Shopping cart recommendations

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mattwnz

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#97559 16-Feb-2012 19:06

Currently looking for shopping cart software options. I designed a shopping cart for a client about 3 years ago, and they are wanting to upgrade it. However the company that developed the shopping cart software hasn't really improved the software since I purchased the license, so it is missing some things they need. eg It's product varitaions are very complex to use, and quite buggy. It also doesn't allow the uploading of PDF documents to use as downloaded products . Also the layout is a bit restricted. As it was purchased software, it is not being improved by a community like open source software is, and technical support from them can take many days.
It must have customisable product pages, and a decent image gallery system. eg the product images on the pages must be big, and allow as many images as you want to be displayed. They don't want it looking like an OS Commerce cart, it must be designer looking. I would style it through CSS, but I would want it to be able to be easily styled.
I would prefer something that I host rather than one of these hosted solutions where you have no control. Also would prefer php/mysql carts.
I have looked at opencart and prestashop, which look much improved, but I don't think they are quite enough. I see that several NZ web designers are now using both of these quite extensively.
Anyone have any suggestions of any good ones?
Even hosted options, althogh they ones I have seem are quite basic, with small diskspace and traffic quotas, and not that customisable.

nate

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#582746 17-Feb-2012 12:24

Shopify, Magento or osCommerce are my picks (in that order)

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raytaylor

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#582984 17-Feb-2012 21:23

Oscommerce, oscommerce, oscommerce. For the WIN

There is nothing more flexible and customisable. You can also buy some really awesome templates for it at templatemonster.com

There are also plugins for NZ shipping modules and courierpost? tracking. Anyhow, there is NZ specific modules and features avaliable for it. And it works with almost every single payment gateway on the planet.

Ray Taylor

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itxtme

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#583103 18-Feb-2012 09:55

raytaylor: Oscommerce, oscommerce, oscommerce. For the WIN

There is nothing more flexible and customisable. You can also buy some really awesome templates for it at templatemonster.com

There are also plugins for NZ shipping modules and courierpost? tracking. Anyhow, there is NZ specific modules and features avaliable for it. And it works with almost every single payment gateway on the planet.

A few years since I have used it; how far has moved? It was at crawl speed in regards to development back then. I did prefer it the most because as you say it was so easy to customize!

raytaylor

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#583161 18-Feb-2012 13:09

Been a couple of years since i used it too
But i doubt it would have changed much because there isnt really much else you could do with it. They had developed it to a point where it was finished from what i could see.
It does what they set out to do.

The add-ons however and modules are always under development so people are always adding new features that way.

Ray Taylor

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mattwnz

20045 posts

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#583215 18-Feb-2012 15:54

raytaylor: Been a couple of years since i used it too
But i doubt it would have changed much because there isnt really much else you could do with it. They had developed it to a point where it was finished from what i could see.
It does what they set out to do.

The add-ons however and modules are always under development so people are always adding new features that way.

Thanks for teh suggestions/
I have found shopping carts have improved quite a bit over the last 3 years. I have tried out OS commerce before, a few years ago, as well as Zen Cart (which I believe was built on OS COmmerce) but it's backend isn't particularly user friendly for clients.It also was lacking quite a few features, and didn't allow image galleries. It also looks quite dated, and probably needs quite a few plugins an modifications to get it to appear more modern and user friendly. I ended up using Interspire when I was searching 2-3 years ago, which was a good system at the time. However the developers of that appear to have moved on to concentrate more on a hosted system of that system, called Big Commerce . The support, which you have to pay a subscription for, for their standalone product hasn't been as good since they did this. The variations in Big Commerce have also been improved, but they haven't added those improvements to their original shopping cart, which is disappointing. The traffic and bandwidth allowances on big commerce are far too small for that to be an option either, and I prefer not to use a hosted system like that.
Shopify I have looked at, but the onging monthly price is expensive, and it is also a hosted solution, so is essentially only rented. Due to the products they sell, they would probably be better getting the $160 US per month package, which depending on the exhange rate could range between $NZ 200-300+ per month.
Haven't really looked at magento, but I had heard that it can be difficult to setup and configure, and doesn't work well on shared hosting as it needs lots of resources.