July 2010 Edition
As a web developer or designer we are often asked by customers to recommend a shopping cart or e-commerce solution. Let me run down the main players and give you the heads up on what to expect.
Magento is good until you have to hand it over to a customer and they ring everyday for 6 months because they can’t work out or remember how to do the simplest thing. That and to get any good features you need to spend over $1200 – that’s a fair chunk of change for what will become a dead weight. There is a free version but Magento themselves are very clear that unless you are a technical genius with technical prowess to rival Google engineers you should avoid it.
Big Commerce is solid and pretty and easy enough to use that your customers will get the hang of it pretty quickly, biggest kicker is that the templates are straight HTML with tokens which means no server side logic at all unless you want to attach it as javascript which gets cumbersome. Your clients will love the features and usability, you just may have to compromise some fancier implementations.
Shopify rocks for templates – so easy and there is even a tool to download to test them so you can do it without causing issue – it is so easy to use in the back end too because there are bugger all features – but that suits a lot of online businesses. Downside? They take a percentage per transaction, pisses most people off, you can tell them to account for it in there pricing but most businesses start getting the shits after a year paying a monthly fee and per transaction fees. If you can talk someone into this it will be the easiest shopping cart template you’ll ever make.
Core Commerce, is like Big Commerce but you can use PHP in the template (not as many individual template files to modify though – but with proper CSS you can get at anything) – the PHP makes it simple to add basic logic so I find them far more powerful than Big Commerce. User admin area is pretty messy though – everything is there and it works just looks like programmers designed it – otherwise, it’s as good as Big Commerce and identical in price. Expect to spend a few more hours helping the customer ease into it that you would with Big Commerce or Shopify though.
Zen Cart – bastard free shopping cart that some people insist on because they think it’s free. It usually costs them more to run because of the templates and administration, but of course the kind of people that want a free cart usually don’t want to pay you to do any work on it – I tend to avoid these jobs now, I got sick of explaining that just because I installed free software did not mean I would work for free. Do the internet a favor, refuse to use osCommerce, Zen Cart or X-Cart
Foxy Cart – nice bolt on cart, similar to Paypal cart but way cooler – it’s a good way to sneak a cart into a static site on the cheap – I am quite fond of it as a solution but it doesn’t suit everyone, worth a look if you have a static site or WordPress install and need a quick cart solution.
WP e-commerce – great solution for small shops on WordPress sites. It is quite powerful and generally well featured (using plugins), needs WordPress to run and comes in free or Gold versions to suit most people. I am a huge fan of WP e-commerce for the right situation but have seen some insane implementations that just leave me wondering. It is always worth a look if you need to add a shop to a blog.
More to come, but to get onto the crappy carts I need more red wine. Don’t forget to Tweet, Digg or Stumble this – I live for the love.
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We’re using Interspire shopping cart which seems like it’s dieing in favor of bigcommerce. We do like ISC a lot and are disappointed that Interspire seems to be ignoring it and ignoring their forums. Have you ever looked at ShopVisible? It looks great but they don’t seem to have a demo or pricing on their website.
Kurt – Sadly, it seems that the same trend of ignorance is being carried over to BC as well. Many of the features requested by the BC community have their ideas under consideration by the BC developers but they’ve been quiet as of late and it’s been months.
Andrew – I’ve been wondering about the WP e-commerce as well. Could you elaborate what do you mean by insane implementations?
WP e-commerce is great and a really useful tool in the right situations. By insane, I mean people that want to sell 1000+ products with several variations of each and hundreds of categories – WP e-commerce can handle the volume but the user interface is not designed for shops this large, there comes a time when your online shop needs dedicated infrastructure
Just curious as to why you said not to use x-cart? I’m just starting to research for my own site and x-cart seemed to be “OK”…for $150 one-time fee it’s all PHP based and the CSS looks pretty easy to modify. What’s bad about it?
The biggest issue is that is is old and out of date (and it looks it). the templates are tables embedded in tables embedded in tables which means to make anything useful you will need to completely rewrite all the templates yourself.
There is also worthwhile support for SEO, social networking, blogging and optimized websites
ah…tables…yuck. I tell you what, I am totally confused about which cart/system to put into place on my site. Right now I have very few products but I’m in the midst of negotiating with suppliers and should have 40-50 items within the next year or so. I have a programming background so not worried at all about mucking with PHP or writing CSS — but if the architecture of the cart is fundamentally flawed then I don’t want to deal with that. I feel like this is a huge decision almost like being married to it once decided…the idea of getting on the wrong horse and having to rip out and redo later is disturbing to say the least…
It is a big move but almost all the carts have free trials so you can spend some time getting a feel for the carts. So long as you stick with one of the major cart vendors you will have something you can rely o that will grow in features as you need them
Good post (and good site) Andrew!
I’ve had a play around with wp-ecommerce recently but found it to be astonishingly buggy, which is a real shame because WP is such a great platform in so many other ways. I can’t say I’d feel confident launching a client’s website with that.
Completely agree with you on ZenCart, X-cart and OScommerce. Dated systems and just horrible to work with. You have to wonder how much longer they’ll be around.
Have you ever tried Actinic? Oh boy… that was fun (not). A lot of chambers of commerce recommend it to their start-up businesses here in the UK – they seem to be heavily in partnership with different places, much as Microsoft is. My heart always sinks when I hear from someone who wants an Actinic shop set up.
Have you taken a look at Magento Go? I gather the Magento team launched it earlier this year as their hosted solution. I know the regular Magento is supposed to be quite complex to customise, though I’ve not yet had time to tinker with it myself. I wonder if Go would be simpler?
I am still working on this believe it or not, and I think I’m going to end up using Avactis. I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no perfect cart system unless you write your own to suit your exact needs…and I don’t have time to do that. I’m going to give Avactis a shot.