What are the disadvantages of using a free shopping cart such as Agoracart or Interchange?

oscommerce is nice

http://www.oscommerce.com/

its free, opensource :D

yes oscommerce is my first recomendation over any other shopping cart....

Oscommerce is a great cart and a lot of our clients use it. I really like it as well.

Originally posted by esdjco
Oscommerce is a great cart and a lot of our clients use it. I really like it as well.

what kinda cart do you guys use on jaguarpc?

Oscommerce is great, the only problem is installing it is a death trap

Originally posted by ntwaddel


what kinda cart do you guys use on jaguarpc?

Do you mean on our own site or for our clients? We try to psuh oscommerce for clients that need a true cart. Our own site doesnt really have a cart, its more of a custom form type of script.

Maybe a easy to use version of oscommerce should be built into cpanel?

ntwaddel,
Most of the time we get a request from the clients to install the cart and they are very happy with it. It takes a little bit to setup as nohealing mentioned but overall it is highly customizable and easy to input items.

Originally posted by edude
Maybe a easy to use version of oscommerce should be built into cpanel?

Or maybe into HostGUI? :)

I've tried PerlShop before.....

http://www.arpanet.com/PerlShop/PerlShop.html

To address your original question: Agoracart is for smaller shopping cart sites... fairly easy to configure, but if you have large database dependent stores, it's not for you...

Interchange is a very powerful E-Commerce application, capable of practically any configuration you would need. The disadvantage is that it seems few support techs where Interchange is offered with CPanel will offer support for Interchange..,

It took me three months to build a cart for a client who sells about 2,000 products. The documentation is almost 700 pages long. There are three sites on the web where support can be obtained by 1) a developer group's mailing list, 2) a forum much like WHT, and 3) Redhat's Interchange support documents.

If you have the patience, Interchange is hard to beat. OS Commerce has a rep for being a system resource hog, although I've never used it myself, so I can only report what I've heard from those who have.

[edited] oscommerce does NOT have a rep for being a system resource hog. It was Commerce.cgi I was thinking of. oscommerce looks like an excellent choice. Although not yet as powerful as Interchange, it looks like it will be developing with as much success over the long haul.

Good luck...

What I am hearing is that free shopping carts can be great. So why do people pay for other shopping carts? I am sure they offer a certain amount of tech support and other goodies. I am still lost in a sea of shopping carts. How to make a decision.

Thank you to everyone who responded.:)

we dont care for either interchange or agora, infact we dont even list that we offer a free shopping cart.

when you tell a client here is a piece of advertised software and by the way we dont support it they get miffed, makes you look bad.

if they are poking around in cpanel and use it and we did not tout it, then our conscience is clear telling them they are on their own.

in the end shopping carts are a tech support nightmare we prefer to outsource.


miami_g

All of a sudden, OSCommerce has just become so popular with our clients. Some of our clients are doing wonderful things with this application. One guy even posted an installation tutorial on our forum for the benefit of everyone else.

This is one of the best free scripts I've yet to come across. Very large thumbs up. :)

PhpShop also looks promising. http://www.phpshop.org

You said it right : "promising" :D

Originally posted by NexDog
...One guy even posted an installation tutorial on our forum for the benefit of everyone else...

Any way you can provide the link to that tutorial? I have downloaded OSCommerce and plan on using it for myself and others but after looking at the documentation a couple of times, I was quickly lost. If the tutorial that the person you mentioned provided is easy to follow, I would surely love to try it out.

Thanks,

Sure Mark, here you go:

http://www.hostnexus.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=1219&pagenumber=3

Feel free to register and ask questions. They are a great group of people!

Oscommerce and interchange great shopping cart.And these shopping carts more secure.Specially interchange, becouse this frequently upgraded.
:)

definetly oscommerce. i've tested out just about every free cart out there and this one wins hands down. It's like running my own "amazon" type store. plus, there are a lot of module plugin type things that many people contribute and help expand the cart. the only thing I can thing of that would be against it, if you don't know php might be hard for you to customize the look of it.

anyways, try it out.

Originally posted by esdjco
PhpShop also looks promising. http://www.phpshop.org

I really wanted to try OSCommerce from all the good things I heard about it but after a few hours of trying to install it and fighting through error after error I felt stupified enough from it that I gave up and decided not to use it, and I also gave Agora a run from a control panel install and didn't like it. IMHO phpshop was the easiest to work with and customize- although it doesn't seem to have as many bells and whistles as the bigger free carts, it is easy enough to follow the code to modify it and create a nice application from it. I use it exclusively now because I am so familiar with it that I can really freek it to create almost whatever I want from it.
It's quick too-