Are there any recommendations for E Commerce software? We want to get our stuff online on a website, but find it hard to get anything worthwhile. And OSCommerce seems to be a royal pain in the butt, although I have messed with it a little bit. ANY help would be much appreciated.
The only problem with this approach is that in most cases you do not have access to the coding files hence you can be held to ransom if prices go up or the servers slow down. If you have a cart with 500 items it will take a while to add and imagine if you had to do this gain on to another system. The best approach I think is to use your own hosting which you can get for $5 a month or so and use a third party shopping cart this way if the host gives you any drama like a price increase and so on you can move to another host without any problem simply by copying your database contents and files and reloading again on a new plan.
Hope this helps.
Joe
Last edited by josephfrancis : 1 Week Ago at 03:38 PM.
If you found osc too much zen has the same functionality but is better developed and heaps of help available.
Cubecart is also another one although not supported as well (without paying)
The main advantage of osc and zen is they are open source so the code is available and plenty of people who have made modifications then make those "mods" available free to do yourself.
In my opinion if you want good software you need to be willing to pay for it.
I tried all of these open source software systems and my suggestion is to try them yourself then do a comparison with Viart and you will see what I mean. One real negative with open source is that hackers will know how these systems work.
Things to test for is ease of use via admin, ability to edit the templates and the ability to remove modules via admin rather than hacking the code or adjusting a template. Other stuff to look out for is the ability to adjust discounts and shipping and the ability to incorporate UPS that would auto calculate the shipping cost per product. There is no comparison with Viart and this is after I had spent 20 plus hours testing and playing with different systems.
Avactis Shopping Cart includes an Australia Post module for Aus customers using the system.
The advantage with Viart is you can use a product code to search for an item or you can use normal text word for searching search. I am using this software on a website that has over 9000 items and you should see how fast teh search feature is.
One open source shopping cart that may become the most popular within 12-24 months may be I think Magento which one cool feature it has is that you can run 10 websites with 10 carts installed but they all run off the one system on checkout time.
It uses the same php scripting as most OS packages but without the available mods. If it works for you great.
Magento may do, guess we will see.
There are several posts on this sort of thing that cover other considerations like what happens if your not happy with the cart (talking about paying a designer here) or they retire/leave/change jobs etc.
It would be worth hitting the search or having a flick through the ecommerce threads
Viart is a professional development company based in the UK who have an office and a number of staff. I believe the same goes with Avactis Software. Magento has a team as well and they have a professioanl edition you can purchase. All three are not back yard operations.
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It uses the same php scripting as most OS packages but without the available mods. If it works for you great.
If your talking about the current Open Source systems yes I believe this to be the case.
Magento is an entirely different setup.
As explained above I have spent many days researching installing and playing with different systems and personally on a professional basis Viart and Avactis are the two best packages going around and are the only two systems I will use when setting up new ecommerce websites for clients.
Avactis has less features than Viart but is powerful as well and I think will do nicely for a T Shirt Biz.
Viart has a free edition for 50 items and the basic system is only $149. Viart also has an editon which I use which has a helpdesk, forum for $349 and its all in one.
I've been using them for my site, and have been really happy with them. I think their best feature if being there to answer the hundreds of questions I had for free.
Bryan
Last edited by Comin'OutSwingin : 1 Week Ago at 07:37 AM.
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Having now spent a considerable amount of time with magento I would seriously avoid it at the moment unless you are from a programming background.
If you intend to build or customise the site yourself it has no where near the support documentation or available help that any of the others do. Even installing the available "extensions" can cause issue's and is not very straight forward. (This program is mainly used in conjunction with linux so if you are familiar with that it may help. My hosting is on a linux platform and there are still issues.
It depends on your budget and what you are willing to spend. How much you spend on cart software is only a small percentage of the picture. Personally I'd spend less on the software and more on the marketting, I'd bet you grow your business quicker that way. Doesn't matter how good your site looks if nobody comes to visit.
Cube Cart has served me well - 100% free, free tech support via the Cube Cart forums, huge modification community with their own dedicated forum, many mods are free and the paid ones are extremely cheap, the code is 100% open source, and the templates are fairly easy to modify.
Because it's PHP based and because there is a large aftermarket for CubeCart, you can always have someone custom code features for you if you really need something done that CubeCart doesn't offer. However I haven't found anything I've needed that wasn't readily available via the modification community.
If I were you I wouldn't pay for any cart until you check out the free ones available. I went through a few other carts and chose CubeCart.
If you want to spend some money, I would recommend Volusion. We use it and like it. Another company that uses Volusion is all the Christian Audigier/Ed Hardy companies--- if you want to check out what it can look like.
Another really nice one is at aspdotnetstorefront.com. We might have gone with that one because of all of its features, except for the cost.
Zencart is free and used by some larger companies, like Affliction (afflictionclothing.com)
Another one is pikistore - Create your own tshirt store which I think is also a fulfilment service, but I'm not sure because I haven't used them yet - worth a look though.
I will average installing about 5 CubeCart shops a week for clients. It's all most anyone needs.
There are coders and web designers who promote other stuff, and magento is new, but extremely difficult at his point, unless you are a coder and used to working with open source software. Their main target seems to be larger hosts and developers, not a one time user.
There are a lot of folks who think t's got to cost to be any good, but I will bet that between CubeCart, OSCommerce and ZenCart there are more working carts on the web than any ten other packages.
And you own it. You are not tied to any host, you can move whenever you want. You have full access to all of it, there is nothing proprietary about it and you are beholden to no one. There is a tremendous amount of free support on the forums. No need to pay for anything, unless you may want one particular feature that is missing and there are plenty of folks in the business of providing free and low cost mods for specific situations.
Don't be mislead by those who tell you you need a paid solution or a custom site. It's just not so.
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ECommerce Software? 
