Hi All,

I have seen many posts/questions about which shopping cart to use. I thought I would share my experience with several of the popular shopping cart systems. I have been building online stores and running web sites for almost 3 years on Windows and Linux. I have technical experience with PHP/MySQL and ASP/MS Server.

What I look for in a shopping cart system is customizability, scalability, and ease of use.

Mercantec: This cart system uses templates for the store look and feel. These templates are hard to customize and easily messed up if you don't take particular attention to detail. Mertantec uses a flat file system so there really is no database integration or scalabiltiy to speak of. The cart functionality is poor and administration of the cart is very frustrating. Technical support was adequate and I give those tech support reps credit for trying to support such a bad product. For example if a large order is placed by a customer(say over 20 different items in the cart) this breaks some of the functionality of the store. We had this problem and a tech support rep had to spend several hours patiently troubleshooting this to determine if our problem was this same old bug or something else. Do yourself a favor and do not use Mercantec.

Yahoo Store: Yahoo store is great for shops that have a small number of items. It comes with a merchant account and payment gateway along with a very good adminastration panel. There are tons of reports and statistics available. Basic customization is easy to do and it is hard to accidentally break something. However, customization beyond the basics is difficult since Yahoo Store uses a proprietary scripting language called RTML. They just recently released a teach-yourself style book about RTML, which may make customizing Yahoo store more easy to do. Setup is pretty is easy and you get the marketing power of Yahoo.... at a price.

Several months ago Yahoo Store announced a new pricing structure that penalizes you if you have a lot of items in your store and then tacks on additional per sale fees. If I remember correctly, each month I was billed 10 cents for every item in the store along with several transaction fees per that reached about 4%. So for a large store with 4000 items the charge would $400.00 a month just for the per item charges! Not to mention the base hosting fee and the revenue sharing fees. You can buy very good shopping cart systems for half this and have unlimited products. We have not ventured too far from the basic templates so have not had much interaction with tech support. Inventory tracking is a pain with Yahoo Store, but can be managed.


Miva Merchant Miva Merchant is a shopping cart system that is based upon a proprietary scripting language called Miva Script. Miva corporation has a large number of indpendent developers/companies that create modules that are easily integrated into a store. Miva provides a lot of doucmentation so that you can Miva Script yourself. I have found that there are modules that are already built for just about any functionality.

The problem with the modules is that you have to trust the person/company that made it. In fact if there is a problem with your Miva Merchant store and you contact Miva Corporation for support. Miva Corporation will blame the 3rd party modules for the problem and not provide technical support until you remove all the modules. I have found this very disturbing in that Miva Corporation fosters this developer network and markets the 3rd party modules as a benefit to the Miva Merchant store system but then as soon as there is a problem they refuse technical support if you have purchased and installed any of the 3rd party modules.

Along with the proprietaty Miva Script comes the proprietary dbase III database. This database adds some scalability but there are problems. First Miva Merchant is slow compared to carts built with PHP/MySQL or ASP/ SQL Server. Second, database corruption is a problem that is inherent in the dbase III dbf file system. This problem is so common that several companies offer recovery services that don't come cheap, $75 per half hour.

Customization is very easy to do, up to a point. The basic look and feel is set and then there are a ton of options/variables that allow to customize. These options are stored in a database file and changed by the easy to use administration panel. Therefore, you don't need to know any Miva Script or HTML. In regards to customer usability, I believe that the developers must live in a cave. Things like having the checkout button and continue buttons on the far right hand edge of the screen can make it confusing and difficult to navigate thru the store. Also, customizing the customer invoice or e-mail is difficult. For example, the invoice that comes with Miva Merchant has a big problem with line wrapping so that the customer can barely understand the e-mail invoice that is sent to them after checkout. Most of these usuability problems can be fix and customized to your liking by purchasing third party modules. But be fore warned the more modules you install the slower your store becomes and the more likely you will have stability problems.

Reports and Stastics are virtually nonexistent with Miva Merchant right out of the can. But you can buy the 3rd party modules to get the reports that you want.

In the latest release of Miva Merchant, 4.x inventory control was added as a feature. Again, the developers must live in a cave. Items are taken from inventory when an item is put in the cart not when the customer checks out. Therefore, items can be out of stock even though no one has paid for the items. We have had a big problem with people (kids or competitors) repeatedly going into the store adding a lot of items to their cart so they are out of stock and then leaving the site without checking out. This leaves the items out of stock for most of the day until we check and restock the items. So, this means that we have to pay someone to monitor the store continually to make sure the items are in stock. In one instance most of the store was out of stock(600+ items) even though not a single order was placed. A 3rd party module has been developed to fix this problem but it costs $400.


In addition to the 3 carts detailed above I have also purchased or used the demo for several others. I am currently in the hunt for an e-commerce package that offers inventory tracking, uses a SQL database, allows easy customization of look and feel templates as well as allowing the code to be customized to suit the merchants particular needs. I have yet to find a stable product that meets these needs that is less than $2,500.

X-Cart: X-Cart seems like a good fit for the criteria mentioned above. I purchased the software about a week ago and had some customization work done by X-Cart. The custom work was done in about 2 days (I was impressed). However, the installation is not going well. In fact I have not been able to get the installation wizard to work and have tried several suggestions by X-Cart tech support . I first reported this problem on Friday and 5 days later there is no resolution. A BIG problem is that there is NO documentation. I repeat NO documentation. So each customer has to figure out the functionality and how to set-up the cart by trial and error. X-Cart claims that they release the source code to the customer. But, who in their right mind would try to customize a store when there is no documentation. In trying to customize/figure out the store, a person is very likley to screw things up beyond hope. Frankly, I think selling an e-commerce product without documentation is stupid and have requested a refund.

So that is my experience with working with e-commerce packages over the last couple of years. I have grown my web sites up to the point that the price of the cart is not much of an issue. The big issue is the time it takes to customize the store and making sure that the store can scale up to the business needs. Hope this helps some you avoid the mistakes that I have made.

BMM,

Thanks for the info.. I for one am still struggling to find a decent solution for customers..

Seems that the two at the top of our list right now, courtesy of one of our customers who has done exhaustive research and trials, are;

PDG CART 2002 http://www.pdgsoft.com
Dansie http://www.dansie.net/cart.html

We are trialling these right now, so we'll see what happens..

Cheers..

Take a look at http://www.edatcat.com

Very nice cart, good support and very customizable.

I am liking oscommerce tons of freatures open source big community

only thing I don't like is their forums be prepaired to spend time here trying to find add ons.

good thing is the code is clean and it is cheap to hire a programmer to modify the cart totally.

Oscommerce is a great cart, but not ready to offer your customers. There is no web based customizing feature and even to change simple things as the text on the main page it is required for the users to edit direct in the files.

try the hosted cart at Mals Ecommerce. I have made over $5000 in sales the past month using that cart.

http://www.mals-e.com

As mentioned in another thread, been using quikstore for some time now and it's very nice for up to about a thousand products as it's using txt database. But you can use both html and database store together and any layout and language/currency.

Check it out at http://www.quikstore.com

-Nordic

Originally posted by felix220
BMM,

Thanks for the info.. I for one am still struggling to find a decent solution for customers..

Seems that the two at the top of our list right now, courtesy of one of our customers who has done exhaustive research and trials, are;

PDG CART 2002 http://www.pdgsoft.com
Dansie http://www.dansie.net/cart.html

We are trialling these right now, so we'll see what happens..

Cheers..

Dansie Cart is known to have some serious security issues, see the following:

3.8 Dansie Shopping Cart allows arbitrary commands to be executed on server
Dansie is a CGI based shopping cart application. A post on BugTraq revealed that there is a backdoor functionality in the shopping cart that transmits information about the system it is running on to the author of the application. This has also been reported on a newsgroup by Kasey Johns (see http://www.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=601644315). A follow-up post by Barry Hemphill (http://www.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=601857849) revealed that the backdoor transmits the location, IP address, and other information about the server to Dansie. It is unclear at this point what Dansie is doing with this information, but the follow-up post suggests that Dansie is actually using this information to make some sort of connection to the server running their software. It is also clear that the CGI allows unauthorized users to execute code in the user context of the web server. Dansie has apparently made available patches to registered users.

The full article for the above can be found here:
http://www.sans.org/newlook/digests/ntarchives/043000.htm#3.8

In addition another artical advises:

Based upon an investigation it is believed that the back door within Dansie.net's shopping cart can best be summarized as follows:

**1. The back door is very deliberate.
**2. It isn't unique to the one copy we have access to here.
**3. *Is being actively utilized by the author of the CGI.

* Based upon the log snippet in Kasey's post showing attempted access to the CGI from an Earthlink dial-up IP. (209.179.141.0/24). According to Kasey, access to the CGI was attempted less than 30 minutes after the cart was installed.

This article can be found here:
http://www.securiteam.com/securitynews/5VQ0C000FW.html

Whilst these articles state that Dansie advised they were goign to fix this back door - as far as I know they have not. We bought a copy of Dansie last year - many months after these article had appeared and Dansie had advised that they had patched the software - and the copy we purchsed still contained the back door. We did not know this at the time and weren't made aware of it until coming across these articles a few months ago.

But beware. Dansie cart has this back door so the programmer can track every copy - obviously a misguided attempt to stop piracy. BUT I have come across threads on forums where people have advised that they simply took a look at the code for Dansie cart and made a few adjustments and within a fee hours their cart was remotely deleted from their server by Dansie and they received an email saying they had violated the software licenese. These are people who bought the software and were using it on only one website and did nothing else but make a few adjustements to the CGI.

PDG Soft is a good functional cart, but maybe a bit harder for newbies to customize it to the way they want it to. I worked with the cart since December for a client here in Atlanta. Since they were located right up the street (just on the other side of the street) we could call them up and made sure any technical problems would be handled quickly and efficiently.

There are a few quirks with the transfer of the license from our devbox to the live web site. Their recommedation was for us to download their demo and install it on the new site and transfer the database of products over. Kinda silly that they couldn't just update the URL in their database to reflect the move. It was still on the same machine, just a different URL.

Everytime we called them, their lines were busy. They returned calls promptly though. I doubt they have so many calls 9 AM in the morning.

The only main difficulty I had with PDG was error messages that didn't really give you much information on how to fix the problem. Sometimes it would give a code that only PDG techs could decipher it and usually it would be fixable by a simple change that would save me alot of time from calling them up. Since it is written as binary CGI, you'll get the unimpressive 500 errors which doesn't give much help unless you look through the Apache error logs for the answer.

Since this is the first time we dealt with a well known commercial cart, I had eaten 20 hours of the company's time before we could actually start charging the client for costs. And to add to this, 20 more hours to configure the cart and hack PHP scripts together to do somethings that the cart wasn't developed to do.

In the end, it's a good app for the low 100-200 products sites. Adding a new product requires too many steps as well as modifying. You first had to add the product's SKU and title before you modify the details of the product. If you have 20 products to add, it's a real pain.

All was not lost with experiementing with this cart. Our company is now writing a new cart in PHP/SQL after the experience and our client's site just went live as of last week with around 300 products.

PDG has a good User Manual too which was quite useful during the trial period to make sure it could handle everything we need. Formatting could be better, but none the less, it's a well worth it product for low to medium inventory sites.

Better Basket Pro is another one to check out:

http://www.imediasoftware.com/

any good php/mysql shopping carts beside Oscommerce??

I need a paid solution that is
.Easy to customize
.Easy to manage

Originally posted by freehtml
any good php/mysql shopping carts beside Oscommerce??

I need a paid solution that is
.Easy to customize
.Easy to manage

As mentioned above, BBPro is a great product. While it is CGI based - I heard through the grapevine that a PHP/MySQl Store Builder add-on is just about to be released for BBPro that allows you to build an entire store via your web browser that interfaces with the CGI cart.

Having used BBPro earlier in the year i can say it was a breeze to set-up, it has an install script and a set-up control panel. So Iam excited to hear about the store builder.

I hope this is helpful :)

any url??

I am using OsCommerce now but the Paypal option does work properly somehow

Originally posted by freehtml
any url??

I am using OsCommerce now but the Paypal option does work properly somehow

Oh right .... go here http://www.imediasoftware.com/products/bbpro/ for more info :D

There is no info about the store builder at the site, but if you email them they will tell you about it!

And it works with Pay Pal.

How about Interchange? Does that cart use mysql as backend or its own proprietary storage format?

I have found Shop Factory (www.shopfactory.com) to be a good cart, with the advantage you own it. Also, they offer (at higher prices) unlimited editions.

We just hired a admin/programmer And I highly recommend it. Before I felt I was at the mercy of open source and found it hard to work within their confines, ya sure it was customizable but…. My programmer and I believe a lot of programmers find it is harder to change code that to write it your self as everyone has a different coding style.

I totally recommend taking the “bite” of getting a custom solution, it is not “leaky” or buggy like open source and is somewhat templateable for your next client.

Anyone have real-world experiences with Interchange? I've only had experiences with it via virtual hosting environments... and it seems to be unstable. However I've not tried it via a dedicated server.

I have tried phpNuke, OsCommerce and incEngine, and definitely like the way incEngine works. The system runs on mySQL or Postgres, and has around 150 modules to use. They have a very nice control panel (or main menu), which makes it easy to set up the store layout and update products and categories. I am amazed to hear that Miva didnt have inventory tracking until now. I am running my store (http://www.BeverlyHeels.com) on incEngine as a shared hosting with other stores...like http://dagexpress.com. You can run multiple stores on this system.

For more info, you can read all about it at http://www.incengine.com

One amazing thing is their Theme technology. Try these links!
http://www.incengine.com/incEngine/?theme_html=123
http://www.incengine.com/incEngine/?theme_html=76

We like to use VPASP - vpasp.com. It's an asp cart but will run with ChiliSoft. We've never installed it on Linux. So, can't vouch for using it on Linux. But, we have 5 sites running it and it works fine. It's relatively easily customizable. The only problems that we have had was getting it setup correctly with the client's host.

You can beat the price for what you get and the client owns it without recurring monthly fees.

Hope that this helps someone looking for a win shop cart.

As far as Mercantec's SoftCart, it is awful. We lost a client after recommending that software. And it's expensive.

We also have recommended Mal's for people who need a service that is inexpensive but good.

Originally posted by Skeptical
How about Interchange? Does that cart use mysql as backend or its own proprietary storage format?

Interchange rocks... Yes it supports mysql or postgresql, it's default db is gdbm I think...

http://www.icdevgroup.org