Interchange?
Exchange Project? [free]

I'm searching for a webhost to run: phpnuke + nukeaddon + gallery addon + online shopping cart (that will allow misc shipping methods such as: cash on delivery, hrm.. etc.? AND price in different currecy (Malaysian Ringgit))

Recommendations? I don't want to spend too much - US$15 ~ would be good.

I like the functionality of WebGenie's Shopping Cart Professional. Can't offer up my store as an example though as I've been too busy with other projects to finish it. Soon I hope.

SCP gives you the option of a catalog or one that is dynamically created from
a txt file. The latter means the less technical marketing personnel can update the txt file,
upload it, and have the store up-to-date with the latest product & pricing with pulling me
from other projects. Am not thrilled with their default colors, but their easy enough to change.

Also it allows you to embed shopping cart code in your existing pages.

webgenie.com, an Australian based company.
US$199 for a standard license, US$595 for web designer license which allows
you to set up stores for up to 25 of your customers.


And no I don't work for them, I just like the product and they are quick to respond to questions.


Cheers,
KG

Ok, now I see the under $15.
We bought SCP outright, because every time we change hosts, we have
to change the store. Which is a major pain. SCP can move with us, so
far more convenient.

We've developed a number of sites using the Dansie cart. Not the most sophisticated but easy to work with.

Originally posted by Jaiem
We've developed a number of sites using the Dansie cart. Not the most sophisticated but easy to work with.

Aloha
was curious as I want to set up a cart soon I had read that the Danise cart had some serious security issues a few months back ????
did they patch them or ????

It was an issue with enforcing the licensing of the cart software. Nothing to do with orders or order processing, or general site security.

I know of one you should stay away from and that is Comersus, it's Free and then have expensive add-ons to manage it. They will come out with a updated version and none of your add-ons that you have paid for will work with the upgrade.

You write to them and they recommend that you buy the new add-ons to run the shopping cart. Did I mention that they say the updated version can be applied right over the old version but they do not mention until after you do this that the old add-ons will not work.

Their support usally gets back with you in about 38 to 48 hours if you have a problem and in their forum they will delete any negitive statements about their product and then they will email you and ask if there is anything we can help with let us know.

You can email them back and no reply, after 4 emails and 2 months later and still no response. This is just my 2 cents worth!

Originally posted by Jaiem
It was an issue with enforcing the licensing of the cart software. Nothing to do with orders or order processing, or general site security.

Aloha
aahhhhh
now its coming back
I think the thing was that he was allowing himself a back door or something to check lic info

Originally posted by biatche
Interchange?
Exchange Project? [free]

I'm searching for a webhost to run: phpnuke + nukeaddon + gallery addon + online shopping cart (that will allow misc shipping methods such as: cash on delivery, hrm.. etc.? AND price in different currecy (Malaysian Ringgit))

Recommendations? I don't want to spend too much - US$15 ~ would be good.

I like The Exchange Project so far. I tried it - and it's better than other commercial sollutions.

T.E.P. is a mix of some very nice features, with some very poorly thought out and executed options. I find I have a real love-hate relationship with the product.

Here are some examples of what it does poorly:

It does not handle images well at all. Small images - thumbnails - are fixed at a specific height and width for all images. You can specify what this is, but it applies to all images. These small images are made by simply displaying the larger image with the smaller height and width tags, so your images are significantly distorted if you don't plan ahead and make sure that all your images scale to the small size appropriately. YOu also pay the download penalty for the larger image even if the user never wants to see anything but the thumbnail.

No text attributes for products. Want to personalize a product by offering lettering for instance, and you are out of luck.

No way to collect additional information for customer records. If the existing customer data fields are not adequate, you are out of luck.

No multiple-purchase discounts. I need to offer sales of back issues of a magazine, which requires both text attributes for specifying which issues, and a quantity discount for buying in quantity. No way to handle this at all.

Limited shipping options.

Email notification of order is very limited. There is no way to provide additional instructions base on the product ordered, or the payment method, or the shipping model used - when you confirm the order with the customer. If you want to give them instructions on how to log into a secure page and download the online product they just purchased - you are out of luck.

Now all of these things can be addressed by modifying the database schema and writing your own replacement modules or enhancing the modules that are present, and this is part of why I have a love-hate relationship with T.E.P. Since I can customize it any way I want, I can indeed get my own personal version of T.E.P. and make it walk and talk exactly like I want. There are days however, when I don't want to be the programmer, the support staff, and the customer for a product. Something as ubiquitous as a shopping cart should be available with these features off the shelf.

-t

On one of ur sites we use Dansie which is very flexible but you need to know some code to use it. I'm no tech and can make my way through so anybody who dabbles in HTML should do OK. For an integrated approach on another site we needed more features and found it in 1shoppingcart http://www.1shoppingcart.com/
The system (which they let you try free for 30 days) has shopping cart, autoresponders, Email list management, affiliate program management, etc. Full blown system is more than $15 though:crap:
Hope this helps.

Subscription carts also bother me. I know it's a business model, but as a small web business, it rankles me to know that I will pay each and every month for a shopping cart that I should be able to simply purchase and install.

I know, I'm picking nits now, but I don't consider a shopping cart that you pay for on a monthly basis falling into the Best Shopping Cart out there model.

It's sort of the same thing as the best shopping cart that I can deploy and change via writing my own PHP or Perl code out there bucket...

-t

Here are two I've been looking at:

EZWebStore (http://www.ezwebstore.com/) easy to setup, nice demo online, looks quite thorough.

AllCommerce (http://allcommerce.sourceforge.net/) is quite exstensive and is suppose to remain open source.

I have tinkered with AllCommerce off and on through a couple versions. It's well-conceived and really slick but a bit tough to install and get working just right (picky-picky Perl code). Good support through a fairly busy mailing list.

thewitt: I'm surprised those problems with TEP persist. Those were around over a year ago when I used to hang out with that group. At the time, the big development issues were sales tax and shipping tables.

Another free one is www.fishcart.org

Originally posted by alchiba
[clip]thewitt: I'm surprised those problems with TEP persist. Those were around over a year ago when I used to hang out with that group. At the time, the big development issues were sales tax and shipping tables.

Another free one is www.fishcart.org
TEP development and support is an interesting beast.

Sometimes you can post a question on the forum and you get 10 replies with people offering to code it for you, telling you how to work around the problem, assuring you it will be in the next release, etc. At other times your questions fall seemingly on deaf ears, offers to code it and add it to the project go unanswered, things that seem to be of value are just ignored, etc.

I know that projects like TEP rely on volunteers to make things happen, and everyone has different priorities, but the different levels of support for issues that allow TEP to be a really great product surprise me.

-t

I was pretty excited about using TEP when I saw it. Started on a project with it, and after some very odd error messages finally got it working. I'm right with thewitt on that image thing. I'd built a few set of images for products (around 250 or so), then found the sizing to be all wrong - fixing one area wrecked another etc...

Once that was fixed, I started to add products (after manually needing to pull the demo ones out of the database as the script wouldn't remove them). Some products have over 30 attributes (sizes mainly), all of which needed to be added one at a time, and individually for each product). Still I was happy to battle on till I started to notice it was dropping some of these attributes as they were added :rolleyes: In the end it was a write-off

Interchange looks very slick now it's being run by RedHat though - next time I'm going to try that one I think...

TEP would probably work fine for a small amount of products, with few variables for each one. It gets quite unwieldy once the numbers start to rise.

Oh.. the forums are still the same - red hot one moment, dead on another thread... (last month)

Greg Moore