which shopping carts do you recommend to use?

oscommerce?

Oscommerce is nice but so is magento and virtuemart. There is also CREloaded wtich is a branch of oscommerce with a nicer template system.

Magento is far the best ecommerce application out there. Although has a steep learning curve.

What sort of circumstance do you want it for?
A huge shop, a few items, store a few details in the cart, store a load of details in the cart?

A shopping cart can be achieved with a $_SESSION array.

oscommerce all the way.

the Magento is still raw to use, as it still use quite a lot of server resources and overloaded with unnecessary modules.

just a normal clothing shop with 100 items+ linked to paypal and worldpay.

just a normal clothing shop with 100 items+ linked to paypal and worldpay.

With that number of items you will be better off working with something like OSCommerce, Magento, or Virtuemart.

I recommend the following shopping carts:-

Magento Commerce (Open Source / Free)
PrestaShop (Open Source / Free)
Interspire Shopping Cart (Paid)

What do you guys think of X-cart and CubeCart?

Keep in mind that VISA will only allow PCI-DSS approved carts in '10. Open source carts will struggle in this as they are communuity driven.

Take a look at MIVA Merchant or Pinnacle cart - I believe they are both certified.

I should have been a little more clear.

Do you want the cart to also be a shop where you can enter and edit items prices, promotions, etc? If yes then people have recommended some mainstream and decent carts already.

The last site I did already had the prices and items stored in the database. So made a simple cart with PHP $_SESSION, rather than use third party shopping cart software, which can often be bloated as you generally don't use all the functions they provide.
Using osCommerce for simple requirements like this would have added HUGE amounts of unneeded code and functionality to this website.

If you ALREADY store your items and prices in a database, you might want to consider making your own, depending on your coding experience of course.

So the session array would give you options such as:
$_SESSION['cart']['item'] ['item'] is an array that is added to using a PHP file when a visitor clicks "add to cart"
My "add to cart" PHP file gets the $_POST data from what they clicked on ($_GET can be used), runs through security checks (is get/post empty, does it resemble something I expect with regex etc), adds any items the visitor selected to the session, then redirects them to the basket.
The basket then loops the session array if set
(if not set it echoes "You have no items", but I have a bit more complex checking than a simple isset(), such as incrementing a var to each item successfully echoed from the loop, if after the loop the incremented var is still 0 then there were no items listed, etc)

Your basic cart session would have this
['item']['name']="item A";
['item']['quantity']="2";
['item']['price']="20.00";
['item']['delivery']="5.00";
etcThen for each "item" the visitor has in their cart there would be an array in the ['item'] array with the array key as the name of your item.

You can also add other arrays to the main session is you wish/need. Perhaps your delivery is one set fee and not per item
Such as:

$_SESSION['cart']['delivery']

['delivery']['total']="10.00";

I found it to be easier than using a full third part cart for the circumstances I had. Also, doing it this way, I had full control over how the cart worked and what variables I could set for the Paypal button vars. I also found it easier this way to store users details in the database, rather than trying to figure out how a third party solution did it all.

It's just an option, and maybe you don't have the coding experience, although there are learning curves for commercial third party carts as well.

I recommend the following shopping carts:-

Magento Commerce (Open Source / Free)
PrestaShop (Open Source / Free)
Interspire Shopping Cart (Paid)

I would not particulartly recommend any of those - and have tried them all plus a few more.

Magento - on the surface - has all the neat features. Getting them to work unless you are a programmer is another story.

Prestashop is probably better than most open-source carts, but still lacks quite a few features - when I tried it a few weeks ago for example, there was no way to export products to an excel or XML file.

Interspire - well, let's just say that we lost a lot of money on that one and finally gave up.

It is unfortunate, but there seems to be a real shortage of carts in the under $10K range that I would really consider good - especially on the backend part.

We would like to suggest oscommerce becos its a simple and have lots of features..Community Add-Ons

and easy to change templates as you wish you just need to change 3 php files

header.php, footer.php, stylesheet.css

if you have simple knowledge of html its easy..

Well, I'd suggest you virtuemart, loads of features and easily customizable though TPL files. :)

I've been trying out CubeCart on the 30 day trial, and I really like it. A friend has it running on a store with nearly 100,000 items and with some minor MySQL optimizations it hums along just fine.

I don't mind the back-end, but there is no option out of the box to duplicate an existing product, which is the sole feature I miss from Magento. I might try my hand at modding it in, though I suspect there's probably already a mod out there for that purpose.

I personally think Magento sucks, it's slow and it's like pulling teeth to get it to do half the stuff you'd expect it to do straight from the box. I think they put way too much effort into making it pretty, rather than making it work.

which shopping carts do you recommend to use?

oscommerce?

Hi,

I personally prefer magento shopping cart because it offers complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of an Online Store.

I have been considering 1shoppingcart but have heard some bad things about it, anyone have any feedback on it?

Which shopping cart you are useing?

We use oscommerce for all our clients - it is no perfect, but it does the work.

Magento - Free
Shopify - Paid.

The above are two that I recommend.

I really enjoy Zen-Cart(zencart.com) Its free, I believe it was based on OC. Been around for awhile and the support forums are very helpful. It also has a lot of hacks for it.

So made a simple cart with PHP $_SESSION, rather than use third party shopping cart software...


Thank you for mentioning that, Greg. I have a single software product with fewer than ten packages for varying quantities of licenses. I was considering ZenCart but I'll probably just roll my own.

Charles

what cart is the best for NON-Programmers?