I’ve used Romancart and Mals-e but need a solution that is more ‘all-in-one’ with a client backend.
I’ve tried CS-Cart and OpenCart, and while both are eminently workable with a bit of template tinkering, they struggle to handle a couple of things I really need:
One is the ability to apply quantity discounts to product variations (imagine a widget having five sizes, each size with a different base price and a different quantity discount structure)
The other is the ability to notate (or annotate?) the default price fields with text additions… ie. £20.00 per roll, or £10.00 per box. While you can add this to the product description, the description is often placed far away from the price display.
Another annoyance is that they don’t display quantity discounts in a very friendly manner. To most of us we would think of a ‘range’ of quantities, such as 11-20, or 50+ - but these scripts seem only capable of displaying a single threshold figure. Not very user-friendly.
I just wondered if anyone has experience of an installable PHP catalogue/cart which might be able to address the issues I’ve found with CS-Cart and OpenCart? (I’ve looked at Magento and it doesn’t seem any better and has a horribly complex interface!)
I haven’t used it yet, but I hear a lot of great things about FoxyCart. You may also want to look at something completely different – Shopify. This is a soup-to-nuts catalog, cart, checkout, payment software-as-a-service. They have lots of great-looking templates, but they also make it pretty simple to convert your HTML into their templates for a completely custom look. You pay monthly, and they take a cut of sales, but in the end, you get to use a robust, secure system that you could not afford to build for yourself without venture capital and months of my (or another Rails developer’s) time.
Walter
On Feb 26, 2013, at 10:42 AM, hugh wrote:
I’ve used Romancart and Mals-e but need a solution that is more ‘all-in-one’ with a client backend.
I’ve tried CS-Cart and OpenCart, and while both are eminently workable with a bit of template tinkering, they struggle to handle a couple of things I really need:
I have used Foxy Cart before - it is a shopping cart and you need to add code snippets in your FW page to make it all work. There is no admin area where your client can add products, change pricing etc.
Shopify gets my vote for an all on one e-commerce solution. We have a Shopify project in the pipeline for later this year - can’t wait to start working on that one.
FoxyCart is a bit like Romancart, really (add your own snippets etc.) but without the admin area that Romancart has.
Shopify looks interesting, but a quick test doesn’t reveal much difference from CS-Cart or OpenCart…other than it being an online service and more difficult to change templates. It wouldn’t even order my categories (‘collections’) anything other than alphabetically
Maybe CS-Cart and OpenCart are as good as it gets, after all? Hmmm…
I have used Open Cart before and it is quite easy to style and make it your own. Not a bad platform if you have a client that is willing to pay for your time to keep the script up to date. The problem is that the plug-inn developers are not always up to speed to with the latest release.
Thanks for the suggestions on this.
But at the moment I’m having to lean back towards Romancart - it has a half-way backend/admin, but most importantly it allows most of the designing and therefore product/price descriptions to be done in Freeway.
None of the all-in-one carts allow, as far as I can see, custome fields or descriptive text against prices…ie. ‘per box’ or ‘per roll’.
Could be a small advantage for one of the software makers to think about!
