This is a simple pros and cons articles on the more popular mysql/php ecommerce platforms. Since our company leans more towards the open source platforms, we will not be discussing any of the carts that have a monthly fee or ‘pay per use’ set up
All of the carts below come with the basics of what a cart should have, customer management, product management, payment and shipping modules, emails, ssl abililty, now in saying this, there are also many differences between the carts.
One good thing between all these carts is, you can purchase usermanuals for most of them at http://oscommercemanuals.com
Lets take a look.
Oscommerce
Oscommerce is the platform that most used open source carts were built from, such as creloaded and zen cart.
This is a great cart for beginners and very simple to use IMHO.
osCommerce is a free, community supported shopping cart that comes will well over 1000 contributions you can install (FOR FREE) to add additional features to your cart. Out of the box it does not come with a whole bunch of bells and whistles, but don't let that detour you, it is a great application that has the additions needed to get your ecom site where you dreamed it would be.
This is one of my personal favourites to work with, along side is creloaded.
PROS
- Endless amount of contributions and modifications that are free to use and for the most part, easy to install
- Recent security update brings it up to date with MySQL 5 and PHP 5.
- Has a great contributions called STS that allows those who are ignorant when it comes to designing in php; to design and html static page and use calling codes to pull in the features you are wishing to use from the cart
- No licensing fees
-Stable
CONS
- Customizing the template can be a bit tricky, but with the help of a trusted developer or the STS contribution you can get the look you are after
Zen Cart
Zen Cart has a pretty good size of features which are based on osCommerce. Don't get mislead though, although zen cart has been based off of the osCommerce platform and works in many of the same ways, it is just not as user friendly as osc. I could not in good faith ever suggest zen cart for the first time user.
Even though it is similar to osc, you cannot use the osCommerce community contributed contributions right out of the box for zen cart, they need to be edited and reformatted in order to work on the zen cart system.
Some of the nice features in the vanilla zen cart are the product attributes managers, template system, html editor, built in coupon code system, ability to select what credit cards you accept, and more.
PROS
- No licensing fees
- Stable
- Many contributions from Oscommerce already reformatted and installed
CONS
- cannot use Oscommerce contributions out of the box
- Admin interface can be a little confusing for the newbee from the additional mods that have been installed
CRE Loaded ( My #1 Choice of GPL eCommerce applications)
CRE Loaded is pretty much the big brother of osCommerce. It is based and pretty much cloned from the osCommerce platform but has many, many contributions already installed into the system.
Some of my favourite contributions that are preinstalled are Easy Populate which lets add/edit and remove categories and products via and exl sheet that you can upload via the admin, coupon codes, and an affiliate manager.
CRE Loaded comes already set up with a templating contribution from osc called BTS, which makes it easier to integrate a custom design into your cart along with control over which info boxes show and whether they show in the left or right column.
PROS
- Great community support
- Stable
- Some of the best and more widely requested contributions already installed
- ability to add osCommerce contributions without having to reformat the mod in order to get it to work, unlike zen cart
- Creloaded has a few different versions to offer up to use needy folk. They provide a free version, a pro version and last but not least, their B2B version
CONS
- Contributions from Oscommerce.com can be a little trickier to install because of the templating system and preinstalled mods that already exist in creloaded.
- The admin section can be a little overwhelming for new comers, because there is so much to offer in the cre admin, it takes some time to get used to and well practiced with all of the contributions that have been installed
OSC Max
OSC Max is yet another version of osCommerce that separates itself in the simplistic way of having preinstalled osCommerce contributions, such as the creloaded does, just not as many!
PROS
- No licensing fees
- The contributions installed are very useful
- Has wholesale/Reseller pricing module already installed
- Well-documented
CONS
- Still a few bugs to squish, but, overall is still a good cart
X-Cart is another php/mysql shopping cart, but with a licensing fee of $800 we wont bother taking the time to discuss this. You are better off going with an open source app like one of the ones mentioned above and paying to have it customized to suit your needs
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