Which is the Best Shopping cart?

[komlink]

Hi Forum,

I keep seeing so many posts on shopping carts, there is a lot of talk but no clear confirmation as to which is the best shopping cart, irrespective of the price tag.

So I would like to request all of you out there to respond to this post and let us all know, which product you feel is the best for ecommerce and WHY?!

I look forward to hearing from you all.

Regards,
Aditya

[ShoreCon]

That is a great question that I recently was forced to seriously look into. I have found and installed two recently after a lot of research. These are the only two that I can say for certain are truly the best of breed without going over to an Windows Server.

1. Viart.com - This is a truly incredible system. It is and will continue to be my first choice from this point forward. Good support, but it can be delayed a bit with the time difference (but they have always been extremely responsive and even added features to the software at my request).

2. PinnacleCart.com - It has a truly exquisite management side with a lot of goodies. The only thing I don't really like about it is the checkout procedure. It is a little quirky. Good program and decent support but doesn't have nearly the feature set that Viart.com does.

DO NOT go with Miva.

Good luck.

[brentan0]

I don't think I'm authoritative enough to say what is the BEST cart, but it's hard not to like OSCommerce. Here are a few reasons.

It's free.

It's pretty easy to use, and well documented in forums and other support resources

Because it's open source, a number of plugins and additional capabilities are available that are also free

Because it's free, easy to use and well documented, it's easy to find developers who are familiar with it and can customize it to do what you want with a lot less developement time than if they were to start from scratch.

And, did I mention it's free?

[ChiefTutor]

I am in the web development business focused on search engine friendly websites and used a number of e-commerce solutions over the years. Since all of my clients are clients are small businesses, I quickly realized that an ASP(application service provider solution was the only cost effective solution for many if not all of them.)

The problem I found with these ASP solutions is that even though they claim to be search engine friendly, they are not. The only way to get them ranked was through domain name marketing(ie...link marketing). The structure of these sites held back the actual rankings of these sites in the search engines.

About 10 months ago, I read an article on this forum by a guy named Lee Roberts. He has spent years focused on ecommerce search engine friendly websites and everything he said made sense to me.

At the time I met him, we was just received a cease and desist from Apple computer about using the name apple pie shopping cart. This was a true search engine friendly shopping cart.

He then set forward on rebuilding an even better SEO friendly shopping cart under the brand name merchantmetrix.

I have been using this cart for all my clients. It is a great SEO product because it is built from the ground up from an SEO point of view.

I would take a look if you are really interested in SEO shopping carts. It doesn't yet have all the bells and whistles of a monster cart etc.... but even without doing any large scale domain makrketing, my clients are seeing results in the search engines and generating business via the search engine.

That has made me look good and generated more business than I can handle.

Good Luck and thanks for asking the question. I don't do a lot of posting, but in this case, I felt it was worth the time.

[malcolm]

I don't think I'm authoritative enough to say what is the BEST cart, but it's hard not to like OSCommerce. Here are a few reasons.

It's free.

You get what you pay for!

[timmathews.com]

I personally like candypress for the asp cart, and I like x-cart for the php applications.

[covingtonscustoms]

I build my own with flash and asp.

[timmathews.com]

Mr High and Mightey!
Send us a link to your cart then so we can all see it.

[fivetone]

The best carts are custom built. They do exactly what you need them to do, can easily be modified at will, and you own them free and clear without paying monthly charges.

[blueharvest]

We are using www.storesprite.com its a php shopping cart with on-line admin and supports all major payment processors.

[fred!head]

Like most of you, I've looked at a number of carts over the years. The "best" depends on your needs. Here's my experience for what it is worth.

In the past two years, I've found digiShop (http://digishop.sumeffect.com) has the best balance of features, price, and support for my small-ish clients. In addition, it's fairly easy to change and update the page design compared to osCommerce and zencart (in my experience, yours may vary).

In addition, I recently switched a client from zencart to digiShop and, in the process, we discovered that credit card numbers were not encrypted in the database. This seems like a rather obvious thing to check but be sure your testing looks at simple details like encryption. I've not had time to determine whether this is something the person who originally set my client up did or if it's a feature of zencart. I assume the former.

I also put another client into MonsterCommerce which has been a so-so experience. Good/great support, high price, sometimes quirky interface, good/great features, especially the ability to map options to different product IDs. That client wants a name brand ASP rather than the risk of hosting their own cart.

Finally, another client looked at PinnacleCart circa 2004 and while it looked great at that time the support was so-so and the features were good/great. I'm happy to see another poster on this thread speaks highly of them. I'll have to go back and test their product again.

Bottomline, collect as many cart names, URLs, and feature lists as you can then map the features, support quality, and other details to what your client needs today and in the next year. Don't assume free is best. But also don't assume paying through the nose means a better product and better support. And don't assume one cart will work for all clients.

In terms of search optimization, my preference is to create the catalog pages and product detail pages as static pages (either by hand or as static page output from a publishing tool) and use the cart only to process orders. I'm not 100% convinced querystring URLs and URL rewrites are as search friendly as static pages. And I find carts don't let me control absolutely every last detail of a page's underlying html that's useful for search engines.

Also, see if you can set up a trial account or find a demo site and let your client play with the carts that seem most appropriate. For the needs of my clients, as noted, digiShop has worked very well on all fronts (e.g. price, features, responsive support, customization) for the past year or two. Hopefully some of the above is useful detail.

Tim

[topboy]

definitly custom built carts, you can do so much more with them

[satorigirl]

Best is relative. What is best for one is not right for another.

I've used X-cart, ClickCartPro, Zen Cart, Miva, OS Commerce and Virtuemart (a Joomla adaptation of PHP Cart), as well as custom carts, and had modifications done on all the ones I've used, depending on what I needed.

IMHO, there is no *best* cart. What is best at the time depends on what you need, and what your customer needs.

I'll tell you what though, so far *none* that I've looked at (that cost less than thousands of dollars) has a decent drop-shipping function. Some will allow multiple drop ship vendors, some allow multiple ship-from locations, and some handle concatenating multiple shipping methods (since 3 different drop-ship vendors might use 3 different shipping methods), but not a single one will do it all.

[deirion]

I think the GoDaddy shopping cart works great and is very economical.

[Conficio]

I guess the reason, why you won't find an answer, is, there is no BEST for everything.

It all depends on what your needs are. What kind of shopping do you need? Do you need a simple shopping cart, with a few products available? Do you need integration into a particular CMS? Do you need a whole site builder? Do you need merchant account support? Do you need multi vendor portals? Do you sell downloadable products? Do you need a shopping cart that can customize products, such as size M, L, XL? Do you need international taxes? Do you need international shipping? do you need shipping wizards? Do you need integration in your shipping/billing/CRM system?

If you tell us what your needs are, we might be able to make better suggestions.

K<o>

[weslinda]

Of course, "best" is purely subjective. As many have mentioned, there are some free carts out there, but you do get what you pay for.

I've found good success with PinnacleCart myself. While some people have seen some ups and downs, the product has really come a long way, and over the next 6 months, this cart will do leaps and bounds in quality and features. I honestly have not seen a backend management side so easy to use for a client.

I have found their support to be quite helpful, and they are more than willing to work with people who want to develop for the cart. It's easy to do mods and updgrades with.

Only issue is that if a version changes, make sure that you client knows what mods you have completed and they do not try and upgrade.

THeir support has been very reliable over the last year since I've started working with them. Very timely, with an answer usually in hours, unless you send them an email Saturday evening, they are unlikely to get back to you till open of business on Monday.

Of course, it's all what you make of the cart, and that's the biggest piece.

http://www.passionspice.com is a site I did a while back with the PinnacleCart and while I would say it has a lot of work to be done to be improved from a site standpoint, the cart works well and they put through a few hundred orders a month without any hicups.

[ShoreCon]

I posted earlier about ViArt and Pinnacle Cart.

Frankly, regarding the OS software, it is just too problematic. OSCommerce is free, but has come a remarkably short way in the years since it was released. I do agree with the comment, "you get what you pay for."

While I cannot yet show you what can be done with ViArt.com at this point (and it will be better), this is a shop (not yet live, but will be in the next day or two) I just finished with Pinnacle Cart:

http://70.87.239.92/

I found the ASP and windows platform just too big a learning curve for me.

As for custom aps, come on! Be realistic. They are in most cases, simply unwarranted. With good, affordable shopping cart software (not free), you can almost always get really close to what you need and expect.

[weslinda]

IP Doesn't appear to work...very interested in seeing what you've done with Pinnacle.

[malcolm]

When Ampalian Jewellery was started over 3 years ago it was impossible to truly predict the level of success (or otherwise) that we'd experience so it was based on free OScommerce software. It's been hacked around an awful lot and the code is a real mess. Nevertheless Ampalian is page 1 on Google for most jewellery related terms and business is very good indeed.

Over a year ago the decision was made to re-develop Ampalian from the ground up with bespoke written software, coded by a highly talented programmer, backed by 3 years live trading experience in this fiercely competitive market. Ampalian is certainly a top 5 online jeweller and we are now just a few weeks away from having cleanly coded, intuitive software that we intend to make commercially available to other eTailers (but not competitors, sorry . We are not ecommerce theorists who are creating software that we think will work. We are eTailers creating software from live and ongoing ecommerce experience that we know works.

We will be continuously developing and improving as technology allows and there will be some key principles maintained as standard:
Code will validate to all standards
SEO built in from the ground up
Admin sales statistics as standard
Ability to operate with all payment gateways
Constant user exposure to product with buy now always available
Simple navigation with blistering speed for both browse and search
Fast product filters to drill down to what you're looking for at astonishing speed
I'll keep this thread up to date as we approach a launch date. I'm sure it'll be interesting.

[danners02]

We use www.cubecart.com - one of a few that has standards compliant HTML. Wth a fair bit of tweaking we got a decent result that ranks very well for its main keywords.
http://www.cribonline.co.uk
.. although this www.viart.com looks pretty good - will take a peak at it later.

[malcolm]

That's a great looking site.

[brucet]

There is no such thing as the 'best' shopping cart - it depends what your particular requirements are.

Some of the things to consider are:

- Specifically what features do you require - eg do you want personalised accounts for your customers?
- Do you just want to add a shopping cart to existing product pages, or do you need a complete store-building solution?
- Do you need a system that includes order-processing and reporting facilities?
- How will it perform with the search engines? Search Google for something like 'ecommerce software', and you will find the providers who know enough about search engines to make products that perform well out of the box.
- Do you want to completely customise your design? Or are you happy to choose from a selection of predefined layouts, and just change basic things like the colour scheme and images?
- What payment gateway do you intend to use? You will need to choose a shopping cart that integrates with it.
- Do you want a hosted system that runs everything from the server? (Generally you pay monthly, and you can manage the store from any location through a web browser; but the functionality is usually quite basic, all your data is held by a third party, it's hard to change provider and you lose everything if they go bust) Or do you want to hold all your data locally and upload to the internet? (Using desktop software that you pay for up-front and then own outright)

Your budget will almost certainly require you to make some compromises, but you shouldn't let the choice of technology itself constrain you - which it will, if you pick a cart first before speccing out what you want from it. Decide what you want, then look for the most reputable and best-value cart that provides it.

[thindenim]

I've been developing a shopping cart system over the last few years. PHP/MySQL, using the vLib templating system. I'm pretty sure I've got most of the features in that you would expect from an 'off the shelf' product, and obviously it's easy to add things in as I need them. All very search engine friendly.

I've not considered selling it commercially as yet, just used it to develop a number of my own e-commerce sites and sites for clients.

[iandoc]

ChiefTutor hit the nail on the head sometime back.
In my view, a lot of the points raised here are largely irrelevant compared to the one BIG issue - is it search engine friendly? Many carts are not and as such are a complete waste of time, money, and effort.
You can have all the bells-and-whistles you like, but if the engines cannot navigate efficiently around it then what is the point?

[jrdmra]

I cant say the best but I can tell you that I recently installed an e-commerce site for the first time after 3 years of doing SEO and website design.

Its called product cart www.earlyimpact.com

Customizable, in the sense that you can apply most any design to it and if you are familiar with HTML and how it works with ASP code you can fiurther customize the look of your site. A lot can be achieved without delving into the asp code but I found I needed to change some of the default looks to suit my personal artistic principles.

SEO friendly. My store has been live two weeks and I already have 15 products and categories indexed with no inbound links yet. The software builds google and on site maps automatically. All title, meta and anchor text is fully customizable. Each product is given its own page and the URLS although dynamically generated dont change as long as you keep the product in the same category.

User friendly. The back end and in stall process can be done very easily. The basic template the product comes with can be quickly customized and you can have a store running in about a days worth of work. Tech support is great with a two or three hour response time. They have a very informative website packed with info and demos/examples of their product. You can actually call them and talk to the OWNER of the company to order. I personally like that They dont hide behind a computer.

The software is your own. You buy the license one time. No monthly fee. No tech support fee, you use your own hosting and certificates.

Downside for a start up is the price. It's $625 though you can get reseller rates for selling two or more versions. Plus non essential upgrades cost money.

I have never used another e-commerce product so I cant say what else is out there, besides what I have "heard". If you have the money to invest check it out.

30 day return policy with %10 restock fee.

the site I use it on: www.mjtsales.com

[nexternal]

Here we go again. I have had this conversation with hundreds of clients. I have read it hundreds of times on boards and forums. As much as I would like to walk away, I feel compelled to stop and spread the gospel. While I appreciate the business owners and web developers who contribute their input on what they've used...

THERE IS NO "BEST" CART.

I'm sorry, but it's out. Anyone who will stand up in public, with no details, and say one is the best is a LIAR.

It depends on your needs. PERIOD.

You might me able to go out and buy "the best cart" for $5000, but if you only need to sell digital goods did you really just buy the best? NO, of course not.

Some people might say this is ammunition of the "custom" solution guys. I mean...if the needs are what counts and custom is built on the needs, what's not to like right? WRONG.

95% of the time custom solutions should have never been built. The only circumstances where a custom solution should be used is if it's cheaper, easier or never been done before. Otherwise I can guarantee someone has already built what you need to sell online. If don't believe me try Googling "Shopping Cart Software" Well now...that only returned 51 MILLION results. But, I'm sure NONE of them will work. So for you custom boys, POST SOME LINKS. Let's see it. I'm tired of talk. Quit lying to hard working business owners.

Can your system control inventory? Can you update products online? Can you import? WYSIWYG? How about the shipping companies? I'm sure you integrated with them and I bet you can print USPS labels right from the flash huh? What about an API for enterprise clients, is that built yet? Cross-selling and up-selling? Lastly, I'm sure Visa and MC have personally inspected it to be sure it's PCI compliant right?

Then again, that's just a rant, who really needs those features, none of my clients...

So if you want to know the "BEST" cart; Please list your needs and you'll get some great SUGGESTIONS to follow up on from some of the best in the industry.

[DrTandem1]

The "best" shopping cart is the one that sucks all of the money out of your visitors' credit cards. Just kidding. However, the most important part of a shopping cart is the payment gateway, if it's a real-time cart. All your features can be great, but if there is a glitch in the gateway, none of it matters.

Obviously, your needs will determine the "best" cart. Many will allow you to trial them. I suggest you do with test pages and play the role of visitor. Try to cause the cart to fail by doing strange stuff. For instance, if collecting a tax is important, see whether you can deceive the cart and still get the order to process without paying taxes.

[wpriley]

I read and responded to threads on the "best" shopping card on this forum several times in the past. It's one of my favorite topics as I'm very comfortable answering shopping cart questions. I too had worked through a number of less than ideal shopping cart solutions and was always looking for the ultimate solution.

Among my "must haves" was the ability to retain total design control over my sites (rather than trying to fit into a canned catalog/shopping cart system). After much disappointment I found and have been using (www.ultracart.com). It's an inexpensive hosted solution but amazingly feature rich despite its low price. I retain complete control over each product page down to the graphic or text link I use to add the item to the cart. There's also an online catalog driven option for those not interested in complete product page control. I've never used this so I can comment on its exact functionality.

Here's a summary of the features that most impress me:

- Integration with all major shippers (including real time to the penny shipping cost calculation with the ability to add your own parameter based shipping markup). The integration with UPS World Ship is particularly good.
- Packing support which automatically selects the best shipping box for a single item order or computes the minimum number and optimum size shipping boxes for multiple item orders (this is a great feature).
- Automatically E-mailed shipping notices and order status links to shipper web site for in process order tracking.
- Integration with all major payment processing services (including PayPal).
- Electronic check support (direct bank drafts).
- Option for customers to create an account for faster future checkout (optional, not required).
- Simple intuitive shopping cart with product thumbnail photo, links back to the original product pages, easy quantity changes and item deletion.
- Suggested companion products displayed on the shopping cart page.
- Support for gift certificates redemption and promotion code based discount coupons.
- Gift item support including multiple ship to addresses and choice of wrapping paper.
- Newsletters/mass E-mail support for previous customers communication.
- Powerful and easy template based theming to match existing site designs. All of the shopping cart pages themselves (cart display, enter shipping info, order status, update my stored account information, etc.) are collectively (or individually) template controlled by your uploaded template(s).
- Support for in stock and/or drop-ship fulfillment (order information automatically forwarded to drop-ship source).
- Integration with most major third-party fulfillment services.
- Affiliate program tracking and accounting.
- Embedded product catalog search engine.
- Digital goods support.
- Multiple tax jurisdiction support (down to individual counties or cities).
- Powerful and flexible product pricing options which meet every conceivable need I can think of (including volume discounts and contract pricing support for major and wholesale customers).
- Accounts receivable support for selected customers.
- QuickBooks integration.
- Built-in live chat option.
- Search engine friendly pages.
- Contribution support.
- Automatic reorder support.
- SSL certificate included.
- Custom DNS option.
- Documented API to allow your own add-ons.
- Multiple site support through a single back office (including individually branded shopping carts for each site). The previously referenced templating function makes this work very well.

I find UltraCart very reasonably priced (up to 50 products is $35 per month, 250 products is $50, 500 products is $65, etc.). There are only a few extra cost add-ons (live chat ($15 month), Froogle datafeed ($1 to $10 month), E-mail marketing ($.0025 per E-mail), and digital content delivery ($6 per GB)).

I've used UltraCart for almost four years on a number of sites and have never had a problem. The support is great. The technical staff is also very receptive to new feature requests.

UltraCart offers a free trial for a few weeks to a month (I forget exactly). Try UltraCart; I doubt you'll be disappointed.

[SG14]

Hi All,

Actually there are no best shopping cart software. And asking for it leads to encouraging the flood :)

Even well-known and expensive solutions sucks in some areas, where other carts may be great.

Personaly, I guess that most solutions are sharpened for special purposes.

[lesya]

Totally agree with nexternal to the fact that there's no perfect shopping cart out there. Someone can afford only free solution, others are willing to pay for the shopping cart and the service which comes with it. Though, my advice is you stick to smth open source so you can customize it easily.

If you're using or plan to use QuickBooks you can benefit of QuickBooks Integartion addons available for Store Managers of the following shopping carts:

QuickBooks Integration for osCommerce
QuickBooks Integration for CRE Loaded
QuickBooks Integration for Zen Cart

Also available for X-Cart, Magento and Pinnacle Cart. Just google it or check magneticone.com/store

[handcrafteduk]

I guess that most people will probably be recommending the cart that they use so it might be hard to get an idea of the 'best' one!

I use zen cart though and find it great.

[X-Cart]

Originally Posted by handcrafteduk

I guess that most people will probably be recommending the cart that they use so it might be hard to get an idea of the 'best' one!

You may be right. However all people are different, all business companies have different goals and strategies, thus the best software would be the one that would suit needs of everyone by default. And I am afraid there is no such a cart

There are many shopping carts on the market at the moment, so I am sure everyone will find the best shopping cart for his needs.

[gavjof]

I've used a number of Carts over the years.

They all have pros and cons. Depends on the site/client.

Actinic
Tried it a while back when a customer bought a copy... Run away!!
osCommerce
Be prepared for a lot of hard work as things will get messy with all those customisations and 3rd party contributions. Open to exploits - someone I know had his site hacked the on the 4 Sep 2009. As did quite a large number of other osC users... check your php files for eval(base64...)
X-Cart
Tried v4.1.x and found it cumbersome to customise the skin and full of pre-bundled extras we did not want (mind you, don't they all). Other add-ons can be purchased and I tried the X-Configurator which was expensive, and buggy - support however was excellent responding to tickets and solving said bugs. Have yet to try 4.2.x.
CubeCart V3 & V4
This is my current favourite as it's small and easy to use - great for clients. Version 4 is paid-for while V3 is free. Both versions have lots of free & commercial mods which are well supported by developers (Estelles springs to mind). Shipping is weakest part of it out-of-the box. Templating is very good, but admin need to be made less cluttered - come on version 5!
Magento
Very BIG. Very nice, but you probably don't want to run the bad boy on a shared server environment. Have only played with local demo so not got experience with live store.
1ShoppingCart
Costly but well featured. Works well if doing email marketing too. Got 1 client who is happy with this setup.
VirtueMart for Joomla
Buggy, poor forum support (in my experience) and just lacks the crucial elements for a successful store. - use Joomla for a CMS, but don't bother with this component.

I would like to know if anyone has experince with Interspire? Looks pricey so I'd expect the support is of a high standard?

[X-Cart]

Originally Posted by gavjof

I've used a number of Carts over the years.

They all have pros and cons. Depends on the site/client.

X-Cart
Tried v4.1.x and found it cumbersome to customise the skin and full of pre-bundled extras we did not want (mind you, don't they all). Other add-ons can be purchased and I tried the X-Configurator which was expensive, and buggy - support however was excellent responding to tickets and solving said bugs. Have yet to try 4.2.x.

Gavjof, we would really appreciate if you could test our 4.2.2 version. X-Cart has CSS based design since 4.2 version, thus it became easier to modify the design. Also we offer several free skins for the software.

[gavjof]

I may get around to that one day.

I mean I know functionality is more important, but customers like to have 'pretty' sites and a good templating structure goes a long way to making my job easier.

[websitescripter]

You need one that offers a unique shopping cart supporting digital and physical products which support multiple vendors. Can be used to create virtual mall, drop shipping business or aggregate business like amazon. Also, that has an open source software that allows entrepreneurs to create a fully branded online store builder. Their customers can create full fledged ecommerce ready stores in minutes.

Hope this helps.

[optimalwebsite]

I'm surprised Zen Cart hasn't come up a bit more often... ...the learning curve is pretty steep, but I've managed to get numerous UK based search terms with it... it's certainly SEO friendly, but it's not intuitive to setup and customise... you just have to keep working on it.

[chanchalseo]

Hi,


Well I have used ecommerce. I have found that the easiest one to use is Shopping Cart which utilizes your PayPal account. It's free, no fee and super easy to use.




Have a good day.

[sam40]

shopping-cart-reviews is a website that can help you in finding good shopping cart for your business

[newyorkshopping]

os commerce, no? it's really flexible!

[douger]

x-cart...

Without a doubt!

[bsnelling]

Originally Posted by X-Cart

You may be right. However all people are different, all business companies have different goals and strategies, thus the best software would be the one that would suit needs of everyone by default. And I am afraid there is no such a cart

There are many shopping carts on the market at the moment, so I am sure everyone will find the best shopping cart for his needs.

We use X-cart and I was happy to find your comment here. We have over 500 products online and with the help of -x-carts support team were we able to tweek the cart specifically to our needs. In the beginning we had issues because we bought the cart system from a website developer that completely overcharged on their work. We are happy with X-cart and if we need help, they are there. Of course they charge points for more difficult issues, but hey we all have to make a living...and they can not work for free.