hi there,

i was looking at a few shopping carts and there's one thing that has confused me slightly.

Are shopping carts all 'site builders'? because i am very competent at making websites using html and css, and what i want is to simply add the shopping cart features to my website.

For example, I looked at oscommerce cart and it seems to me that you literally design the ENTIRE website through its interface? is this correct?
i looked at a few "live" sites and to be honest they all look the same and are pretty damn ugly!

and also, can anyone tell me what shopping cart firebox.com are using? i really like it.
thanks

hi there,

i was looking at a few shopping carts and there's one thing that has confused me slightly.

Are shopping carts all 'site builders'? because i am very competent at making websites using html and css, and what i want is to simply add the shopping cart features to my website.

For example, I looked at oscommerce cart and it seems to me that you literally design the ENTIRE website through its interface? is this correct?
i looked at a few "live" sites and to be honest they all look the same and are pretty damn ugly!

and also, can anyone tell me what shopping cart firebox.com are using? i really like it.
thanks

Some carts you can intergrate into your current design such as Paypal.

OsCommerce is a great cart because its open source there is lots of add on's just like Wordpress. OsCommerce is made up of coding and you can get templates online. The code can be edited so you can make it look however you like.

Pm me if your interested in testing out Oscommerce

hey there,
thanks for the quick response.
I've already installed wampserver and oscommerce and started playing around a little bit. But i'm wondering if i can make a website like firebox.com just using oscommerce?

I am very good with dreamweaver and find it so easy to use, and can definitely make the design of firebox.com from scratch in it, the problem arises when the whole product area comes in, i'm obviously not going to literally make every single page for each product, i'd need something that creates pages for each product using the design i did in dreamweaver.

Basically, i want something very similar to how firebox.com looks and works but with my products and branding

thanks for any help and advice you can give me!

Magento is recomended but it is a full CMS.

If you just want to insert some products into web pages then why not just use PayPal 'buy now' buttons.

Alternatively you could maybe sell products from ebay/amazon through their affiliate system that's fully automated.

Magento is recomended but it is a full CMS.

If you just want to insert some products into web pages then why not just use PayPal 'buy now' buttons.

Alternatively you could maybe sell products from ebay/amazon through their affiliate system that's fully automated.


Does CMS mean that it's like oscommerce in that you design "100%" of the website through its control panel?

I don't think i want to go through the ebay amazon route. I've sold on ebay in the past but want to have my own website.

Before i really dive into any of the shopping carts i just want to know if it is possible to create something ala firebox.com solely using their interface?

Yes CMS is mostly designed through their control panel but allows for as much customization as your capable of programming.

You can have your own website and 'incorporate' ebay/amazon affiliate links directly into your website (if you're accepted)

Honestly it sounds like building a custom shopping cart would be a big headache for you. Why don't you just give Magento a try?

Check these out
http://www.opencart.com/
http://www.prestashop.com/
http://www.cubecart.com/

I am partial to Open Cart, lightweight, feature rich, easy to work with templates. And features are growing all the time. Ample payment options, and more. Presta is still buggy, and Cube v3 is free, not v4.

I would look into Drupal/UberCart. A couple more releases from UberCart and it'll be a big player in the OS shopping cart market.

thanks for the info guys,

however i've just found out something kind of critical that might affect my decision as to what shopping cart to use..

OsCommerce is table based (the current full working version), and it's made me a bit sceptical now. Divs make design so easy and i don't know how good my website would be just using tables.

So my question is this:

What is the best open source shopping cart that can be designed with div tags? I think magento uses them? however as a starting business, paying a lot for hosting isn't feasible yet. Maybe in the future, but for now i don't think i can use magento because of it's system requirements.

thanks

@Thatboy22

Definitely look at opencart
http://www.opencart.com/

Thanks, i will look into opencart.

However, if i use something like opencart or zencart or whatever, do i HAVE to keep the "powered by opencart" at the bottom of the site? to me that seems unprofessional as a business, do you know anything about the subject? thanks

You can pretty much do whatever you want with it. The only ones that are free that you cant remove it is storesprite and cubecart.

On many ecomm apps you can use the links to a product within your site. The cart itself will be part of the ecomm app, but you can usually customize that and give it that consistent look. Most online stores have a different site for the ecommerce engine.

This way you can manage your business in a way that a paypal buy now button does not offer.

Thanks again all.

Mike i have a question for you - I was looking at prestashop and i'm really liking it so far, it seems exactly what i need, but you mention it's still buggy, what version did you use to say that? they released version 1.2 a week ago and some contributions i saw look extremely good (show shipping costs in cart, one page checkout is under development as well, etc) and the forum looks very busy and big. Opencart looks good aswell but the forum has about 1/10th of the amount of posts and people and i still haven't figured out if it can do everything i need, i need to do more research on it.

Either way, i'm going to test them both to see how good they are.

The only issue I had with Presta was tax calculations, since they are in France and I do stuff in the U.S. They had different formatting, etc. Definitely dig around their forums, they may have cleaned all that up in v1.2

The easiest thing to do is install it somewhere and play with it. Rather than playing with their demo, as other people are logged in and poking around changing things as well.

Thatboy22, you are correct that most shopping carts are used as site builders also, I mean you install the software and you get a site that is on-line store also. Then you can redesign the software to meet your needs and add as many static pages (with information about your company/products for example) as required. Sure, in most cases HTML/CSS knowledge is required to make the changes.

Or, as Collabora has mentioned, you can leave your site as it is and only integrate 'Add to Cart' buttons into your site, so customers will use only checkout part of ecommerce software. However i do not think that is the best way to make the integration.

As for powered by - these notes usually can be removed (unless you are going to rebrand the software).

OsCommerce is table based (the current full working version), and it's made me a bit sceptical now. Divs make design so easy and i don't know how good my website would be just using tables.


There is an error there. I don't know how it is with OSCommerce, but DIV tags can actually be used together with tables. Some shopping carts use this method to accommodate backend customization without having the user alter any CSS or HTML. You click options that you want to appear, insert your own images, etc. and the cart's programming generates the tables within the DIV tags. Altering the CSS styles (for a table-less design) in such a manner is possible, but it gets messy fast.

It sounds like you are going to be doing a lot of customization, in which case most programs will allow you to rewrite the HTML for a full-CSS design. Functionality of the shopping cart will depend on PHP and XML tags anyway. If you aren't going to do a full customization, then you really shouldn't be worrying about this.

I recommend the oscommerce as you can everything what you need.

Zen cart uses div. You can upload your own template and do it all that way opposed to using their site(for some pages you enter in the html on their site, but thats not for the template) I love zen cart and the community is active.

Try x-cart, you can customize it using css/html

My boss uses cartmanager and I just started using it, I like it.

oScommerce is good to use

If you need a CMS for your shopping cart, you can use Wordpress with wp-commerce plugin and themes for that.
Alternatively, Zencart and Avactics both served well on the content creations and e-commerce shopping cart management systems for you to handle all the products updates.

I would recommend OpenCart - Its very easy to get started and if required supports digital downloads like templates and music.
Its really simple to use and lightweight.

I am curious about 2 things. How many products are you uploading and are you taking SEO into consideration for your product pages?

i like zen-cart. I have had great luck with zen-cart sites. Very much similar to oscommerce. I bought a template from a template store and uploaded to the server, after installation, you simply change the default template in the admin section to the customer template and whapaha...It's all done and ready to go.

Most of these stores are .php driven that use SQL as database. So making configurations to the coding may take a little technical skills. However, I never heard of .php before i started my ecommerce store, Now i'm writing my own coding for custom addon's. My recommendations are: OSCommerce, Zen-Cart, CRE Loaded, Magneto, Drupal,