I am planning to start an e-commerce site. I want to know which is the best opensource E-commerce script available? I know about one - ie OScommerce. Is there any others to choose from? What are the payment options available & which is the best?.
Its really hard to beat ZenCart to be honest. I have always used osCommerce, but recently switched over to ZenCart and I won't be going back. Also the size of the community and coders is big enough to allow for a lot of help, new hacks/mods, and the reassurance that it will be there in a year or two. Thats what I would go with.
You can use the payments pro option from paypal to accept credit cards. I used the contribution from oscommerce and it works like a charm. Looks professional as well.
In another thread someone mentioned waiting for v1.3 on zen-cart.com as it will be a major upgrade. I did a little research and found that is was supposed to be released in Oct 05, but it is still not available. Also, they plan to release it in 3 stages so you'll have to do multiple upgrades. The users in the forum were frowning on this. The delayed release tells me they have bugs and that they are not good at hitting deadlines. I hear it's a good product and it's free so I guess we shouldn't complain, but I'm a bit leary about exposing my site to a buggy program with flakey support. I'm trying to find users of cubecart.com to find out their experience.
I'd like to add a few more questions: How well does OsCommerce, Zen Cart, etc. deal with multiple (say 1000s) products, different shipping options and various payment options? I know they are supposed to support CC, PayPal, eChecks etc. but how does this perform in the real world? Anyone want to share an experience? I'd also be concerned about ease of management (add/delete product, price), accuracy in updating the QTY on hand when a product is sold, calculating shipping and last but not least, the ability to integrate into my existing site design and the user community. Any ideas on these? If anyone has had any long term experience with any good cart software (especially open source) how about some detailed input? (if you have a couple of minutes to type it up!) Pete.
I use zencart. (www.ejfineart.com) I accept paypal and also Credit cards get charged automatically via authorize.net Adding products/changing quantity etc is simple. Their admin is easy and user friendly