Help deciding on a shopping cart.

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steve_

steve_

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Hey guys im only new to the forum, iv come over from boards as i wasnt getting very far with a specific question. Basically im looking at setting up an online video game store. Id be selling merchandise aswell as doing my own reviews. The thing im struggling with the most is which shopping cart to choose. There seems to be so many and i just cant settle on one. The top three at the moment are volusion, magento and zencart. I like zencart because its open source and has nice features, volusion and magento are neck and neck but again i cant decide and which is best. All link with sage pay which is good.

The site would needs to be able to display store items within the regular content of the site, for example if you where reading a review for a new game id like to be able to display items from the store in a side bar or something. I cant seem to find whether any of these carts will allow me to put up articles and such as well as my stock.

A friend of mine suggested that i embed wordpress within the shopping cart so the cart only handles stock and WP handles the articles and reviews. But by doing this wouldnt each user need to create two accounts in order to buy from the store as well as comment on reviews? Any help with this problem would be great, the momentum on the project is greatly slowing down because if the shopping cart conundrum. Thanks guys
 
mneylon

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
Which of the shopping carts you've been looking at supports reviews?

If you're interested in Wordpress I believe there are a few solutions which either integrate with it or vice-versa
 
steve_

steve_

New Member
As of yet i havent found a cart that supports reviews. I was hoping to integrate wordpress into the site. Having the shopping cart as the main structure and then using wordpress to handle the news and articles. In theory it sounds handy but i feel ill have a nightmarish time trying to get it running together.
 
babyboy808

babyboy808

Member
Don't use wordpress for your ecommerce site (coming from a guy who loves WP!) Have a peek at opencart. I got a site up and running in less than a week with it, and it's well maintained and each release gets more and more valuable features added.
 
mneylon

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
Looking at ZenCart it seems to support reviews, though I'm not sure if that's "out of the box" or an addon ..

@babyboy808 - got a link to OpenCart?
 
steve_

steve_

New Member
open cart looks very nice, like a cleaner version of zencart. Im not pushed on using wordpress as the main structure. Essentially the store is my main focus, the reviews and news are just stuff im doing in my own time. At most all i would need is to be able to embed the articles inside of the cart. It seems people have merged opencart and wp together successfully keeping both structures seperate. With open cart would it be possible to handle payments onsite instead of leaving to a sagepay server?
 
mneylon

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
I've no idea how SagePay works, but if it's similar to Realex then you should be able to customise the remote page layout . ..
If you want to take payments fully on your end you'll probably need to do a lot more about security ie. PCI compliance etc.,
 
steve_

steve_

New Member
Its not a huge deal for me just yet. I seen sagepay running with magento community edition from within the site. I think it used sagepay has some direct integration within an iframe. So that way they wont leave my site. But like you said i think the site will need to be PCI compliant first.
 
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shanno06

New Member
I don't know why anyone hasn't mentioned OSCommerce. Or for a better alternative OSCommerce Max.
OSCommerce comes with product reviews out of the box. and OSCommerce Max comes with loads of add ons pre installed.

Both Zen Cart and Magento are based on OSCommerce code - I'm not sure about Open Cart.

The best aspects of OS Commerce are the endless add ons and the community support forum. I've found an add-on for almost everything I've neeeded.

I got myself in some deep water a few years back when I promised a client a fully functioning e-commerce site in 6 weeks when I'd never done e-commerce before. At first I hated oscommerce but I hit the deadline bang on and the client still uses oscommerce and me which is the most important thing.

I'll admit that Im a die hard OS commerce fan.
 
A

achieve

New Member
shanno06 said:
I don't know why anyone hasn't mentioned OSCommerce. Or for a better alternative OSCommerce Max.
OSCommerce comes with product reviews out of the box. and OSCommerce Max comes with loads of add ons pre installed.

Both Zen Cart and Magento are based on OSCommerce code - I'm not sure about Open Cart.

The best aspects of OS Commerce are the endless add ons and the community support forum. I've found an add-on for almost everything I've neeeded.

I got myself in some deep water a few years back when I promised a client a fully functioning e-commerce site in 6 weeks when I'd never done e-commerce before. At first I hated oscommerce but I hit the deadline bang on and the client still uses oscommerce and me which is the most important thing.

I'll admit that Im a die hard OS commerce fan.
Click to expand...

+ 1 for being a fan of OsCommerce. It's a steep enough learning curve for a truly customised e-commerce solution, but as mentioned above the BIG plus for OsCommerce is the huge amount of add-ons. Having said that would be interested to hear from others who may have previously used OsCommerce but have moved on to other ecommerce platforms.
 
mneylon

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
The big fat downside to OSCommerce is that a LOT of installs are accidents waiting to happen .. ..
 
nevf

nevf

New Member
If your an asp.net techie, I couldn't but recommend nopCommerce. It's simple, easy to use and easy to customise while being really sophisticated. Best I've found yet...
 
A

achieve

New Member
blacknight said:
The big fat downside to OSCommerce is that a LOT of installs are accidents waiting to happen .. ..
Click to expand...

But there are lots of really really good and well supported Add-ons, plus packages such that come pre-installed with over 40 add-ons that covers almost every conceivable add-on required all bundled into one, so just one install!

Personally what I'm beginning not to like about os commerce is that the design is overly based on tables. And unfortunately V3, which is not based on tables does not have many add-ons available just yet.
 
unrealindeed

unrealindeed

Administrator
Staff member
Opencart looks nice, I used it once but didnt follow through with it as i needed to get a site up and running quickly and I was more familiar with Joomla/Virtumart

I have set up plenty of website using Joomla (Open Source) and Virtumart (Open Source)...

You can easily integrate it with paypal, and there is a realex module too.

It can display random products, featured products, scrolling products on any page, in any position you need. It also supports customer reviews.

There are lots of nice templates out there that look great and are about €40 to buy, which will save hours of fun customising the default theme.
 
K

kulesz

New Member
I have two shops with Opencart scipt and I am happy with them, the other think is I am beginner so my opinion is maybe worthless.
 
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