So, what am I looking at?

As I told you the other day, I am looking for a new shopping cart program to implement on my e-commerce sites.  I have been using OSCommerce for years, but have decided that the time has come to migrate to something else.  I’ve had good fortune using OSCommerce, but I just feel that OSCommerce has seen it’s better days, and my businesses would be better off using an alternate shopping cart.

I have a number of criteria for my new shopping cart:

• I would prefer it to be an open source package, rather than an expensive and proprietary cart system
• The cart must support 2Checkout as a payment provider since they have been my primary payment provider for years and I am quite happy with their service
• I need the cart to be flexible in offering a different bill to/ship to addresses since my companies primarily work where one person buys and has it delivered to somebody else.  Many carts do this, but I want it to be seamless and easy to understand, which is not easy to find.
• I want a cart that has a relatively large user base so that the cart will have ongoing development, and not die on the vine after a short time.

So, those are my primary criteria for choosing a new shopping cart program.  Keeping those things in mind, I have looked at a number of packages:

• I considered staying with OSCommerce but updating it.  I decided that this was not a good option, as I have done this many times over the years, but the problems that the cart has never seem to get fully resolved.
• Zen Cart was a consideration.  However, a few things turned me away.  Firstly, Zen Cart is just a derivative work of OSCommerce and suffers from many of the same limitations of OSCommerce.  Also, I don’t like the “look and feel” of the Zen Cart stores that I have played around with.
• Magento.  Magento certainly seems to be the up and comer.  However, it also seems to be complicated as all get out.  I played with it two different times and felt very frustrated after not being able to figure out this, that or the other.  I may give it one final look before making a final decision, though.  It is sleek and elegant, but complicated too.  This is one of the problems with OSCommerce, the learning curve is very steep.
• TomatoCart is another I checked out.  I saw things I liked, but it does not support 2Checkout as a payment provider, which is a “must do” for me.
• PrestaShop.  Scratch that one… again, no 2Checkout support.
• WordPress.  There are a number of e-commerce add-ons and plugins for WordPress.  I use WordPress on all of my other websites (non-e-commerce sites), and I know WordPress in and out.  I wish I could use WordPress for my e-commerce sites, but the truth is that I was unable to really find an e-commerce system that was really “ready for prime time” with WordPress.  Maybe it will happen in the future, but I don’t feel that it is ready to go as of now.
• OpenCart.  More on this one below.

OpenCart

OK, so I tried out OpenCart.  I like it.  I played with it off and on for a couple of days using just a test setup on one of my domains.  The more I played around, the more I liked OpenCart.  So, because I liked it, I started working in earnest to set up a working OpenCart store.  There were a few glitches, but I quickly and easily figured out a way around each of them.  I set up more than 500 products for sale in my soon-to-be OpenCart Store, and I was loving it.  Just as I was getting ready to go live with the store, a major glitch.

The 2Checkout payment did not work!  I thought I had checked this out and it worked fine, but apparently, I had forgotten.  I am confident, though, that I can get this working.  Perhaps somebody will read this article and offer a suggestion, or in some way, I will find out how to make it work.  The OpenCart system supports 2Checkout.  I can get it to process a payment, but I can’t get it to notify the cart that the sale was made.  If that happens, which it does every time I try, I will never know what people are buying, and thus the whole thing is worthless.  But, as I say, I feel that I can get over this hurdle… at least I hope I can, because I like everything else about OpenCart, and feel that it will be a good addition to my business.

So, have you tried OpenCart before?  If so, what do you think of it?