Shopping cart advice

Hi,

I am looking for a new shopping cart software. Something easy to install, use and which is seo friendly, or seo friendly through a mod. I also need something that is fast to load and has clean code.

I need it to be something which can have its layout ammended/customised.

The site will be a mix of products and content related to the products.

Any recommendations?
Most people here have mentioned oscommerce, zencart, cubecart as well as joomla/virtuemart?

Thanks

Fuzz

 

How many products? How much content? Do you have a design already made or one you would like?

 

If you can wait a week or so I would go with magento. I has a bit of a learning curve but that stuff is frankly amazing. It is however pretty much brand new. The new build has great new features but more noteworthy the stuff is beautiful. I am playing around with the alpha build of 1.1 now. I love that stuff. http://www.magentocommerce.com/

hope that helps,
Nigel

 

i made few sites using zencart, no troubles, easy to install and very easy to customize, and it has a very large community for support and suggestions.
and as far as i know, it has a good seo

 

Nigel:
Why do you praise magento? It seems to be a new contender and i've heard some say its slow. What is it about it that you like so much.

Shallow:
No more than about 100 products, However i'd like it to be expandable.

 

Nigel,

I should point out, i did view magento once but was put off by the fact i'd have to spend at least $500 for help and even then thats limited.

Then again i imagine if the product quality is good then you wont need to get support.

 

Magento 1.1 is lightyears faster and allows for custom attributes on individual products(added very easily). I require this functionality for the hubble site in my footer.

Furthermore, it has complete separation of design from function making it vastly easier than say zencart to design for. I don't mean skinning something either, I mean a proper professional design such as http://ocbutcher.igentics.com/

It also has cms page related features, newsletter, tags, meta tags, clean urls out of the box, csv importing and exporting, I could go on for a week. It also has a new feature called bundled products so you can mix and match stuff in the cart to build a product that has more than one item. This is a really slick feature.

Anyone I have had to do a zencart site for is going to get ported over as soon as the new build is ready.

my test build is sitting on my junk server here http://www.thegraphicdesignresource.com/testcart its not slow on my end. In fact 1.1 is already way faster.

If I remember correctly, 1.1 is due out quite soon.... first week of july or so.

hope that helps,
Nigel

 

Hi Nigel,

So out of the box and uploaded it looks like http://www.thegraphicdesignresource.com/testcart/ is that correct?

What about the support side? They charge at $500 for support. That majorly puts me off. Is the friendly community support aka free support?

For me, i want a cart, and i also want something that visually looks good and has less of the generic cart element to it. Do you think it can look good with changing of colour schemes and logos?

Thanks for your feedback, its appreciated.

 

Yes, that is the default install for the alpha build from the SVN repo. It's not ready but i couldn't wait to test it.
The company charges 500 for professional support. I would say that currently the forum is a bit slow but everyone is really friendly and will help for free unless you need someone to cobble some code together or a special feature for you. When 1.1 comes out that place will likely be hopping. The speed and attributes issue is causing alot of folks to hold off until that release. Me included.

You can view a really good screencast of the new custom product features here http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/video-custom-product-options-in-magento-11/

You simply can't make that any easier on the end user.

Design wise, yes, it would be quite easy to simply change the header and the footer graphics and whatever colors you need changed. Take this page for example http://www.thegraphicdesignresource.com/testcart/testimage.html

you simply can't compare those graphics to zencart or oscommerce and check out that url site.com/product.html you cant beat that either. I have tried 2 different friendly url mods for zencart and they both simply break the whole site. It's quite the headache.

Nigel

 

So I guess if you were considering dropping 500 on support then you could just as easily pay someone less to set it up how you need it so you can simply enter products and go... I was able to install it without issue but it requires a few things some servers don't have by default. My host installed the php extensions for me quickly though so no problems there.

Nigel

 

Nigel thanks for the replies

Yes the graphics do look good. It doesnt look like a generic cart.

SEO friendliness? Can i play around and decide what i want to be h1, h2 etc?

In the past i used things like Actinic which was very out of the box. Times have moved on and if i jump on oscommerce the site will look out of the box again.

I think i will try a demo of magento and see how it goes. You mentioned waiting a week, is that because of a new release or were you referring to a week long learning curve?

Thanks

Fuzz

 

I mention waiting a week because that is when 1.1 is due out. 1st or 2nd week of july. As for seo yes, in the sense you mention this is the simple markup that would make your design. You can do whatever you want.

It is moot point to test the current stable release build because the new one has loads of cool new stuff in it. For instance the stuff in the screencast is not in the current build.

Fair warning. The SVN build has the entire zend framework in it. Its a 70 meg upload. It took me quite a while to upload it. I can however reset my password(forgot it) or reinstall it and let you poke around mine. You cant hurt anything. I beat that machine silly lol. I can probably get to that in a few hours. I have some clients hovering over me.

Nigel

 

Nigel,

What is 'moot'? and what is SVN?

 

Moot means pointless in this case... SVN is subversion. Its how developers build code or applications and track changes. You have to use something like http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ an SVN client to check out the alpha build. You can't simply download it yet. SVN is how folks deal with version control to keep track of who changes what in the code so all the developers are on the same page. Pretty nifty stuff actually.
http://subversion.tigris.org/
Nigel

 

Nigel,

Thanks for the education lessons there.

Do you think when 1.1 comes out there will be people able to make templates for it or templates available for it immediately?

 

There are already folks making templates on the forum and there is a marketplace here http://www.magentocommerce.com/jobs

Nigel... your welcome for the help, no problem....

 

Have to admit Magento looks pretty good!!
I myself use Joomla Virtuemart. Its very easy to skin and has all the features my client need.
It is the best solution for me since I have the power of a full content manager where I can add other features such as a forum, gallery etc and have a good Shopping Cart.

I have several shopping carts I have made for clients who have had no problems with them at all.
But if you are going to have thousands of products, you are probably better going with someone that is quicker!

Thats my 2 cents worth anyway