Choosing your Shopping Cart software.

Articles

Nowadays there are a massive number of Shopping Cart software out there (roughly 1000 companies, according to http://blog.vermorel.com/?p=84, the site belongs to Joannes Vermorel, a master in osCommerce), with price ranging from free to, well, you name the number yourself.

From that number of products, I ended up with Zen-Cart™ by the wisest way I know when I was faced with such number of options.

I picked the one having the coolest name.

What?

Well I am a Zen-Buddhist myself, and I thought it would be somewhat (geeky) cool to get my hand on Zen-Cart™.

With that fact in mind, I don't think I can give any objective views on this area.

But I am not a complete idiot though. I have tried two other Shopping Cart software, Joomla™'s VirtueMart™ and OsCommerce™ . While I believe this is not the most objective benchmarking, these are what I found out anyway:

1. If you are looking for design simplicity, with very good to excellent result, you might want to look at VirtueMart™. Their live shops demo has the best shopping cart designs compared with the other two. Followed by OsCommerce™, and Zen-Cart™ is the crappiest.
2. Aside from that, VirtueMart™ and OsCommerce™ both have a lot of readily available templates, compared to Zen-Cart™.
3. OsCommerce™ has the most number of contribution modules. Followed by Zen-Cart™ and an unsignificant amount for VirtueMart™.
4. From a programmer's view (well, my view and some clients that have used OsCommerce™ for too long), Zen-Cart™ has the most advanced overriding system, in which you don't need to re-write the core files when installing / creating modules. This make upgrades fairly easier than the other two.

I stick with Zen-Cart™ since this is the most developer friendly than the other two I have tried. It is easier and most non-obtrusive for me to develop a module here.

As for the designs, well, you CAN create a good design with Zen-Cart™. They are a lot of standard-looking Zen-Cart sites because they do not really bother to learn the structure of Zen-Cart. Take a look of this website for example, doesn't look half bad right? ...right?

I hope this small article helps. But then again, if you find it hard to decide, well, just pick one with the coolest name, and stick with it for a while.

Still curious?

You might also like to look at this site, they compare quite a lot of largely used Shopping Cart software there:

http://www.shopping-cart-reviews.com/all-shopping-carts.aspx

Scott Wilson's website, thatsoftwareguy.com has also a nice review on this issue. You can read it on this page. Although the title and url name kinda biased to Zen-Cart™, I found his article to be quite objective on this matter, just change "Zen-Cart" words to other free Shopping Cart software.