Help with eCommerce Store

I would like to build an eCommerce store, but do not know which ecommerce store builder software to use. Can someone direct me to a software that's already exist here or one that i can get online.

if you know what your doing with PHP, try Oscommerce - thats my prefered system. I gues it depends what you are doing. As it is, for a small ecommerce site you can set up a worpdress site with the ecommerce plugin and that'll work too.

Well, first off, if your getting hosting from a company then they have a few commerce scripts built in. i use OScommerce. good for me. has a few bugs but nothing i didn't fix in mine.

I would suggest Drupal + ubercart

If you can't build/code your own, use OsCommerce, as it is one of the most well-known, well respected and most recognized storefront resources. People trust it because they are used to seeing it.

It is user friendly and as some of the other guys have posted, a quick fix for any issues it has with minor effort.

Get it up there and run with it.

try opencart......... its opensource ... nice features... themes and mods ... you can try setting different software and then test which works better for you..

I think Zen Cart is easiest to use for non-coders. It's in most Fantastico packages so you can install it automatically from your cPanel.

When I'm evaluating carts I look for
- the ability to create and change products with file uploads
- a clear path to adding images
- on-the-fly creation of products, categories, manufacturers, attributes
- ability to manage tens of thousands of products

Besides Zen I've tried Magento, VirtueMart and PrestaShop. Magento requires a great deal of coding knowledge and manual creation of categories (unless you do some hefty API stuff). Presta and Virtue had very shaky upload modules last time I tried. Images showed up around 30% of the time. In Zen I upload to my images folder and the cart just points the prod to it. If I need to change the image I just over-write the file on the server.

Other carts are prettier and slicker looking but nothing beats Zen for ease of use. I'm looking into Drupal now and I'm always keeping an eye out for new carts, but I'll always have a Zen shop. Zen is based on OSC so they are similar. BTW: the next big release of Zen (2.0) is supposed to be pretty slick. It's over a year delayed

Here's a nice guide to free carts

And here's the Zen forum.

alvingobind said:

I would like to build an eCommerce store, but do not know which ecommerce store builder software to use. Can someone direct me to a software that's already exist here or one that i can get online.

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I am an ecommerce developer and have used a number of shopping carts including Oscommerce, Zencart, CRELoaded, OscMax, PDshop, VirtueMart, Volusion, Yahoo Shopping, Magento and something else that I cannot remember the name of.

Judging from the fact that you are asking this question, I would suggest Zencart. The Excel/CSV upload does NOT work well in Zencart though.

Magento might have been the best off the shelf but it's too database intensive and slows down in shared servers.

Virtuemart is quick and easy to install if you want to do it yourself.

If you are hiring a developer then try Zencart.

Please feel free to contact if you have questions.

ponce007 said:

Judging from the fact that you are asking this question, I would suggest Zencart. The Excel/CSV upload does NOT work well in Zencart though.

Click to expand...

Well, the paid EasyPopulate (or EZ Pop) is completely broken. The Free one works well. The new one EasyPOP CSV is perfect. The original developer does not help out at all anymore, so a user fixed a lot of bugs and renamed it to the CSV version.

I'm surprised nobody recommended prestashop.
www.prestashop.com

It's a really nice e-commerce system. Scalable, not heavy on the database (like magento), and is fast.

Loads of (free) modules and themes and is adequate when it comes to the SEO part.

If you're more into SEO, then it's magento all the way around. But that requires you to know some PHP, a ninja in xhtml (I'm assuming you don't have a lot of money to spend - so you will have to do everything all by yourself.)

Try prestashop!

I like oscommerce and oscmax, because the support forums are really east to get find the info you need when you want to change things. Oscmax is technically just oscommerce with a lot of modules already added to it. The biggest advantage of oscmax is the themes module that is built in makes it easier to change the look and feel of your website. But if you want to add additional themes for oscommerce, sometimes you have to tweek them a little to make them work with the oscmax. So if you wants something fairly well ready to go out the gate then oscmax is good, if you want to pick and choose which modules you want to add then you might prefer to work with oscommerce.

i tried zen cart and went back 1 month
..

zen cart interface.... crashes ..loading time....seo urls (sometimes problem in zen)...
handling features ( zen has lot of features no doubt)

i have ten and thousands of products under many categories
I have to handle shipping .... invoicing....
coupon system customer groups...

site should look cool....should be vary very fast
and it should be secure


My single advice for future users... don't get mislead by any wrong advice...
may be your view is different..

but please its our cart ...try all softwares you can on your local machine first..
with sample 6-7 products in each category/subcategory

install xamp on your machine... and then install carts in different directories..
hope you are ble to take right decision...