best shopping cart?

[Paullas]

I am about to sell products online so would like members views on the best online shopping cart to use.

 

[Skinner]

Are you a geek ?

If your computer savvy Magento (must resist urge to type magneto) is the muts, iTrends on here did Dog Beds UK, Dog Accessories and more! - DogPod.co.uk in magento, its insanely powerfull, and you need to do alot of modding to get most other packages upto that level.

For ease osCommerce is nice and easy an very popular.

There are some paid versions for less geeky folk, but its the SMF vs vBull argument only with com packages.

 

[golddiggerguy]

Shopping cart - Magento, Shopify, Wordpress with this plugin

Depends how big the sites going to be and what payment gateway your looking at.

 

[Paullas]

what do you mean am i a geek i can mod any script to how i want it id thats what you mean....

 

[Skinner]

Then there is only one option, Sir Geek-i-wan Kenobi.

Its a yoda moment, there is no try, only do or do not.

Its Magento or nothing

 

[Skinner]

Oh if you use an auto installer like Fantastico or Installatron, you may wanna add the sample products to see how to set it up, then when your ready to rock its easier to do a clean install and start from nothing

I spent forever trying to work with the demo/sample products and just wanted to cry until I figured out I should start with a clean slate.

 

[golddiggerguy]

Magento can be resource hungry and can cause problems if on a shared server with a lot of products.

If it's a hand full of items i'd go for a simple option but if it's a full on shop then a dedicated/Virtual server and Magento then!

 

[rottensoundz]

Good Thread topic, Thanks for the info guys.

I had found Shopify Before but was not aware of Magento

After a quick scan, Looks GOOD.

I Am also looking for a Ecommerce shop, Ideally one that can integrate XML Feeds
It looks like Magento does not but could be customized to do so (customization a bit to expensive for me tho )
Looking around Shopify it is hard to tell if it supports XML feeds either.

John

 

[Paullas]

ill try magneto now so will report back on its progress. if members have any tips, mods they recommend them please post here so we can all try them

thanks for replies so far.

 

[Skinner]

A tip ?

COFFEE! It's your friend, hell speed maybe more appropriate because starting on Magento is like falling thru the looking glass.

 

[golddiggerguy]

Be warned some hosting companies struggle with it to run correctly! So get it up to speed quick within 30 days just in case.

 

[Jeewhizz]

Magento is a beast - editting it is not really for the faint hearted!

We tend to use JShop (not free) for the majority of our client sites.

We won't touch oscommerce for new sites as it's awful

 

[bensd]

Could anyone recommend a very lightweight and simple script for a small site?

 

[Ellis]

Magento takes about 2 hours to upload - then they tell you need to be running the latest version of php 5.2, I think.

Page load times are also slow - the forums are full of negative posts about speed.

I gave up on it after a few days. It looks great, if only it worked properly.

The biggest problem with wp-e-commerce is you can't override the meta tags so you end up with lots of duplicate content pages which is really bad for SEO.

Support seems to be none existent too.

eShop is the easiest cart I've found to get up and running plus it's compatable with SEO plugins. It just doesn't look as good as the others.

I'd also be interested to hear more suggestions though.

 

[Skinner]

^^ if you use installatron or fantastico it installs in about 90 seconds no uploading needed

 

[tifosi]

opencart is good... did distros.co.uk on the new 1.2 version. Lacks payment gateways yet. opencart 0.7 has more.

prestacart is also good.

cubecart, oscommerce, zencart. OK but use old architecture.

magento is good, but wtf! it's bulk with effectively 2 frameworks on top of each other. Not for the fainthearted!

S

 

[golddiggerguy]

Magento takes about 2 hours to upload

Or upload it zipped up and unzip on server!!!! Please tell me you don't upload all them 1000's of files?

 

[Ellis]

I had a good look at Opencart but didn't like the fact you had to create a profile or log in before being able to buy something.

Does anyone know if it's possible to override that bit?

 

[tifosi]

I had a good look at Opencart but didn't like the fact you had to create a profile or log in before being able to buy something.

Does anyone know if it's possible to override that bit?

not yet. I think guest checkout is on the development list.

 

[Paullas]

What shopping cart do you use poll.

poll added to get an idea of what members use