PHP shopping cart dissapointments
Ok, if you’re a developer like me, it’s not often you find a product that what you want how you want it. I’ve been on a quest to find a great open source shopping cart developed in PHP. I have tried the following open source carts.
OS Commerce
Zen Cart
Magento
Prestashop
Open Cart
PHPMass
Ultimately… I am completely disappointed. I would not want to use any of the carts listed above for a client website. Either the admin side is weak and doesn’t offer much of anything (open cart), or it offers too much (Magento) and in many cases (except magenta and possible Prestashop) the interface is incredibly ugly. Is it too much to ask for a simple shopping cart that is designed well, that offers a decent selection of payment gateways, a few nice features like coupons and end it there? If anyone knows of such a cart, let me know! OS Commerce or Zen Cart is the closest thing to what I want, but I find them to have the some of the worst interfaces of the list. Prestashop was decent, but it seems to be going in a direction opposite of what I want, sort of like a Magento wannabe. The only cart that I’ve used and liked (at least somewhat) is a commercial cart called digishop. But in my opinion, one of digishop’s greatest flaws is not being open source. They have a little statement on their site that says it’s open source once you pay for it, meaning that the code is not encrypted, but that is far from what I consider to be “open source”. I think the benefit of open source technology is the community. The community that can help develop, patch, extend, answer questions for people new to the system etc. Digishop also lacks developer documentation. So anyone wanting to dive right in, needs to figure it out on their own.
I believe this has led me to a place though where I may develop my own cart. I am a big fan of the Code Igniter framework, and would love to see a simple shopping cart that has some basic functionality in it (user accounts, coupons, easily extendable, and a few decent payment gateway options) and, a decent non-ugly interface. If anyone out there knows of a project started like this already, I’d love to hear about it. All my searches for a code igniter cart have let me down.
Tags: eCommerce, PHP, Shopping Carts
March 18th, 2009 at 6:28 am
Apparently open cart uses the code igniter framework pretty much. My opinion is every site owner has different requirements. So you need to customize the cart no matter which one you choose.
The only thing perhaps that makes a difference among the ones you listed is whether or not they follow the principles of commerce. Meaning no matter the OOP that sits behind, the objective is to make sales.
March 18th, 2009 at 9:21 am
I just downloaded Open Cart again to reevaluate the code base. It is NOT CodeIgniter. It may be loosely based on it, but I would really say that the author of this app is just following MVC.
The issue I was bringing up is not how the cart functions as an ecommerce tool so much as the ease in which one can customize it. Yes, each of these carts can be customized no doubt, but some are far easier to customize than others.
My ideal cart will have very little inherent functionality outside of the basics of a cart, and the code base should be clear and well organized so I can easily change things that need changing and add things that need adding.
After looking over Open Cart’s code again, it may be a good base for me to use. I do remember being disappointed with it’s interface though and I felt the administration panel was lacking.
October 10th, 2009 at 11:01 am
The one thing opencart really has over the rest of them (or at least osCommerce and Zencart) is it’s file structure and templating system. Trying to change the design of osCommerce and Zencart is an absolute nightmare. With opencart, I had my design pretty much completely integrated in an hour and had written by first mod in about 5 hours.
Who cares what the admin interface looks like, that’s so easy to change… As for Magento, it seems actually pretty great, it just requires a powerful dedicated server to run smoothly which makes it only suitable for bigger shops.
Opencart has a long way to go, but I think it might be a pretty good base if you wanted to start a new branch. The one thing these carts really lack is some sort of hooks system that makes plugins really easy to integrate like Drupal provides.
October 10th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Opencart is the one I’ve been using lately and it’s is relatively nice, There are some discrepancies I have with it, but they are minor compared to the other nightmare carts I’ve dealt with. I am very close to an initial release of a CodeIgniter based shopping cart.
April 14th, 2010 at 11:04 am
Totally agree!!!
June 21st, 2010 at 2:56 am
I love opencart, I think its one of the best opensource carts around.