New shopping cart. Opinions?

[kebechet]

I know a lot of you lads and ladies out there are well-versed in e-commerce. I'm not familiar with any of the shopping cart systems that we can use with AuthorizeNet, so I'm asking for opinions / reviews / comments before I have to shell out cash for this.

 

Compatible Carts

 

The quicker I can get this set up, the sooner the update will happen. =P

[supasonicsage]

the only one I have used Beth, is Miva Merchant. It comes with the web host I use. I can say that I can't code, script or any of that, and I found miva merchant to be pretty easy to use.

 

And it seems pretty stable. The sewing machine site that I run uses it and they have about 20 to 30 orders a day.

[supasonicsage]

Oh, and I forgot. You set it up a lot like CCnow, in that you have a standard button that you plug a code for the product into the code of the link.

[Ina Garten Davita]

I'm not really qualified in this sort of thing, but I have done an amazing amount of online shopping since 1998. I went to all the sites to have a look and I found the cf_ezcart quite easy to use and had a good look to it. Everything was easy to read. Also Cart Manager was really nice and easy to understand. I didn't care for eCompal.

[lorajc]

I don't have experience with this other than shopping and I remember cart manager. Never had any problems with it.

[TygherRayn]

I went ahead and had a look at the ones listed, and while I don't know about ease of use, I do a lot of shopping online, and I can at least say what looks good, right?

 

Freedom Networking Solutions, the one that was shown as a 'working shop' was very nicely laid out. And they seem to have a good range of features.

 

Cf_EZcart also looks pretty good, from the sample sotrefront, and has some pretty good features itself. I like the 'Web Bucks' option .. though, it certainly wouldn't be needed with BPAL to encourage repeat buying! I did hear a rumor that Gift Certificates were a planned thing, and this one has an 'online gift certificate' option which would be good.

 

Veracart looked pretty good too, features-wise. I like the idea that it can be blended with an existing site ... it's nice to not have the shopping cart look different than the site .. especially since BPAL's site is so dreamy! I wasn't overly impressed with their demo sites, though.

 

Cart Manager was good too. I like that it allowes for an emailed customer receipt too. And the existing stores using it were very nicely laid out. This is probably one of the best of them all, in my uneducated opinion.

 

 

Okay .. there's an awful lot of these. But these are the ones I like so far.

[ipb]

regardless of the cart used, the user interface can probably be .. massaged .. if it's something that beth hosts. and depending on how well it's coded, there can be features added if they are lacking (like purchasing gift certificates)

 

ditto for the tools to add/edit things.

 

btw, beth, if any of them use a database backend (i haven't looked yet, but i imagine most of them do), i can export the search engine tables to ease the pain of setting it up.

[Lyn Never]

I've installed osCommerce several times for freelance jobs (and just recently for myself to see what had changed since the last time I did anything with it) and really like it. It's got a good solid database structure in case you want/need to customize things, some decent basic reporting, pretty easy to manage catalog (although it looks like the initial inventory set-up is extremely manual; I could be wrong, I haven't looked very hard yet).

 

Poking around, it looks like the Authorize.net integration is pretty painless, and there's PayPal integration also. It's pretty much plug-and-play so long as you already have your account set up.

 

osCommerce is open source, too, so there's always someone somewhere coming up with add-ons like gift certificates, etc.

 

Feel free to pretend shop (it's not hooked up to any actual payment providers, so "buy" all you want) at http://spackletsunami.com/teststore/catalog/ , and I'd be happy to give a couple of people admin access to the catalog if you want to poke around there as well. (I also promise I won't sell any email addresses used to register or whatever.) What you see there is pretty much what it looks like out of the box with no customization or style sheet wrangling. That took me about 15 minutes and not a ton of technical know-how to install - it's a really spiffy package, and it's come a long way from a couple of years ago.

 

Feel free to use the "contact us" form or email me via the address in my profile if you've got any questions or would like to poke around in the admin part.

[Sarah]

osCommerce is free and there's an active support forum for it. Since it's an open-source product, any one of us more technical-minded can download it and play around with it. I'm downloading it now and I'll try to mess around with it and see if I can get it looking like the Lab's site, although I probably won't get around to working with it until the beginning of June since shriekingviolet is visiting me this week. I'll keep you updated on that

[Astarte]

Just adding my vote for OSCommerce. It looks quite good, and next time I get an ecommerce site to do like that from work I'll definitely use it.

 

Its definitely worth taking a look at.

[Sarah]

Played around with osCommerce today and it was very easy to set up. Right now I'm just adding things and seeing if I can get it to look like the Lab. There's a section in the admin panel where you can add modules for payment processors, and there's Authorizenet and PayPal. I can't play with those, since I don't have a secure certificate, but I'll play with it some more when I have the time.

[kebechet]

Thanks for the help, guys. =) I'd love to use osCommerce, but I'm not well versed in it, and I need to make sure that whatever cart we use will allow me to keep the design of the web site 99% of what it is now. I don't want to use any one else's templates or anything like that... I'm happy with how I designed the site, and I don't really want to change it at all.