Anyone have experience with Interspire Shopping Cart? I have have been looking at this and have so far found the support to be great and the software to be intuitive and feature rich. Not sure how easy it will be to skin yet.
lland - I haven’t used Interspire, but based on some research I was doing for a client it would be my choice. I don’t mind paying for peace of mind and being able to hold somebody accountable if things get tricky.
The Interspire screenshots of the various skins all look the same. It’d be nice to have something more unique-looking. Shopify has less template-looking designs if you’re going to pay. I guess you have to give and take when it comes to shopping cart solution features.
What about E-Junkie.com or FatFreeCart.com?
Both hosted solutions and have a good reputation 
(of course I work with them, so if you’re concerned about my bias just do a google search) 
I would use zencart and os commerce the most …haven’t use magneto but I am so comfortable with zencart and oscommerce that wouldn’t use any other script
Jonathan, it looks like you were asking about free solutions. I was looking at free solutions first, but decided to give Avactis a shot because of their developer discount. You can pass the license cost on to your clients. Are you a programmer or a designer? Would you be comfortable working with backend code, or do you want something easy to implement?
I think after this thread that I’m going to stick with Avactis for my project. I don’t like that users who have JavaScript turned off won’t be able to check out. I have too many customers who are older, and I don’t want anything to confuse them or turn them away. I think a working site is worth the $100 license (for developers). Thanks!
If you’re on Avactis already, I wouldn’t bother going to anything else. Given Magento’s development pace I am tempted to say that small growing shops will do well with choosing Magento. That way they can grow with the product and have one of the best solutions in the long run once it gets past this initial stage. But of course, that is speculating quite a lot that all the issues will be fixed (which they may not), so I would never actually recommend that to someone.
As of the current Magento release, more products == [URL=“http://www.magentocommerce.com/group/blog/action/viewpost/384/group/168/”]exponentially slower performance, especially while searching the product catalog.
Unfortunately, I can’t really say that I would recommend any of the software packages listed. I would love to recommend Magento, but I just can’t right now given the stated concerns/problems. Perhaps Zen-Cart, but it’s not very user friendly, especially for end-users that are not tech savvy. I have never used Avactis, but I have heard really good things about it. Also, if the OP wanted free cart solutions, he/she would not have listed Miva, so I think paid solutions are OK suggestions here.
Thanks for all of your input and advice on Magento! I appreciate hearing an honest response rather than from people who are completely frustrated or jumping on the bandwagon.
I checked magento …not bad huh…
very good featurs and easily customisable…I will try to use it next time
With little bit of effort, zencart will be a good soultion for e-commerce and cms. You can do almost everything with zencart and free add-on developed by active community members.
This is site I build with zencart, please feel free to take a quick look
kinglock.com
Or if you are willing to pay 200-300 bucks, I recommend cs-cart
magento is still premature, better wait for version 1.3 (currently v1.1) and above
cheers
i would suggest you to look into the systems a bit deeper.
osc has a problem when it comes to updates.
all the modifications you do are hacked into the core.
an update will reset all the mods you did.
i don’t know zen cart too well, but i guess it will be the same.
compared to that magento is a whole new generation.
but it’s new.
if you don’t plan to rent a server, you still have performance issues.
best bet for magento is to get grid hosting with media temple, as they offer one click install ad they have good performance. their package is around 20 US$, read the small print if it will be enough for you, upgrades are quite costly.
easy install is worth a lot, because installation of magento can still be a real pain. i just tried to install magento on godaddy linux hosting. i didn’t get it running. it might be possible, but for now i will wait for newer versions.
so if you have some time, wait a bit and see what magento is able to improve. that would be my best advice.
Having used many carts for my customers (starting with ait2000.com years ago), then working with oscommerce from the time it was called the exchange project. I’ve looked at zen-cart, and used miva a lot. I can’t stand miva. It’s expensive and has very little support. (I had a way to get discounted licenses, but their retail price is bad). Though Magento does have issues, I have decided to put my faith in Magento for a number of reasons. Miva is hard to modify (the hardest). OsCommerce has died, they are more concerned about fighting than getting anything done. It’s been over 3 years that 3.0 is coming. Zen is just a knock-off of osCommerce and has no future without osCommerce. Magento is backed by a commercial company who has an interest in keeping it new and fresh. I feel comfortable believing that these few items (yes performance is bad) will be addressed soon and I’d rather be able to upgrade a Magento store then have to upgrade from another to Magento.
I have heard that Magento is good choice.
This is all overwhelming. Let me ask the question a different way as I am intersted in carts for 2 sales sites.
If you have to rank your favorite 3 and give them like this
- Fav gets 3 pts
- 2nd Fav gets 2 pts
- 3rd Fav gets 1 pt.
What whould they be?
Time to chip in with my two cents from someone whose been looking for work purposes currently ‘sat on the fence’ but certainly has been browsing, downloading, installing configuring and trying out as much as poss.
dwdonline, interesting to hear your points there with regards to your thoughts on osc and zen. I’ve got magento, zen and osc installed on my VPS and I demo’d magento last week in work which seemed to go down very well.
5 immediate concerns I have on Magento are:
- No ability to alter the stock invoice other than add business logo and address.
- No virtual product support yet (I hear it’s in the roadmap so possibly arriving in v1.1?)
- Templating system from a web designer’s point of view. Trouble were faced with is we are a million miles away from seeing a photoshop mock of what we’d like our shop to look like and actually seeing anything like that within a Magento store.
- Default v1.0 PSP & Delivery options seemed more U.S focused?
- Maybe scrapping the barrel but probably the same as lots of people here, not established enough yet to be albe to tap into professional resources. Tried 1 UK based ‘so called’ Magneto Professional which didn’t even respond to my bloody email which is just poor in this day and age.
For now it seems that we are happy to try the Ebays and Amazons and perhaps not go along this route of the ‘big picture’…
little frustrated
Regards,
Rich.
Check out www.livecart.com
Its new and ajaxy
I have a grid server account and tried there one click install, Magento seemed really slow with them!
You just have to come to the realization that there will never be an out of box solution that is perfect for everyone.
I use x-cart on all my sites, have had a great deal of issues with it, but overall rate it a C+. The only reason I havn’t switched over is none of the newer solutions are that big of an improvement, just better packaging.
If you can afford it, get a custom cart coded with only features you need. Or find a decent platform of a cart, and a good tech who can mod the crap out of it.
One more! http://www.prestashop.com/ New open source that looks promising
I know I’m resurrecting a old thread here but anyone have a good recommendation for a shopping cart with a slick checkout process that will only feature 1 product and never any more than that?
Ive developed a few zencart’s before but don’t really like the upgrade process and it always seems your hacking the system to make it work more than fixing the system.
also i might add if one cart excels at being super easy to plop a custom design into that would be a major benefit!