Help me choose: X-Cart, OSCommerce, Interchange

Choosing an open source ecommerce solution

[jgneiser]

Hi Everyone,

I have been a voyer of this forum for some time, but I am new to posting.

I have a working knowledge of HTML, PHP, and some Perl. (no ASP yet). Two of my stores are customized Yahoo! Stores and one is built on quickcart. I would like to move these stores to an open source platform where I could leverage customizations across all of them. I would like to host on a remote server, say GoDaddy. The requirements for my largest store are pretty wide ranging. Keyman described them very well in his post:

[webmasterworld.com...]

After reading dozens of posts and pouring over dozens of estore sites, it seems to me that these three open source solutions rise to the top: X-Cart, OSCommerce, Interchange.

I would summarize like this:
X-Cart: PHP, Fully Featured, Supported, Not Free, good effort at SEO
OSC: PHP, Fully Featured, Largely unsupported, Free, SEO impaired
Interchange: Perl, Hard to learn, Fully Featured, Largely unsupported, Free, SEO?

Please give me your feedback on this well-worn topic. The decision I make will govern how I spend a fair portion of the rest of the year and beyond.

Thanks in advance,

JG

[Essex_boy]

Xcart it creates HTML pages as well

[swones]

X-Cart or it's smaller cousin Litecommerce if your needs are on a smaller scale.

Simon.

[Morgenhund]

Partially my experience, partially rumors:

- Intercharge, if you are Perl hacker and have full privilegies on your server (requires a lot of extra Perl modules to instal) (rumor)

- OSC -- lack of features, SEO is not a problem (correspondiong contributions are available). This cart is for PHP hackers, aware of HTML and web-design. Otherwise, your shop will look like 100,000,000 other dirty shoplets with default OSC-skin (my experience)

- XCart -- no idea what it is

[jgneiser]

I am looking at X-Cart and potentially lite Commerce. Has anyone been frustrated by Lite Commerce?

[jgneiser]

Thanks for your replies,

JG

[cotc]

X-cart all the way.
Benefits:
Uses smarty php so all design and codeing are kept seperate
Very friednly and usefull members forum
Highly modifyable

Downsides:
Helps if you know a bit of codeing
The demo they show on the site is the 4.0.x which isn't classed as stable yet but has lots of cool features (so if you can live with the bugs)
new branches released often (yes that is a downside when you have spent lots of $ and time getting the site to work the way you want it and then have to update it again)

[nutsandbolts]

Tried Zencart? It's an offshoot of OsCommerce (uses templates - more standard features)

[henry0]

X-cart gold is PHP5 compliant

lite version does not work in PHP5

OScomm and Zend are not ready yet
using a ton of serialize (functions)that PHP5 does not like

Interchange is fine but IMO requiers over average PERL knowledge it can be used w/flat files or w/MySQL DB

[tntpower]

Stay away from OSC; except that you are a PhP guru

[incrediBILL]

d) none of the above, all flushable

[henry0]

Please, develop
Reasons are:?

[outrun]

I use Oscommerce primarily, I use 5 or 6 contributions, Importantly for a template systems - STS templates. For Search Engine Optimization - Ultimate SEO, and - Purchase Without Account. Honestly to get it customized it does take some delving into code but its not difficult, and after doing it once its a peice of cake.

[lorax]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld jgneiser!

>> none of the above, all flushable

Yes, please do explain. If you're referring to the easily identifiable footprint then I agree it's an issue but not insurmountable. ;)

[incrediBILL]

OK, X-Cart would probably be my choice out of that list but it's missing one simple MAJOR feature that can impact sales conversions which is displaying the SHIPPING amount in the cart before you start to checkout. In this day and age showing SHIPPING as early as possible is ecommerce 101 - it can be a deal breaker and result in abandonded carts. I'm shocked that I don't see this fundamental feature on Yahoo stores even, just amazing.

The other problem with X-CART from what I've seen is the product discounting system is a joke.

Take a look at MonsterCommerce's demo (not that I'm recommending it) but it's way more customer friendly with a complete mini-cart and shipping rates right on the side of every page. It's also a bit more feature robust and admin friendly than the choices presented above unless you just have to have a PHP cart of your own.

[derekwong28]

We use litecommerce and have ordered a lot of modifications. Their service and pricing has been excellent. Whenever a sticky situation occured, they have always got it fixed after we phoned them.

Litecommerce is not a stripped down version of x-cart. The company said that they have made a huge mistake in naming the product and will rename it in due course.

[ectect]

In this day and age showing SHIPPING as early as possible is ecommerce 101

True but if you don't know the shipping method the client is going to choose or their location then automatically showing the cost of shipping soley based on the contents of the cart is not really viable unless it's flat rate.

[incrediBILL]

ectect,

modern ecommerce asks for the zip code or country and shows shows the prices for various shipping methods you can select right in the cart. do the MonsterCommerce demo, you'll see what i mean.

[Ballpark]

i just switched my osc to cre loaded 6.1a. it's osc with 41 contributions added to it. pretty awesomw.

[edited by: lorax at 1:15 pm (utc) on Feb. 16, 2005]
[edit reason] remove URI [/edit]

[pardo]

any advise any shopping cart software for .Net environments?

and do someone have experience in connecting Navision (MS) to a web shop component...?

[jsinger]

We're going to Shopsite and are very happy with it so far. Excellent support. Large user base. Continual enhancements.

[jo1ene]

I've been having good luck with Zen-Cart. The template system keeps the layouts and code separate. The documentation is pretty good as docs for open source projects go. It has a good range of features and some decent contributions. In the shop gallery, there are hundreds of sites that are nearly identical, but there are also a few really nice custom layouts.

[jgneiser]

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this thread.

Incredibill, I agree that a full fledged mini-cart is important and MC does it very well, but MC has a uncomfortable way of handling puting thing in the basket. Most times people don't realize the product was place in it, I actually prefer to be transported to the shopping cart.

Yahoo stores do not support the mini-cart, but a few consultants are willing to rig it in.

I am definitely concerned about the average footprint I see out of standard OSC, XCart and Interchange.

One of my favorite store layouts is Backcountry.com, they are included on the Interchange site as a referal, but I think there has been tons of consulting and inhouse work since.

It just seems that there is not a clear winner out there right now. I am going to start redevelopement of my stores at the end of March... I'll keep my eye on the forums.

Right now definitely leaning towards XCart gold/pro or LiteCommerce.

Thanks

[edited by: lorax at 5:40 pm (utc) on Feb. 27, 2005]

[henry0]

Remember: from that supplier only the Gold one is PHP5 ready

[b0rdslide]

Has anyone ever tried Zen Cart? It appears to be a much more developed branch of the OSCommerce code.

Kev

[bunltd]

X-Cart : demo they show on the site is the 4.0.x which isn't classed as stable

X-Cart 4.0.x went stable yesterday.

LisaB

[EstoreSeeker]

Although I don’t use these 3 myself but i can tell u some of the pros as well as cons of osc and x cart. I came to know abt these when I searched for them for my use.
os-commerce:
very flexible and large support group for OSCommerce users is available.
installing and modifying is tricky plus some security vulnerabilities are there.
X-cart:
Again very flexible+Ability to generate html pages direct from the catalogue
Customer support is not that good
.............Off course OSC is more SEO friendly than rest of the options.

[bumpaw]

Has anyone ever tried Zen Cart? It appears to be a much more developed branch of the OSCommerce code.

I stumbled on Zen Cart a little over a week ago and now have it ready to go on two sites. One is a replace of an osCommerce which is the foundation of Zen. They seem to have an active support forum. The install is way smoother than osCommerce and the admin is more user friendly. I recommend finding a little space and installing it for experimentation and then you will know.