Brandon Stout wrote:
PHP friends,
I was fairly sold on Zencart from my Google searches, but as some of you
may have noted, I'm not completely satisfied with it. If I find someone
to help customize it, perhaps I'll go that route, but maybe there are
eCommerce packages some of you recommend over Zencart. What do some of
you use, and why?
I'd say the vast majority of my cart clients so far have preferred
x-cart -- it's robust enough to fit most stores needs out of the box,
it has paid support (so you don't have to patiently rely on the
kindness of others if you're having difficult issues). Not only does
it do almost anything you'd ever need a store to do, but you're also
able to tweak the code as you'd like, create custom modules, purchase
modules made by other providers, etc. It uses smarty templates for
skinning... the webmaster mode is handy for editing language and
layout. They also have a big, friendly online community (for license
owners only). And because its a popular cart that does pretty well,
many hosting companies (like ours but I won't spam our link unless you
want it) offer a discount on the license with hosting.
On the down side, X-cart does like lots of elbow room. Some add-on
modules and combinations of modules can make it a resource hog. I've
had a few people get frustrated with it, particularly with applying
updates or troubleshooting heavy resource usage after heavy
modification, but we do find more people having success with it than
with other carts.
I have a handful of clients using CS-cart, and they love it. I don't
know much about it other than its supposed to be a side-step to
x-cart, and is supposedly easier to update after modifications.
Litecommerce (by the makers of X-cart) is another popular option, but
I hate it on many levels... for one thing, it's rarely an
out-of-the-box solution -- people have to add on extra modules to just
make a basic cart. On top of that, the code is encrypted. As a host,
due to myriad of add-on combinations people end up with just trying to
run a simple store, the configurations vary widely from site to site.
This makes it a bear to troubleshoot.
Zencart is fine; OS Commerce and Cubecart less so, but most of our
customers who us any of those end up converting to x-cart eventually.
Magento is the up and coming super cart in the open source community.
I have high hopes for it, but I'm not going to start recommending it
yet... alot can happen between beta and release ;-p
Anyway I hope that helps.. I'm kinda cranky and tired tonight - just
made a major software switch over here - but if you have questions
about all this feel free to ask. I'm sure I'll be more agreeable by
Monday... maybe Tuesday ;-)
Take care ... -Velda
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