Best E-Commerce Shopping Cart?

[philbertigus]

Hi folks,

Hope this is a suitable forum for this.

We will be developing a new ecommerce site in the next few weeks and are giving serious consideration to using Joomla as the CMS with a suitable shopping cart. It’s a typical extension of an indigenous ‘brick & mortar’ store that is ready to start selling online.

The store will have 20,000 products to start, but will increase to 50,000 once the site is trading for a number of months. We are stuck with regards to the shopping cart and are currently looking at Virtuemart & IXXO Cart as two possible contenders. Can anyone give us some advice on what you think might be the best cart for this volume of products? Speed and performance is obviously a huge consideration, as is security of customer information.

Any maybe if I could ask a more general question. Do you think the combination of Joomla and one of the aforementioned shopping carts is really up to supporting a big ecommerce website or should we be looking elsewhere? I ask because any of the ecommerce examples I have seen on Joomla, Virtuemart, IXXO or anywhere else for that matter are not great (in my humble opinion).

Look forward to your comments. Thank you.

[harryedwards]

If you're able to install VirtueMart and get it to work, then I would go with them. If it works it's definitely a great extension. I tried installing the latest versions (as of June 2008) of both VirtueMart and Joomla with Authorize.net as my gateway and just couldn't get it to work.

If you can't get VirtueMart to work, I would go with ixxo cart. Support in VirtueMart is almost non-existent. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's difficult to justify trusting a potentially significant part of your business to an organization with inadequate support.

IXXO cart will work easily provided you have a hosting company that has features wholly compatible with ixxo's requirements. The only caveat with ixxo is that you have to be committed once you pay the license fee because there is no refund.

[voxmaris]

I am no shopping cart master, but I have been dabbling with shopping carts over the past few weeks with a few projects and I really like ZenCart. It is open source so there is no cost and there is a huge community of folks who develop for it. There site is really friendly and in the help section, I pretty much found most of my answers to configuration questions.

OsCommerce is another strong package but I prefer ZenCart over OsC.

Good luck.

PS -- And I have to echo what the previous poster said about VirtueMart. In theory it would be lovely to have one seamless site with one way to login and running everything through Joomla, but I just couldn't get VirtueMart to work either. And it's wild because it is ranked so high (I believe it is the Editor's pick) among shopping cart extensions. Too bad, so sad.

[newbiess]

I don't know about the integration between it and Joomla but osCommerceis always one of the best choices for online stores. Speed and security (as you mentioned) are granted.
Good luck

[philbertigus]

Thanks for your replies. Actually we had not really considered a non-Joomla shopping cart! For some reason I assumed they would be incompatible. But will definitely be taking a look at ZenCart and oscommerce now.

Thanks again.

[cjmicro]

I am too considering a different cart than VirtueMart, however if you use zen cart of another "non joomla" cart, is there any way to integrate with your user profiles through Community Builder?

Will check out the other carts, but am also looking for advice and feedback on others.

Cheryl

[voxmaris]

What you would want to do is go to the Extensions portion of this site and do a search on "bridges" for ecommerce packages. A bridge "in theory" should promote a connection from two different packages, merging some aspects of registration, usernames, passwords, etc.

[buzybonnie]

we are using ixxocart right now - joomla1.5 plus version and have been live for about 8 days. the "Simple" installation was anything but, and while the tech guys are very nice there, be prepared for them to pretty much tell you that the problem(s) are not their cart, but your site and your server. They were partially right but we did find a bug in their program as well as their instructions.

Despite what their site says - 24x7x365 day support -- in my eyes it is not. to me that means that you should call any time day or night and get a human being. that is not the case. When we were trying to launch, urgent requests for help went unanswered for 3 days despite sending requests thru their live chat, support ticket system and answering machine.

Once we got them to identify the bug, they did fix it, but communication with them is/was hairy. They seem very open to adding features which is nice.

As of today, they do not actually have "gift certificates' despite what their list of site features says.

THey claim to be marketers and there are a lot of features that focus on that, but if you are one that likes the book "Don't Make Me Think", there are a lot of things I personally would have done very differently in the layout of the products and the buttons for purchasing and checkout to make it "idiot proof" and more user friendly for rapid checkout.

just my 2 cents at this point.. now off to get our site back online.

Bonnie

[OrangeCreative]

I've been using VirtueMart myself and the experience was not that great. Once you get it going it works but it'll take a lot of hair-pulling until you get there. As the others mentioned, support is close to zero.

You might be able to approach this fro a different point of view... In case you do not need your clients to log in to the non-commerce part of your site, you might be able to run Joomla and the e-commerce solution in paralel. You set up Joomla on your site root and the shop in a sub-folder/sub-domain. From here you will only have make sure the design stays the same (or similar) between the two sites.

As an alternative, I would mention CS-Cart (http://www.cs-cart.com). It has a basic CMS included which would mean a single control panel.

I was using OsCommerce longer time ago and wouldn't touch it with a pole again! ZenCart is an OsCommerce spin-off which is a bit better but still far behind other current carts.

[JLHC]

For shopping carts, I will recommend you to have a look at Magento Commerce, OsCommerce, ZenCart and CubeCart. If you are looking for something powerful, you should definitely be looking at Magento.

[OrangeCreative]

While I like Magento myself, it's still too resource-hungry in my opinion... That is, for a shared server. On a dedicated server it certainly does better. Also keep in mind that while it came a long way since it's first beta version it's still a "young" cart...

Cubecart is another OK-solution.

[brad]

What about www.openfreeway.org ?

Can I just echo the comments about magento. We've seen it putting a huge load on server resources as well, time and again.

[Monsoon Baby]

I would warn you against ixxo, although "nice" guys they are slow, unprofessional, the support although on the face of it great is non-existent. I have been trying to get an online shop off the ground for over a year with them and had I not investe a substantial amount of money in bespoke development and licence fees etc I would have walked a long time ago! I may actually do that anyway and sent a lawyer over to recover every penny of this crappiest company every met. Shame that they are Germans!
Be warned!

[donmarvin]

The new Virtuemart 1.1.x has SERIOUS problems! I have an active ecommerce site, and sometimes a customer will enter their billing/shipping info and when they click "Continue" to go to the next step in the checkout process, some other customer's billing/shipping data is on the order!

I'm looking at IXXO Cart or Magento, but I see from this thread that neither is an ideal solution.

[brad]

Have you looked at: www.openfreeway.org yet?

[donmarvin]

Interesting! It does events, services, and subscriptions. I'll try it out.

P.S. -- Looking forward to your presentation on Thursday!

[mdraja]

brad, Plz can u tell me how to install authorize.net into joomla1.5? Am facing a problem, Plz let me know asap.

[brad]

P.S. -- Looking forward to your presentation on Thursday!

What presentation?


Just joking... talk to you then.

[brad]

brad, Plz can u tell me how to install authorize.net into joomla1.5? Am facing a problem, Plz let me know asap.

Please start your own thread in the correct forum.

[jack7890]

How do you go about integrating an external cart within a Joomla site? I don't need to create a "bridge"--just want to stick the cart within my template. How can I do this?

[voxmaris]

Create a wrapper. Do a search in the forums on "wrapper" and that will get you where you need to be. Also, this post is getting off topic. Can a forum moderator move this to it's own thread? Thanks.

[fionix]

As I read all the replies in this thread then it sounds like there isn't any good Shopping cart for Joomla available. I really need to find some shopping cart solution for my Joomla sys. as well as like the toppic starter.

However some of suggestions are good, but sounds complicated.

I contacte IXXO Cart just for some pre sales questions, and they answered one mail after 24 hours (which is okay) but the most important one they didn't answered, (It was just about what the upgrade price would be) now it is a week ago, so I wont buy it.

[donmarvin]

The problem with non-open source is, what if the developer abandons their business? You're stuck.

[moondraak]

I too have spent a LOT of fruitless hours ( accompanied by much hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing) trying out MANY different eCommerce programs. I tried VM, and it is just TOO bloated/complex for what I need, I tried Freeway but it couldn't do a lot I wanted without code stuff that I'm just not skilled enough to do ( yet). I tried tons of free php-type carts and OS ones too.
The only one that looked like being a winner was actually JoomShopping...I could live with the German admin, but there is NO help on the Forum unless you speak German, and it seems to have been let go dormant. The other major problem I have, is it won't uninstall cleanly! I have files and folders left behind, but I cannot delete them. I've tried from every possible avenue: FTP/ninjaXplorer/my host webspace explorer, and of course, I can't ask on the JoomShopping Forum either. It's enough to make you go "AAAARRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!"

I was going to trial Cubecart, but just could not work out how to install the Ioncube thing...same goes for the cart I wanted to trial that had Zendoptimizer.

If someone ever makes a simple,easy,non-bloated-with-useless-features cart, they'll make a fortune I reckon.

[donmarvin]

Your webhost should have installed Ioncube and/or Zendoptimizer. If they don't have either installed I would consider finding another host.

[donmarvin]

I just got a notification about new upgrades to IXXO Cart for Joomla 1.5 that I think may make it worthy of a second look:

- Inventory by Attributes
Track inventory by any combination of attributes using this powerful feature. This feature is used for the inventory control and makes it possible to keep track of stock of the products and options in your shop system.

- Gift Certificates
Customers can purchase Gift Certificates, personalize them and e-mail them to family or friends.

- Wish List / Stored Carts
Now your customers can store unlimited number of wish lists for easy access when they are ready to purchase.

- IXXO Cart users table Synchronized with Joomla Users

[Tangram]

I have only had bad experience with Ixxo. Although on the surface they want to hook you in quickly, they have no support to speak of, slow in answering e-mails and just try to phone them up? NEVER an answer.

Why don't they have a forum or a list of customer sites? Good questions? you know the answer. My advise: stay away, there a lot of viable alternatives. One I found very good and helpfull is by www.interspire.com.

[flowerbunny]

I love the Joomla CMS for presentation and it is so easy. . . . . but this ecommerce problem keeps going.

We have a partially complex site running on zencart, which is beautiful as an ecommerce only solution. Perhaps running zencart in a wrapper is the solution - the only problem is that the zencart and joomla logins would be different - that is if your customers need to login to the joomla site.

We are now finding that we need to "upgrade" to a full accounting system and lloking at ERP type sytems, as managing just the ecommerce side of things is too much without integration.

From that end, if you are running a big site with as many products as you have indicated you may be looking too small. The leading solution we have found which we "may" be signing up for is NetSuite - you can start with only your set modules and as the site gets bigger and busier upgrade extra modules to run your whole business from one single fully integrated package - you can spend as much or as little as you like - in the short term it may not be the cheapest option, but for any business heading towards mid-sized company may well pay for itself in a relatively short time. We have lloked at all similar soutions and NetSuite looks liek the only that suits our business.

We will still probably be running our joomla sites though, especially for our non-core business processes and retail only ecommerce!! ;-) Will need to report back on our experiences with the wrapper trick.

PS: There is a zencart add-on which allows you to place cart content anywhere - be it in a joomla site or otherwise, which makes the placement of products, shopping cart etc very easy to put anywhere within your joomla template, with additional add-ons which may also be useful in the free downloads area of zencart. Add-on after add-on does lead to incompatibilities and eventually an old system with a lot of "baggage".

Also, while virtuemart shows a lot of promise, has "new web2 type" construction and interface, but it is nowhere near robust enough and with enough options to run our requirements - with basic products, delivery and minimal B2B it may be OK, but we are having real trouble getting it to do what we want.

[donmarvin]

Virtuemart is an incarnation of Zencart.

[moondraak]

@ flowerbunny: I tried Zencart too, I agree with donmarvin, it's too much like VM, and just too complex for my needs. I'm a very small business, (just me, in fact LOL), and with the type of jewellery I'll be selling, it doesn't take much to have MANY different types/styles, so "600" items s not that big a deal ( until you have to re-enter them by hand LOL)
Since adding to this thread, I have tried out about 15 different carts now....from OS, Commercial, and "lite" ( free) Commercial. At this point I'm leaning towards Avactis (free version of Commercial) with a view to upgrading later.