What Shopping Cart Are You Using?

[olimits7]

Hi,

I'm currently using osCommerce for one of my sites and it has been good over the years, but I'm just finding myself at a stand still and looking to upgrade.

I've been researching other shopping carts and I've been looking into Magento. I like that it is also open source like osCommerce; so it gives me the ability to customize it to my needs through programming or using the community extensions. And also like that I can use M2E Pro extension to easily integrate with Amazon/eBay, but definitely need to tweak the code to get it working to my needs.

What shopping carts have you used in the past or currently using now? open source? saas? custom-built? Whay made you decide to use the shopping cart you are using now?

Thank you!

[Marshall]

Ecommerce Templates (ECT). Great customer support, asp and php versions, full CSS responsive design layouts available. Have been using it for years for several clients without any problems.

Marshall

[jrockfl]

I'm using a custom built one, I'm a .net software developer and I wrote for my web site.

I enjoy programming and having full control over everything.

[jigneshgohel]

I am using custom made eCommerce framework to accommodate huge product catalog !

[Luxoria]

I am using osCmax which is a loaded version of osCommerce. Basically, it comes with a few dozen preinstalled addons all of which have been tested for full workability. The developer team are active on the forums, make updates, and track down bugs. The software is free to use and is mostly compatible with 3rd party osCommerce addons.

[particleman]

Custom built.. I'm also a .net developer. I've built 4 different carts now because of custom requirements. I've looked at starting with an open source and tweaking it but some of them are so full of fluff that won't ever be used it isn't worth it.

[TimmyMagic]

I've been using X-Cart since about 2007. I would recommend it but it does require some tweaking because by default the code is very bloated (to be fair, this is true for many shopping cart systems). There are lots of features and add-ons available, plus support is pretty good.

[softwaredev]

Magento open source. This is a feature rich, SEO friendly platform for ecommerce website

[lgn1]

We are going thru the same exercise, and we are thinking of using VirtueMart. Our Secondary choice was Magento, because of all it features and availability of plugins; however we have heard horror stories of how Magento is so slow.

Remember if you are choosing any open source shopping cart solution, you must design your own payment module, to get the "custom built software" exemption under the PA-DSS program (if you are not using an offsite payment gateway).

[olimits7]

I'm still leaning towards Magento.

Anyone currently running Magento? Do you have any issues with frontend speed? How big is your catalog?

Thank you!

[waterworks2]

I built a website using the free "developer" version of Magento. It really is an incredibly robust CMS and after finally getting through my first (and so far, only) website build with it, I can see why so many big companies like North Face, Sony, etc. all use it for their websites.

However, it is not user-friendly in the back-end when compared to other e-commerce solutions. This is OK if you're an experienced programmer but a big problem if you're turning the basic everyday back-end admin tasks over to someone who doesn't have a lot of experience.

Overall though, it's an absolute beast of a program and can do a lot. I highly recommend taking the time to read through the entire PDF from the Magento people on how the system works.

Also, my client had Bluehost webhosting and we had problems running it on Bluehost. I should say that in 4+ years of building many other non-ecommerce websites on BH, I've never had a problem. Great service and solid company. Bluehost has a great feature called Simple Scripts to auto-install CMS systems with a single click. They have many to choose from including Wordpress, PrestaShop, etc. They used to have Magento on there and I noticed just recently it's no longer an option. I don't know if this has to do with eBay buying into Magento or if too many people were having performance problems. We switched web-hosting companies and went with a dedicated server and it helped a lot with page load time.

Interestingly, eBay bought a big share of Magento and if I recall correctly, they now own 49% or something around that. Not soon after, the pricing for the paid editions raised significantly. The pricing for the three versions used to be something like [ free, 5k and 15k ] and now it's [ free, 15k, 50k ]. Also has a lot of great extensions but they can cost a lot of money compared to some extensions I've seen for other major ecommerce systems.

Update: I guess eBay just bought the rest of Magento last year for $180m.

[quicksilver1024]

CS-Cart Ultimate. Highly recommend.

[Jon_King]

Waterworks is exactly on about Magento. The level of your experience will play greatly in the package you choose.

I say if you are inexperienced at significant ecomm programming look at ecommercetemplates.com and prestagraphics.com ...

[tyankee]

i've tried quite a few in the past 13 years online running businesses.. Yahoo, Ebay, Sunshop, Zen Cart, OSCommerce, every Wordpress ecommerce plugin for my businesses and now i'm back to zen cart for the ones with more than 20 products and still using wordpress for the smaller number of products (although they are still clunky).

[edited by: lorax at 2:20 pm (utc) on Feb 13, 2013]
[edit reason] no link drops pls [/edit]

[tyankee]

BTW, i stayed far far far away from Sunshop.. All they keep trying to do is get you to buy yearly maintenance packages and their support is HORRIBLE.

[Philosopher]

I've had a site running magento now for a few years. If you are planning on going with magento I would look into a server running LiteSpeed as it makes a huge difference with speed when dealing with magento stores.

As to the cart itself, it's got some very good features. The primary downsides I've run into are it's dependence on javascript and that it is much harder to customize than a lot of other carts due to the way in which it was developed.

[lgn1]

We are definitely going with Joomla for our CMS, and are now pretty sure that we are going to layer Virtumart as our shopping cart solution.

What killed Magento, was that you pretty well need the LiteSpeed addon to get any sort of decent performance, regardless of how few products you have.

Also the plugins for Joomla is a lot cheaper than for Magento.

We looked at some of the hosted shopping cart solutions, but we didn't want any third party to have the potential of looking at our sales data, regardless of what they say in their confidentiality agreement.