eCommerce Tycoon

**WebhostGIANT-Rob** · 03-09-2011, 07:01 AM

I decided to know about the most preferable e-commerce shopping cart software.

There are many of them:

- Miva Order;
- Os Commerce;
- Zen Cart;
- Cube cart;
- Magento,

and many other.

What cart do you prefer to use? and why?

**jedz** · 03-10-2011, 04:11 PM

Most of our clients are using Zen Cart, Magento and Os Commerce. It is easy to navigate and great feature.

**aaanativearts** · 03-16-2011, 11:29 PM

I like oscMax. It's a spinoff of osCommerce and comes with many of the most popular add-ons of osCommerce already installed out of the box. It's free and does everything the shopping carts that cost $$ can do. There are over 3500 osCommerce add-on contributions you can install to add functionality, the majority of which are also free, so you can make it as feature rich or as simple as you need it to be. It will hold an unlimited number of products.

The learning curve isn't very steep, much easier than some of the paid catalogs, and if you aren't tech savvy or are just too busy to do it yourself, you can hire someone to install it for you or customize your theme, or add a feature, or set up a payment processor, etc, for about $30-100.00 on Freelancer.com.

If you want to customize it yourself, there is an active support forum that will help you out for free if you get stuck and don't know how to fix a problem or don't know how to do something with it.

Anything that works on osCommerce also works in oscMax with a little tweaking, so you can also get support from the osCommerce community, which is huge and very responsive if you ask for help nicely and are patient for a couple days. If you have more time than money, you can learn how to fix most problems in the forums of either osCommerce or oscMax.

Really the only difference between osCommerce and oscMax is the templating system, and the convenience that oscMax comes with many useful contributions already installed so you don't have to add them yourself.

**edgray** · 03-17-2011, 11:45 AM

I'm building my first Magento-based shopping cart right now. Incredibly complex to learn, but it's a fantastic system, great backend, very professional.

Still, the shopping carts out there, Magento included, really don't do the job particularly well, especially from a designers point of view. It's about time someone brought out a truly modular, MVC based shopping cart that easily plugs into existing HTML, rather than having to plug HTML into complex template structures.

I have some friends working on one right now... can't wait til they've finished.

**saadmubeen** · 03-17-2011, 01:45 PM

I am using OsCommerce for years and with all the addons and forum support, I think this is the best solution.

**edgray** · 03-17-2011, 04:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by saadmubeen

I am using OsCommerce for years and with all the addons and forum support, I think this is the best solution.

Ooh no, definitely not, OsCommerce is a horrible system, really clunky, horrible unprofessional backend, and a real pain to work into an interesting design.

**ablaye** · 03-17-2011, 11:31 PM

I beg to differ. OsCommerce is the most popular e-commerce script and for good reason. You can find plenty of OsCommerce skins and mods.
The only e-commerce script I have ever used is OsCommerce.

**SiberForum** · 03-21-2011, 09:08 AM

I suppose that Magento commerce and OS Commerce shopping carts are the most preferable... many webmasters use them for running their ecommerce web sites.

**rashidasri** · 03-22-2011, 04:20 AM

Zeuscart is the best free shopping cart software.

**WebhostGIANT-Rob** · 03-22-2011, 11:03 AM

Wow. so many useful answers.. thanks guys..

As I see, many webmasters prefer OS Commerce.

is it really the best one or Not?

**Benmoore47** · 03-24-2011, 09:34 PM

Quote:

- Os Commerce;

Cause it is the most recommended site of my friends.

**edgray** · 03-25-2011, 09:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ablaye

I beg to differ. OsCommerce is the most popular e-commerce script and for good reason. You can find plenty of OsCommerce skins and mods.

OsCommerce is popular, but then, so is Justin Bieber - does that make him a great artist? No, of course not. OsCommerce is popular because it's easier to set up than a complex beast like Magento. But OsCommerce is god awful - horrible to customise, a really unprofessional back end, very badly coded, and very difficult to do complex things with.

I'll never use it again now I've got my head around Magento. It's just in a different league.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ablaye

The only e-commerce script I have ever used is OsCommerce.

So how on Earth do you know it's the best one if it's the only one you've tried?

**WebhostGIANT-Rob** · 03-25-2011, 10:39 AM

As I can see there so many ecommerce shopping carts - I'll find more information about new ones that I've never heard before..

Thanks!

**~ServerPoint~** · 03-31-2011, 04:17 AM

I am sure that Magento Commerce shopping cart will be the best choice for those who are going to run ecommerce web sites.

**dayafterstore** · 04-02-2011, 05:36 PM

Zen Cart because it came with cPanel's Fantastico De Luxe suite of software...

**marcuz88** · 04-02-2011, 10:14 PM

Most clients uses Magento, Zencart and OsCommerce, they have better features from your other choices. You could also visit this shopping cart software site for more information about this softwares and for comparison.

**ndinfosys** · 04-04-2011, 07:40 AM

OS Commers is my first choice.,
Zen Cart & Magento is second..,

People always see who is first., not even second.,
So there is no question for third choice to be written, that it

**erasoft** · 04-04-2011, 08:01 AM

Hi,
As there are a lot of shopping carts, and i worked in them.
Magento is a good one, but it is horrible, it gives too much problems on local systems and also to run a shop on it you will need to have dedicated server, then it will run best. It is quite slow.

OsCommerce looks like old analog computer, backend is like build by children by drawing lines in playing.

X-Cart this is a little bit good, but added too much complexity for nothing. Theme structure is not good.

Prestashop this is best one and i am using it for more than an year. Professional backend, a lot of free modules including payment modules like paypal, authorize.net, moneybookers etc, shipping modules including fedex, ups and usps, small code size, updating this cart is very easy, best help and apart of them it is very fast. In the new version 1.4 they have added much more features.

These are my comments about the carts i used before, but prestashop is the best one.

**WebhostGIANT-Rob** · 04-04-2011, 09:34 AM

Quote:

Magento is a good one, but it is horrible, it gives too much problems on local systems and also to run a shop on it you will need to have dedicated server, then it will run best. It is quite slow.

I can't agree with you here.. You know, there are many webmasters who are fully-satisfied with the speed and many functions of this shopping cart.

I think that it depends on the host itself.

**zen4me** · 04-04-2011, 11:13 AM

We are web developer company, from nearly 10 years experience in building e-commerce solution for the client, I can suggest some views on the best ecommerce solutions out there.

1. Zencart - This is a very versatile script, yet very underestimated because its has outdated and standard looks, yes first impression is not good, this is a big let down for average users which determine the quality of the script from the look, but my advise is look under the hood, put add-ons and you will amaze, this is the best cart and very easy to customize, it requires a bit steep learning curve (another let down for most users), but once you pass it it is the easiest cart to use/modify. The forum is one of the most active out there, very helpful. Most people doesn't even give this a try. We have few clients which we built their store from zero and now grows to multimillion dollar business, so Zencart is trusted to handle large transaction and wide range of products. New version support PHP5.3, PCI compliant, XHTML layout, no such messy tables like osCommerce ...

2. Prestashop, this is a new comer but with a great promising future, people easily flock into this because it has great look, great features, well for average users this script is a gem. For developer, this is slightly better than zencart, but for template. mods and coding we still prefer zencart's flexibility. Performance is good.
Forum support is active but not yet as helpful as Zencart.

3. OsCommerce, the mother of open source e-commerce script, we have no major complain on it, it has the widest range of mods and customizations, also it has wide range of theme, it is a good choice for a start, but bear in mind, osC is a bit clunky at the back-end, and to do modification means a lot of works, and not to mention and upgrade which is just pain. However the performance is good, you can run this on almost any server and run almost any type of online store.
Best thing about this probably because it is used by millions of users, you can find almost any ready-made add-ons whether paid or free.

4. Magento, this probably the most good looking script, it was once of the most promising script before Prestashop comes into the spot light. It is once a very good script, but the problem is, the cart is quite heavy and requires above average hosting to run it smooth, and of course it might be the slowest comparing to other 3 script above. But the huge drawback, forum support almost non-existent, for average user it is pain to find clue if you bump into problem.

5. There are some other good script, like Open-cart, Batavia, X-cart, etc, but we dont have much experience on them so we can't give opinion yet. We will update this when we tested them out later.