Apr 08

Short shopping cart review

I remember, one of my favorite clients asking me about my availability to build an e-commerce site for a kitchen supply store. It was going to be my very first e-commerce store and I tried dodging, not feeling really good about accepting money for something I was going to learn by doing. In the same time, I was feeling that cribble that comes when you are going to explore a new territory being almost sure you are going to succeed if you get yourself together and proceed forward. Given these prerequisites and the client insisting to work with me on this, I gave in and started my journey through the land of shopping carts Over the years, the e-commerce projects then became my favorite kind of jobs. Really, I enjoy doing them the most. Even more than content-based websites built with a CMS! While developing your own, custom shopping cart IS a solution, with the ever-growing amount of ready-made scripts out there, it is inefficient in most cases. Given my pre-existing knowledge of PHP and MySQL, I was only focusing on carts using these technologies, from the beginning. In the following paragraphs I’m going to describe the carts I have been using for my projects as well as the reasons why I abandoned or kept them for future projects.

OSCommerce

OSCommerce was the first cart I have been using. The main reasons for picking it were the fact that it’s free, has a tremendous amount of third party add-ons and a good community support. Maybe I should add to that its relatively low server requirements and that it is not as resource hungry as other carts. Having said all this, the cart itself is not up to par with any of the most recent carts. It’s development is stalling since several years, the newest version is in the queue for a long-long time by now. While it has a third-party templating engine, I found this to be hard to use. If you’re not going to use the template approach, you are left with modifying the PHP files directly whenever you need to make a change to the look of the site. The files mix database queries with HTML used to display the data. Not nice, to say the least. As I already mentioned, OSCommerce has a lot of third-party add-ons. Most of them are really high quality pieces but you will spent HOURS copying and pasting code to your files. This is becoming more and more tedious as you advance and have several of these customizations added. It can be done, but you’d better have a plan of what extensions you are going to use and pay a lot of attention to installing the more complex ones first. Enough of the bad things OSCommerce also has it’s sunny side. Probably the main advantage is that you’ll find a lot of commercial and non-commercial templates that you can use out of the box, it supports lots of payment gateways and there are many developers using it. All this means that you can get your shop up and running fast and with a minimal investment. It is a solution you should consider when launching your first shop. I would only warn you here that you should consider your future business plans before committing to it! If you plan to expand in the near future, you can find yourself in the need of re-designing the whole site using a different cart. It’s really a personal choice you should make, taking into account your business specifics.

VirtueMart for Joomla

I’m a huge fan of Joomla! when it comes to using a CMS. It is a great tool! Although, in my opinion, it lacks a really stable and full-featured shopping cart extension. Joomla’s most popular shopping cart extension is VirtueMart. It has a lot of third-party add-ons and does a good job… once you have it configured. The way to a working shop is very tedious. The extension itself is out there for some time by now but even the newest versions still suffer of “child diseases”. I’m specifically talking about the admin interface. I LOVE Joomla’s interface but, unfortunately, Virtumart is not taking over any of its “mother’s” properties. The admin interface is just clumsy. Having said all of the above, if you have to implement a simple shop in a mainly content-driven site, your best bet is Joomla with VirtueMart. The great qualities of Joomla simply outweigh the trouble of configuring VirtueMart.

Freeway

This cart is really a special one. It seems to be an OSCommerce spin-off at its roots but has been customized quite a bit. Unfortunately, they haven’t really “repaired” any of the things I hate about OSCommerce. I don’t want to sound too harsh but their trial to add some Ajax-driven functionality to the admin interface just failed. While OSCommerce had at least a manageable admin panel, Freeway is really confusing when it comes to editing the products or pages. They have a weird mix of Edit and Save buttons that I keep clicking in the wrong order. It might just be me, though The positive part about Freeway and at the same time the reason why I picked it up, was its ability to sell services. It was actually the only cart I was able to find that would let you implement a rental shop. I only had to modify a few things, like having different prices for different rental periods, in order to make it work for me.

Avactis

Avactis is one of my two go-to-carts. I first read about it on the forums over at Sitepoint. At that time, I was sick of OSCommerce and was looking for an alternative. The cart itself doesn’t seem to be very popular but what caught my attention was its modularity. You can simply insert blocks of this cart in any existing HTML page without the need of changing it’s structure. Admittedly, its template system takes some using-to but its far better than any of the previous carts. Another interesting feature is the possibility to customize each category and/or product page differently. This comes in handy when you want to differentiate between your product categories. The admin panel is also easily manageable and offers most of the features you would need for a small to medium-sized shop. It’s not free but they offer a free copy and 50% discount on all subsequent copies for web designers. I think it is a great deal for the money.

CS Cart

CS Cart is currently my number one cart. It is the most feature rich cart I’ve seen so far. It also has an extended CMS functionality which comes in handy when you want to mix products and articles, for instance. I would also like to mention the absolutely GREAT support they offer. I had a few minor glitches during the development and they were back with me in 24 hours with a solution. They also have a custom development department which is a bit pricy but still worth it, in case you need some custom functionality. The cart itself is using Smarty templates which is rather easy to use and do a great job in hiding the “unimportant” things like database queries or Javascript functions. Nevertheless, there is a central place to look for these in case you need to change them. To be fair, I will have to mention the not-so-good parts as well. These would be the rather resource hungry code and the desert they call forum. Just like Avactis, it is a commercial cart and it has its price. Nevertheless, I would not hesitate to go for this cart again and again. Its price is well worth its features and great support.

Magento

You would probably wonder why I haven’t mentioned Magento so far. The answer is simple: I haven’t used it I was following its development in the early days and am still browsing their forums every now and then. However, I think it is still far from being a real competitor. Many of you will probably disagree on this. As see it, Magento is targeted to large shops with the according budgets that can afford running their shops on dedicated servers. Also, the packaging is really-really nice, with lots of shiny dynamic effects but CS Cart has a richer feature set and is more ripe. Call conservative, but I don’t like Magento. I hope you’re still here reading and that I was able to be of some help in your search for a shopping cart. If you have anything to mention about the above, I would love to hear from you. Please feel free to use the comment form below. Thanks for reading!

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