eCommerce #1: Options

Submitted by mpm on

Nonprofits don't use e-commerce much,  but I've had some experience (on both sides of the profit fence) doing e-commerce, and for some reason, shopping carts are intriguing me at the moment, and I figure its a good time to know what's out there, especially in the open source shopping cart world. What would I use if someone came to me wanting to set up a store? The last time I looked closely at this (which was a few years ago) it was a different situation - there wasn't much in the way of open source shopping carts. Today, there are a ton, some better than others. Here are the options I've found:
  • Zen Cart - LAMP stack program, at version 1.3.9. Has a community forum, and seems to be pretty popular. Dreamhost at least has this option as a one-click install.
  • Magento - this is also LAMP stack, and is using the SugarCRM business model (which I will admit is not nearly my favorite) - they have a community version with fewer features and no support compared to the other versions. The other versions seem extraordinarily expensive - ($3,000 - $13,000 per year. I'm assuming for that we're talking high-end shopping cart system.)
  • Ubercart - Ubercart is a module of Drupal, and the one of the bunch of these that I have the most experience with. Because it is a Drupal module, all of the vast array of features available with Drupal are right there - so the shopping cart system doesn't have to have them. This is a big plus.
  • Open Cart - Also LAMP. Like Ubercart and Zen Cart, this is a truly open source community effort, with an ecosystem of providers rather than a business model.
  • PrestaShop - Also LAMP. More like Magento in business model. My pet peeve: a form for downloading software that requires you to put in your email address. Hate that. Most add-ons for PrestaShop cost money.
  • OSCommerce - Seems to have most of their popularity in Europe. LAMP stack program.
  • Spree - Open Source Ruby on Rails eCommerce program. It's younger than most of the list above, but interesting.
There are others, but they are much less popular, and much less feature rich - not much reason to choose them at this moment.  There are several WordPress shopping cart plug-ins that seem worth looking at, if you are wedded to WordPress. Some open source, some not. Of course, so much depends on how much you want to sell, how you want to sell, what you want to sell, how important your store is in comparison with the rest of your website (for instance, do you set up an entirely separate store, or use something like Ubercart as part of your website.) Those questions are going to be key to know the answers to before you compare features and technologies of these systems to make a decision.

Comments

It certainly is an option for

It certainly is an option for selling stuff online - and for some, it might be a great idea, but it doesn't fit my initial criteria - open source shopping cart systems.

All of the branding is Amazon's, so you don't get to integrate your shopping cart into your own brand experience. There are services I'm sure out there (maybe that will be another post) which will allow you to set up stores with your own branding without having to host and set up your own shopping cart system.

This is a good and timely

This is a good and timely list. We've used OSCommerce for several years and are choosing to move away from it because of the support environment having ups and downs. They were in a down for a couple of years, but seem to be rising again. We use the community edition of SugarCRM and are considering Magento and add-ons to our CMS, Typo3 (more popular in Europe).

I've tried Magento and it's

I've tried Magento and it's a...complex experience. It has just about any feature you could want, which says a lot given the amazing diversity in shopping cart requirements out there. But, it's an over engineered resource hog, the install is extremely finicky. Their forums and plugins are disappointing if you're used to Wordpress / Joomla / etc. We've had a lot of headaches but it's up and running and doing what it needs to do. We did have to write a couple external "plugins" in order to manipulate the database. The data model is also quite complex.

This is a good and timely

This is a good and timely list. We've used OSCommerce for several years and are choosing to move away from it because of the support environment having ups and downs. They were in a down for a couple of years, but seem to be rising again. We use the community edition of SugarCRM and are considering Magento and add-ons to our CMS, Typo3 (more popular in Europe).This is a good and timely list. We've used OSCommerce for several years and are choosing to move away from it because of the support environment having ups and downs. They were in a down for a couple of years, but seem to be rising again. We use the community edition of SugarCRM and are considering Magento and add-ons to our CMS, Typo3 (more popular in Europe).

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