OSCommerce vs. CRE Loaded vs. Zen Cart vs. others

Business
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There are a number of performance issues with Magento on the shared servers. It is not the solution for everyone.

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CRE Loaded is cost-effective feature-rich Open Source shopping cart software, CRE Loaded is similar to OScommerce yet some additional feature. It’s come with integrated CRE secure payment system. CRE Loaded come with 3 (Standard, Pro, B2B) versions that can be used for any Ecommerce website.

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i suggest osCommerce

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Hi, I have tried many, many shopping carts before and must say one:

I love CS-Cart, I moved to X-Cart 2 moths ago but have recently decided to go back to CS-Cart after much reviewing of another scripts.
Interspire SC was my second choice, and there are still a couple of features that I would love to see in CS Cart.

  1. (and I know this is a big mod) proper order management and partial shipping of orders/individual item shipping. This would then allow for proper back orders, part payment of orders, etc etc.

  2. The order process in the admin is excellent. Select customer or new customer or anon customer first, then on same page add products using ajax seach on SKU or description. Very clean process, very fast (important when you have a customer on the phone).

  3. Tracking numbers for all orders (haven’t found this yet in CS).

  4. Allow customer to buy product? Checkbox. When unticked, an option becomes available to display price or message to customer (useful as sometimes there are products available offline only but still want them in the store).

If you want to make a business then must have a little bit of money for begin. My experience with the all free open source carts is not the best. Sure they cost nothing, but if you need a help… Yes your help desk is the Google only. I have a few online business sites and my last (and must say the best) choice was CS Cart. It cost realy “nothing” and you get all features, the best support (the Interspire is a nightmare) and 1 year free upgrades, all what a online store need. I don’t buy my CS Cart licenses direct by the company, but from a reseller page webdesign-creative.com, they sell it for $217, the price on the CS Cart site is $265, and they have often a special price (it is a coupon code) and you get yet $20 off the price. But I don’t know if it’s actualy, must looking on the site or on Google for cs cart coupon code.
Yes guys, the TIME is money and if you want a free cart, then must spend 100+++ hours with setup, design, bugs, and, and, and…

I am very satisfied with my CS Cart and trust me, if you want to make a serious business and want many of customers and visitors, then you need a serious tools to do it.

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I think you’ll have to explain this part to me one more time. The logic behind this has puzzled me.

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I think you should try premiumwebcart its ideal for what you are looking for.

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It’s depends on your requirement, all shopping cart are made for special purpose. For small business website to huge ecommerce website. All have some advantage and disadvantage in specific scenario.

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@sandyboutique I know exactly what you mean with number #4. I’m about to install a cart for a client and they want some products to be “active” but have the ability to turn off the customers’ option to purchase them without changing the quantity or disabling the product.

I think I’m going to go with Zen Cart and sort it out myself as I haven’t found a module for it yet.

To answer the OP, I’ve had experience with OSC and Zen Cart and I prefer Zen Cart. To me, OSC is like Bizarro Superman - he looks like Superman, but is completely retarded. Zen Cart was created as an offshoot of OSC, and while OSC has more contributions, I’ve found that Zen Cart is easier to modify and has a more active core dev team.

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There are a few good shopping carts and wich one you should choose depends on your demands, skill level and how much work you want to put down yourself on setting it up.

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OSCommerce vs. CRE Loaded vs. Zen Cart vs. others

I am not going to comment on “others” but here is the deal.

CRE Loaded is basically osCommerce with 50+ contributions pre-installed, similar to osCMax. Lot of people call it LOADED osCommerce.

So the comparison comes down to what’s better:

osCommerce, loaded osCommerce or Zencart

osCommerce vs. loaded osCommerce is strictly a matter of requirements or desired admin features. The one thing that should be mentioned here is that the 1000s of contributions available for osCommerce are semi-compatible with CRE Loaded or osCMax, meaning that some may work by default, others may require additional code modification. Another thing that should be mentioned is the amount of language packs available for osCommerce. No other shopping cart solution offers as many “plug’n play” language packs as osCommerce does. Additional translation is required in order to port language packs over from osc to cre and I believe osCMax however.

I haven’t been following the Zencart development process much so I am not sure if any significant updates were done recently but the way it always used to be is that LOADED osCommerce versions (i.e. osCMax or CRE B2B 6.2 or higher) have all features that Zencart has + more and they are and the development process is more cost effective as the 1000s of pre-existing osCommerce contributions can be “recycled” when using loaded osCommerce.

Hope someone finds this info useful.

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I love zen cart everything is right out of the box, and adding additional addon is so easy
no coding needed