Cart solution shortlist

Discussion by existing Interspire Cart customers regarding potential alternatives.
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MrCroquet
Posts: 35
Joined: Fri Oct 30, 2009 3:35 am

Cart solution shortlist

Post by MrCroquet »

4 years of ISC with the last 2 thinking a switch is in order. I've been browsing the possible solutions and have come to a short list. My main criteria for making the shortlist were:
1) Purchased solution (no monthly rentals)
2) All or most of ISC's feature list (the functioning ones)
3) An Option (variant) system that doesn't require pricing on each variant of each product (a single ISC product variant required pricing of each of 600+ variants)
4) Mobile browsing

After that, some extra bells & whistles would be nice. After all, as software develops, one should expect more from it. A few nice touches include image viewing options, gift registry, product configurator (for building croquet sets from individual items), newsletter generation

My current shortlist includes -
Checking out currently - CS Cart, EarlyImpact ProductCart, Pinnacle Cart,
Yet to review - Lemonstand, PDShop, nopCommerce (free), Sunshop, ShopFactory
Miss any?

Any comments for/against on any of the above would be greatly appreciated by me and probably other disgruntled ISC owners.
kurt
Posts: 147
Joined: Fri Jul 02, 2010 5:09 am

Re: Cart solution shortlist

Post by kurt »

I've also been thinking about switching carts for a couple years. I would shorten your list to Lemonstand, CS-Cart, and Magento. Lemonstand looks promising but it's very new so I am giving it time to mature.

I ended up biting the bullet and went with bigcommerce. Mostly the problem I have with the above carts is lack of good templates because I'm not great at design. Switching to BC, I was able to keep my template so my store looks the same. I actually pay less per month now because I don't have my VPS hosting account. Still there is some crap to deal with:

1. Can't remove "Powered by bigcommerce" from the mobile template.
2. Can't import product reviews
3. can't import customer orders
4. there are no backup features. I tried exporting products, made some changes then imported them and all my variations were screwed up. Contacted BC to restore and they said "we have no backups".
DBMAN
Posts: 56
Joined: Sat Dec 25, 2010 1:18 am

Re: Cart solution shortlist

Post by DBMAN »

MrCroquet wrote:
My current shortlist includes -
Checking out currently - CS Cart, EarlyImpact ProductCart, Pinnacle Cart,
Yet to review - Lemonstand, PDShop, nopCommerce (free), Sunshop, ShopFactory
Miss any?

Any comments for/against on any of the above would be greatly appreciated by me and probably other disgruntled ISC owners.
I've tested/used many on your list and I think given some of those made it that Presatshop is worth a peek. Open source, early goings but pretty well developed and no huge bugs that I've run into. I think it meets most if not all of your criteria (most packages probably wont hit everything someone wants :( ). Given where they are in development (1.5) I look forward to the future and the Forums there are highly active with some real brains clearly interested in pushing the project.

CS Cart left me cold once I worked with, and choose for this particular project, Prestashop. Prestashop just looked like more thought had gone into design and function. Lemonstand was another one that didn't impress me.

Haven't tried about half you noted but might have eliminated them as I was pruning the list some time ago.

Presta has been stress tested with a lot of products according to postings I've read but obviously your mileage may vary.

Now granted you do have to on occasion get your hands dirty at the code level but I would still not consider myself an expert by any stretch (might be approaching a :geek: but far from a :ugeek: ) and with the help available I've been able to do anything I wanted to do.

I have always tended towards the open source solution all things being equal and I think in this case they are very competitive. I should note that there are many modules that you do have to pay for but the bulk are included and most sites can run without cost unless you really want super bells and whistles (and even then sometimes, check the forums).

Oh yeah, and lots of free templates already in place and many of them even have slideshows on the home page which I rarely see in many other packages.

Interested on the take of others on Presta, could just be me? If/when I have to move from Interspire I will look to Presta though I hope I can avoid yet another transition for a while :x .
Tony Barnes
Posts: 744
Joined: Thu Jun 18, 2009 8:59 am

Re: Cart solution shortlist

Post by Tony Barnes »

Check out Opencart - good open source software with a decent community. The VQMod system is ace, very clever, makes keeping on top of code changes a snap, as you can simply generate XML files to do core file code changes on the fly, with no apparent speed implications.

Prestashop is ok, but very ugly and massively illogical. It's French origin, and there are some weird language gaps that make it a PITA to use IME. If you can get past that, and get used to the insanely random backend, then it is a very powerful cart.
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