Last time I checked, CubeCart, X-Cart, and Z-Cart seemed to be the consensus as being in the top 3 or 5 carts.
We’ve got a project for a mid-tier enterprise (halfway between a Mom&Pop and an Amazon.com). We don’t feel we need to reinvent the wheel as for as the Shopping Cart engine. We want something very robust though, very reliable (bug free and hacker tested), and most importantly something we can easily modify the PHP code. We did some playing around with X-cart and found it to be a very robust app but the coding is borderline spaghetti code - unnecessarily complex and overly segmented. We did like the utility the provide to compare updates line by line so you can merge updated into modified versions of their code but ofcourse you could use a comparison program like that on any source code for any cart.
We never got around to really digging into the code of ZenCart or CubeCart. On the surface though they seemed to be maybe a little too basic compared to X-Cart? I know Avactis seems to be mentioned a lot more recently but I’m not sure what their policy is on modifications is or even how easy they are?
If someone that has really taken a hard look at the latest greatest PHP carts could help me narrow it down so we don’t have to evaluate 10 different apps and just give 2 or 3 a serious look I’d greatly appreciate it. I think we’d raise an eyebrow at costs over $1,000 for a PHP app, but wouldn’t rule it out if it met our requirements.
When I talk about robust, I’m talking about things like Wish Lists, Ratings/Reviews, Gift Registries, multiple coupon/discount types, seamless PayPal integration, PCI compliant, ship items to multiple addresses, etc. I realize most apps won’t have every single thing we want but the more the better obviously.
Problem the single most important thing might just be good code documentation (either separate doc or decent commenting) and decent support (both from the vendor and via a network of developers using the same product). This is where X-cart seems to shine, not the documentation, but the support. I know OSCommerce has a huge developer community too. We don’t want buggy code and/or obscure vendors. We’re not looking for some $99 solution like a lot of people are.