HackerOne users: Testing against this community violates our program's Terms of Service and will result in your bounty being denied.

open source cart with vanilla

Hi.
I am looking for a good shopping cart. I have looked at some as,:

  • opencart
  • Zend cart
  • Magneto
  • osCommerce
  • And some others to.

My question is, what does you guys recommend to use? That I'm looking for is a open source, free and self hosted.

Comments

  • businessdadbusinessdad Stealth contributor MVP

    I don't think this question belongs here, as it doesn't have much to do with Vanilla. However, I'm working on a project which uses Magento as the e-commerce and Vanilla as the community platform. It wasn't easy to choose one, we went with Magento mainly because it's widespread, it's easy to find developers who know it (or, at least, they say that they know it) and, last but not least, I was not supposed to work on it (I absolutely hate the way it's structured), as we were outsourcing it.
    Seven months have passed, one delay after the other, and I'm now developing almost everything by myself on both Vanilla and Magento. I also developed some plugins for both to exchange data between them.

    Why not the others:

    • OpenCart: poorly documented, even bug fixes are commercial modules, one of their main developers can be a complete a$$.
    • osCommerce: obsolete and buggy.
    • Zen Cart: based on osCommerce, I didn't have many good experiences with it.

    Whatever you choose, keep in mind that there is no free meal. Unless you can do everything with stock features, you will have to do quite a bit of work to make any platform work as you like and, quite possibly, spend some money on support, development or plugins that cover your needs.

  • zar3xzar3x
    edited November 2012

    @businessdad Well yeh I know this may not be the right question to post it here. But well I just wanted to know what other people that uses vanilla, think what is best to use. And I have looked around a bit more and read on allot of forums. And I after allot of reading and tested out almost every self hosted open source shopping cart. I gonna start to look more at PrestaShop. Why? because it has a good community, it uses templates files and smarty tags. So I'm gonna start on that and see how long I can come. And you are probably right that I need some paid support or something like that. So if I found a good solution how to get vanilla and PrestaShop to work together I will post it here so maybe other people who looks for a good solution for this, can get it to.

  • Sry for the bold text, I didn't know what happen there.

  • Ah - I read the first post and thought of PrestaShop. I'd highly recommend it. Years ago I used Zen Cart to make some sites but it hasn't been updated for years.

    From a commercial aspect, i'd recommend learning Magento as it is an industry standard among retailers, though the costs involved with it are prohibative to smaller businesses. It's a good feather to have in your cap though.

    Prestashop is less complicated, has a great support network and the best thing... it's easy to teach shop owners to use! It's much less complicated than Zen Cart, which you end up patching up security issues for far too long. With PrestaShop, you dive in and can pick things up fairly quickly.

    If I remember correctly, it was far better at handling products with lots of different variables (clothes with sizes and colours, for example.)

  • zar3xzar3x
    edited November 2012

    @OnlyAnExcuse Well yeh all of that you just write is why I'd chose Prestashop. Because when I looked at the source code and the documentation I understood almost everything, And I think I can handle it so i can customize it so how I want it. And I'm gonna try to write a plgugin for Vanilla so it can use the same userlogin (But I don't know yet if I have the Knowledge to do that) But to learn new things has never hurt anybody. So I think it is time for me to read up my skills now ;) Because it is fun when you look back and see what you have created by your self and you may be able to help others to with the same problem.

  • Choosing a "shopping cart" or ecommerce package like the ones you mention is a a matter of personal taste. Don't let anyone fool you into believing otherwise.
    It all depends what your priorities and preferences are.
    Best thing to do is to make a list or spreadsheet with your most important requirements listed vertically and your available options horizontally.
    Add a weight to each one of them and your best option filters itself out.

    --bassland

Sign In or Register to comment.