After working on a recent project for a printing company I though I would share my thoughts on a few of the shopping cart systems that we used. One thing we were looking for was easy design capabilities and easy to add in custom coding for products.
The first one we tired was zencart. Though easy to customize and free, it was not what we were looking for as for as functionality. I did not like much about this one and sought to find something a little more sturdy.
After a quick search of what others thought I found Magento. The magento script was a nice one right out the box, and open source, and easy to install. It was a little hard to learn my way around adding the custom design, but not to hard once you figured out what files were where and what there function was. Not the best template system to them, but better than one of the others. The functions over all were okay, but time consuming on how it was set up to handle multiple options for the same product. And it would have taken ages to add in all the products for the people working on adding them, also not worth all the time to add in all the custom functions for the developer that the site needed.
On to the next one, one of the guys recommended Shopify. This is a online hosted script, an cost $24 – $299 a month it was really quite the shopping cart. It runs on Ruby on Rails, but it was the right package for the job. After learning a little of the Liquid language and the simple to use Vision application that allowed me to run the Shopify shop code on my desktop and edit it from there, then upload the files to the server though the admin panel it was quite an easy task, and fit the bill perfect. The developer was able to do all the custom components and I was able to design the cart with ease.
Depending on the job I would recommend both Magento and Shopify. Both have some great features, just this time around one had a small edge over the other. Shopify was just a great choice for the printing shop, and a great piece of software, though it comes with a cost, if it were for something more than a electronics store or similar I would go with Magento.
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By Mike | Toronto Condos on May 1, 2009
Since many days I am very confused and worried. One of my sites is being designed in dot net technologies and now my designer is not available. Although I can handle it myself but it would take a lot of time to restart that again. Now I need a shopping cart and there are many. OScommerce, Magento, Zencart and many others. After spending a lot of time, I came to conclusion that magento is the best but my host offer oscommerce builtin so no hassles installing that. Anyways, I decided to take up Magento and I hope that it would not be wrong choice.
By Jason on May 1, 2009
Hi Mike, Got your email. guess the comment went in to the spam.
Magento is a nice peice of software. Working around it can be hard, but once you figure out where everything is its not so bad.