly used shopping cart used in these days.

What are you basing this on SEO_Shruti? Sure it's the new kid on the block and has alot of hype but from my experience I would question the accuracy of this.

Also it depends on the size of the store - due to its complexity both for developers and administrators I personally would only recommend looking into Magento for large scale sites where the investment into the platform is justified. There are plenty of open source small carts out there to choose from.

I've already looked at jcart and it seems promising

jCart is one of these and although I have not used it on a live store I have played around with it and it looks very nice. If you are only interested in a cart as you say it could be ideal. I mainly work on large scale ecommerce but am looking forward to a smaller job coming along as an excuse to use it myself. So have a play!

[topr8]

>>Can anybody recommend me some solid, free shopping cart systems?

IMHO, anything free is basically just waiting to be hacked one way or another

[edacsac]

I've been working with zen-cart for a customer that needed to be up quick. I don't recommend it. You need to take a lot of notes. I disabled the "featured product" feature somewhere, and after 6 hours of searching and grepping, I still can't get it re-enabled. Same with the search box - gone. I could scream really. That goes for most things. It's very difficult to customize.

I picked zen-cart for multiple ship options, what looked to be good support for digging into the meat of things, but it's just so huge and time consuming to figure out where you need to be to modify anything. Similar management topics are scattered throughout different menus.

I'll never install zen-cart again and I wouldn't recommend it. This is coming from someone who has built a couple of custom carts from scratch as well.

[morehawes]

I could scream really. That goes for most things. It's very difficult to customize ... I'll never install zen-cart again and I wouldn't recommend it.

Zen Cart is a modified version of osCommerce which as g1smd pointed out is getting rather dated now. However just to stick up for OSC I believe it is still a very good peice of software. You do have to get your hands dirty but I have recently built several online stores using it. I did have to make alot of modifications which I understand will be off putting to people wanting something quick to set up but the underlying cart is very well thought out. The cart works well even with thousands of products which can not be said for all open souce carts around today.

IMHO, anything free is basically just waiting to be hacked one way or another

What isn't? If you take security seriously and do everything you can you protect yourself (many open source cart communities have guidance on how to do so) then you can be as secure as any other site. I would say though that when open source software is no longer maintained you have to be careful to ensure you remain protected.

[topr8]

>>What isn't?

yes i agree, however the wider something is distributed, the more likely it is for someone to seek out exploits for it.

[lorax]

...when open source software is no longer maintained you have to be careful to ensure you remain protected.

The ultimate question I ask myself is what would I rather be doing? Dealing with fixing code that I may not necessarily understand or focus on selling?

[Clarrie]

I've used Joomla / VirtueMart for a number of sites, and would give it a good rating. Does pretty much everything you could ask. VM can be added retrospectively to any Joomla installation, or you can download a complete Joomla/eCommerce package from the VM site.

[ezygamelink]

i used joomla+virtuemart and magento it's good for me.