Shopping carts for PHP/mySQL

I'm doing a site for someone who will probably need a shopping cart - he was going to use a third party cart service, but has decided against it. He wants to either pay through PayPal, take mailed in checks, or do credit card transactions over the phone.

Inventory consists of 25-35 products - photos all the same size. Fairly low budget for the whole site - so free is better than paid.

Having never done a shopping cart, I've no idea where to start. The only suggestion I have so far is osCommerce

I would also like an estimate on the number of extra hours required to integrate this into a web site - I've already quoted him on the site without any shopping.

 

I would agree with Shawn, OSCommerce is great... I have tried a few (Agora and a few others) and OS is the best by far.

 

I made my book site with Zen Cart, and I'm pretty happy with it.
It's an offshoot of OSCommerce, but seems to move further away with each update.
As far as time needed to build the site goes, that's pretty hard to say. You could be up in a few hours with the "out of the box" setup; however, integrating it into a site and making lots of mods could take some time. Really depends on how comfortable you are with php, etc. I'm not, so it took me far too long--but I learned quite a bit along the way.
Good luck.

 

I would definitely suggest using oscommerce or zencart. I have used them both in the past and have never been disappointed.

 

If you're willing to spend money, http://www.x-cart.com/ is good, it's similar to osCommerce, but better polished, and more feature rich.

 

Try http://merchant-tools.com and the following services are available:

- dynamic instant sales system
- online catalog manager
- Internet online merchant account
- web hosting
- shopping cart and checkout process
- order management system
- credit card processing system
- business email
- virtual DNS hosting

 

Hi,

I've not tried many carts but I've found osCommerce to be fine for my needs. And any modifications are a breeze to plug in because it's all php. Most mods I've needed are in the contributions section anyway.

I've used the SEO one and another one that escapes me right now.

That said, the Zen cart linked to above looks mighty fine.

The only problem I've having with osCommerce is with cookies for sessions, I can only get it working with the session string on the URL. Which looks ugly and is easlily lost if the user types in a URL themselves.

Anyone here know a solution to making the cookies work that doesn't involve getting your customers to switch their privicy settings down a notch?


Cheers

Chris

 

You get escalated security privileges in IE if you set a compact privacy policy for your cookies, this might help. I tried to find the relevant MSDN page, but couldn't.

 

Thanks for looking, I'll have a search later myself. It might fix them in firefox too.


Cheers

Chris

 

try cubecart.com only req license when you want to get rid of copyright notice.

Full PHP easy to adjust

Expat

 

osCommerce is an awesome shopping cart. Especially with all the free add-on modules you can get from the community.

 

I am also launching a Cart Site & I aslo using osCommerce, but with XP themes.

REgards
Sheel

 

X-cart has been great, support is decent on the forums (if you're prepared to wait a week or two), you will pay a price, customizing the layout and including php code can be troublesome until you get your head around Smarty templates.

Have to say OsCommerce, although CubeCart does look appealing as well