Need advice on a shopping cart

My current store is running on oscommerce and it is extrememly modified. It is the old version 2004 and would like to upgrade to something more up to date. I was looking at upgrading it to the latest cre loaded version but the seo contribution I have installed is different from the one that cre loaded uses and therefore I would lose all my seo effort.
Since I will be losing all the seo anyways I started looking at other carts such as magento, cubecart, cs-cart and so on. I'm stuck on deciding which way to go. I could alternatly also upgrade to version 6.2 of cre and install the old oscommerce contribution and I wouldn't lose my links but that in the future if I ever want to upgrade again I will be faced with the same issues.

I've been in a similar situation as yourself, but instead of using OSC I went originally with CRELoaded. There have been some bugs in CRELoaded 6.2 and when I betatested 6.3 these bugs still haden't been fixed. So I decided to find a new cart before my store is too big. (I really would like to avoid transfering 2-3000 customers at a later moment.)
I tested several of the open source carts, but it seems to me these are bit too unfitting for me. Magento is too resource demanding, Zencart lack some features, etc.
The one that fitted me best was CS-cart, which I have been testing through the last 2 months. It seems to be perfect for my use, and I've decided to use it for my store.
Speaking of CRELoaded; some of the main reasons for me leaving CRE behind is the lack of bug fixing, the new license (I bought the 6.2, and when they launched 6.3 they changed it and I now have to pay 180$ for updates,) and the customer service. I don't want to be with a company that delete any critical posts about CRELoaded in the forum.





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A bit too Mac-crazy

I have been using cart32 for about 10 years with great success. It's windows based though which is always a drawback for hosting but it's inexpensive, simple or sophisticated depending on how you want to set it up, and it works.

There are lots of shopping carts in Google. When you choose one, be sure it has Search engine optimized product catalog, Full back office, secure check out and Google Checkout.





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Fastcommerce shopping cart

well upgrade your old osc to new version, that way you will not lose your current configuration too and it will be easy as well rather then install new creloaded or any other shopping cart and then moving configuration to it

You don't have to lose any of your SEO links, just add a redirect from old link to new link in your .htaccess file

have you tried ubercart? I have gheard great reviews and is open source. Also good reviews for presta and cubecart. Haven't personal experience though, just suggestions

I decided on Magento because of the feature set. Really, if the fact that it requires more resources than the rest is what is holding you back you might want to look for a host which can allow you to grow more.
It should work okay in a shared environment with a reasonable number of people online.

I have been using CS-Cart for about a year now, before that I used every open source free cart out there and it seems that none of them fit for me , I decided on CS-Cart for all the features it offers and the price. It is a total e-commerce solution out of the box. The new version which was re-written completely is in beta testing right now and should go stable very soon with a lot more new features coming.
I hope this helps

We did an extensive research on comparing our custom cart, OSC, Zen Cart, X-Cart and Magento (missed out CS-Cart for some reason).
Zen Cart has been easier to tweak when compared to Magento, but Magento's powerful extensible functionality helped us decide on Magento as our primary choice.
Let me study on CS-Cart and provide updates shortly.





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dingloo very kind of you to post your experience. I am also interested in adapted some e-shop and I will be looking forward for your comments. If you know anything about ubercart, please post as I am really interested in it.
Thank you

My business partner designed his own shopping cart and the basic one is free for users, we have had some people already use it and it works fine, of course there are ones that have more bells and whistles on the backend but that costs money but the free one is perfect for anyone who can install it themselves and change the payment url. I can not self promote the site so you would have to email me so I can send you the URL. I am sure there is other free ones out there but I am just saying we got one that is free as well and it works well and is all self explanatory for anyone who is new and has little experience with programming. Free is good as Bert would say.





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Rollguyhttp://www.paymentmerchant.comhttp://www.freebert.com






Last edited by Rollguy : 01-11-2009 at 11:36 PM.

Magento is resource demanding but it is good one, give it a try hopefully you'll like it.
Good Luck.