Shopping Cart Community

Things seem dead here lately, hope this forum doesn't fade away. It's going to be needed more now then ever to get some into the future with their investment in Interspire until they can find the time/money/patience to switch over. As some of us know, switching carts is often a dreadful undertaking.

I thought I would weigh in with my recent experience developing (not switching) a Prestashop site. Seem lightweight I know but I suggest trying it out, it's free.

I had looked into Prestashop not that long ago and they didn't appear "ready" but they have come a long way and I have to say I'm impressed with the ease of use, features and relative wealth of free features.

Now I haven't stressed tested this and my current development is for a handful of categories and products but I've read that it was tested with something like 100,000 products and passed. For a small or medium site it is pretty snappy speed wise.

It has semi-friendly (adds a category number to products/categories) URLS out of the box and I think a module to make it clean to help move your products/categories over (provided you have them already set for friendly URLs).

Lots of stuff included and many free modules but the money to be made is for some paid modules but I think many sites can do without the bulk of them. My current, albeit simple, developments with Prestashop have all been done with base package and a couple of free modules and edits of my own (none of which are very complicated or technical......'cause I is stupid ).

Now I haven't jumped off current Interspire and hoping for a little longevity but at this point I think Prestashop is where I would look to first for a package switch at least for my own personal needs. Still, not looking forward to it . Provided I can figure out how to plug the security holes I've heard about I hope to be fine for a while with my 6.0.14.

Oh yeah, during these latest developments I actually looked at all of the mentioned packages and maybe it was just an initial impression but Prestashop stood out to me and especiallys for an open source package (sorry Zencart, loved you at one point).

Hi there,

Have you seen new PrestaShop 1.5? They made dozens of upgrades and finally added multi-store option.
Unfortunately the version is still not that stable as people would like, but they are working on it. I can suggest that with some minor version upgrades and bug fixes this shopping cart may become a true alternative for Magento. Even though they still have a lot of work to do.
You mentioned that you are still using Interspire. Are they still working? I read at their blog that the cart is discontinued and all company's efforts were aimed at BigCommerce. So, I am wondering how many people are still using Interspire shopping cart.

ISC is now completely unsupported. No security fixes, no new features.

Security vulnerabilities are now being found in many eCommerce systems and need to be continually plugged. Interfaces with payment gateways need to be kept current as does any interface with a third-party.

ISC was falling behind with breaking technology at its peak. Now it is becoming a relic...

babyREFLUX wrote:ISC is now completely unsupported. No security fixes...

For all practical purposes, yes. But what about the ones who renewed their support for one final year... are they actually getting what they paid for?