Can anyone give advice on the pros and cons of these 3 Shopping Carts?

My understanding is the Magento is a fantastic product but too slow unless you run it on a dedicated server.

Zen Cart has been around for a while so has a good user support community.

Uber Cart has all the advantages of full integration with Drupal CMS.

Thats all I know. Anybody have experience?

Magento is a genuis OS Cart - but has a steep learning curve - its a bit of a swine to customise unless you really know what you are doing. I have on on my localhost that i keep messing around with .
Virtuemart for Joomla is also worth looking at.
I had a look at zencart - but the templates i have seen so far look a bit - bully-bargain-basement.

I am a big Magento fan! It does have a steep learning curve, but well worth it

Magento i say while shaking my head, you need several good degrees to understnad how this software works and there is no clear information for this software especially if you are new to this kind of site and the support is very limited, I moved on from this onto cubecart, which is fine and a lot easier to use

Unfortunatly I havent tryed any of the other sorry !

Woc

ZenCart would be my pick. Magento is good, but a bit complex for shopping cart.

Hi,

Magento development is the best choice for any serious webshop. If you put all selection criteria next to each other, it will turn out that Magento is a fully-fledged eCommerce platform.

Magento ecommerce also a great technology as point of view SEO which helps your custom Magento website to gain high rankings in Search Engines like Google. It gives you Auto generated Google Sitemap, Meta for your products and category pages and much more…

Originally Posted by shennon

Hi,

Magento development is the best choice for any serious webshop. If you put all selection criteria next to each other, it will turn out that Magento is a fully-fledged eCommerce platform.

Magento ecommerce also a great technology as point of view SEO which helps your custom Magento website to gain high rankings in Search Engines like Google. It gives you Auto generated Google Sitemap, Meta for your products and category pages and much more…

Thanks for the advice.

But how do you answer the accusations:
a) Too slow on a shared server
b) Learning curve is too steep

At the moment I'm leaning towards Ubercart.

Originally Posted by TWD

Thanks for the advice.

But how do you answer the accusations:
a) Too slow on a shared server
b) Learning curve is too steep

At the moment I'm leaning towards Ubercart.

Magento is the top cart if you want a sophisticated system and good looking AAA store. The big companies normally pay a lot for stores similar to magento.

The learning curve is deliberately high, it appears conceived that way. Combining html and php and their own page instruction format into what amounts to a new obfuscated language. Style sheets not linked in a standard way to the pages, Dreamweaver integration features are made useless, you might as well use a plain text editor.

Magento "Community" Edition is bait thrown by its owner, Varien. Most store owners who might get by coding up a site using another cart are going to go loony making a Magento store that does not look Default. They fall in love with the look and function of Magento, the Varien folk are right there to offer their paid install & support services once they give up, along with Hosting Partners.

The new Enterprise Edition provides that core service support for the low, low price of $8,900. Magento is a clever way of creating high-paid coding work for yourself, they probably have Spock's Brain in a jar.

I have 10 or so sites in Zen Cart, but I'm moving over to Ubercart. If you already are familiar with Drupal, then Ubercart should be the obvious choice. If you're not, the learning curve will be steeper, because you're learning both a new CMS and a new ecommerce platform.

I like Zen Cart ok, but I get tired of sorting through dozens of files and folders for customization, and I don't like having to alter code and database tables for custom work, because it makes future updates harder. I do like the ZC community, and it's definitely a more fully-realized and mature product than Ubercart. But for all the pages and content outside of product data, having Drupal and Ubercart is great. Adding custom fields and attributes is much easier and user-friendly than ZC. And you get to immediately tap in to all the Drupal modules, like adding ratings and comments to products, image resizing, image galleries, lightbox-type effects, forms, etc.

I looked at Magento too, and think there's some beautiful work done in that program. But it's only ecommerce and not a content management system. I wish that community would pour their energy and focus into making Ubercart better, but that's not happening.

Magento is very promising however still some time is required to make it work fast.

As for ZenCart - it is probably outdated, i am not sure whether its structure is being reworked and whether any new features are being implemented into the software.

Anyway, any e-commerce software choice depends on the particular business needs.

Regarding full integration with Drupal - it's worth considering if you do need an integration with this CMS, however, it's also a heavyweighter in terms of performance. For a more lightweight solution, ZenCart is the only option from these three.

Originally Posted by X-Cart

Magento is very promising however still some time is required to make it work fast.

As for ZenCart - it is probably outdated, i am not sure whether its structure is being reworked and whether any new features are being implemented into the software.

Anyway, any e-commerce software choice depends on the particular business needs.

X-Cart

Thanks for contributing to this forum.
I have actually looked into the X-Cart platform a bit and it looks pretty good.
One of the better proprietary systems probably.

A few questions:
1) If a developer knows the basics of Smarty templates would he/she be able to do theme customizations with the X-Cart package.

2) Is it easy to set up out of the box?

3) If do a bit of work for Japanese clients. Is the software fully translated into that language.

4)Would you mind giving me a direct comparison versus Ubercart. Pros/cons.

Thanks in advance.

Just curious...Does anyone know if the SmartyTemplates are still Ioncube Encoded? Last time I had a site a few years ago, SmartyTemplates were usually Ioncube Encoded which sucked. I haven't checked since then, but I believe that one cart in particular comes to mind that used the ste (smarty template engine) called Pinnacle Cart the templates were Ioncube encoded. It was a great cart though.

Originally Posted by Brian07002

Just curious...Does anyone know if the SmartyTemplates are still Ioncube Encoded? Last time I had a site a few years ago, SmartyTemplates were usually Ioncube Encoded which sucked.

As far as I know, templates are simply compiled by the Smarty engine. However, you should in most cases have complete access to their source code and they are automatically re-compiled to reflect any changes.

Originally Posted by TWD

Thanks for contributing to this forum.

Thank you for your words. Actually taking participation here is very helpful since so many customers share their experience.

Originally Posted by TWD

A few questions:
1) If a developer knows the basics of Smarty templates would he/she be able to do theme customizations with the X-Cart package.

Yes, knowledge of Smarty would help you to redesign the software. Moreover, design is fully CSS based now.

2) Is it easy to set up out of the box?

It needs to be installed on any server that meets the following requirements:
http://www.x-cart.com/cart_system_requirements.html

Installation includes several steps:
- unpacking the distributive;
- uploading of files to the server;
- creation of MySQL database;
- running installation script in the browser.

So, as you see, installation is not difficult. All the settings are managed from web-based admin area.

3) If do a bit of work for Japanese clients. Is the software fully translated into that language.

Yes, it is. What is more, we have customers who made translation into Japanese, i hope they will share the package with you.

4)Would you mind giving me a direct comparison versus Ubercart. Pros/cons.

I have reviewed UberCart, and i think the main difference would be the following:

- UberCart is rather new software, it has less features then X-Cart does. X-Cart has been on the market for 8 years now and we are constantly improving the software:
http://www.x-cart.com/roadmap.html
- also there is a question about commercial vs free software packages. With free packages you usually get help from community, while with commercial software you get professional support service, so you are confident that any your question is resolved.

If you are interested in some particular functionality our team will be glad to assist you:
http://www.x-cart.com/contact_us.html

What is more, there is free trial version available on the site for testing purposes.