Opencart vs. Magento vs. Zen Cart: Shopping Cart Reviewed

 

Technorati Tag: make money online,ebay,seo,hong kong,online marketing,ppc,mesurement,making money online,social media,top earning,drop ship,affiliate program,wholesaler,blog,shopping cart,behavioural marketing,media measurement,price list,anayltics,drop shippings,services

Opencart, Magento, Zen Cart are the three new present open source ecommerce shopping cart system. How to select from them needs to be carefully compared.

Firstly, It is important to know when selecting your shopping cart what features you need.  All the shopping carts should feature the following:

    * Customer management
    * Product management
    * Variety of payment and shipping modules
    * Order receipt emails
    * Ability to use SSL secure layers for ordering process

However the shopping carts vary when it comes to:

    * Time it takes to modify the cart to look like a current web design
    * WYSIWYG ability to modify product descriptions using different fonts, colors, etc.
    * Ability to import/export from Excel spreadsheet
    * Wholesale/Reseller Pricing

The following shopping carts below are open-source meaning that you can modify the source code and customize the shopping cart to your needs.

OpenCart
Website: http://www.opencart.com/
OpenCart looks great and is simple to setup and use. It’s probably aimed at smaller online shops, but is stable, fast, and caches pages. It’s new, so there aren’t many mods or themes just yet. Custom templates look straight-forward though.

My main concerns:
   1. It uses MySQL MyISAM tables (fast with full-text indexing, but no foreign keys or transactions). I’d really expect InnoDB to be used for a shop.
   2. URL aliases/mod-rewrites don’t work and there are few SEO considerations - descriptions and keywords can’t be entered. This should be fixed in the next version, but mod-rewrites need easier implementation (there’s currently a lookup table that must be manually populated with the real and aliased URL for every page).
   3. Template values are inserted using global variables. It feels dirty, and problems could occur with that approach. The current templates use transitional HTML, but I think standards-based versions should be possible.

It’s worth keeping an eye on the project and it’s definitely one I’d consider as it matures.

Magento
Website:  http://www.magentocommerce.com/
A serious amount of effort has gone into Magento. It’s huge, can run multiple shops, and has an Amazon-like plethora of features. The interface is nice, support is excellent, and there’s lots of help including video tutorials. InnoDB tables are used, mod-rewrites work, and SEO is well implemented.

My main concerns:

   1. It has high system requirements and could get slow with lots of users. The system could benefit from page caching.
   2. It’s a seriously complex piece of software and has a steep learning curve. It’s one for large companies rather than one-man stores (I couldn’t get a product to appear on the home page!)
   3. Templating is very flexible and uses XML to define multiple HTML page layouts and sections. But, it’s complicated: there are dozens of files in multiple locations, and the documentation appears to be wrong or out of date. It also seems to embed page-specific JS form validation code in the page head - not great.

Zen Cart - The Art of E-commerce
website: http://www.zen-cart.com
Zen Cart has a very nice wide array of features based on Oscommerce but has gone its own path. You can not install contributions directly from the Oscommerce web site onto Zen Cart. Some of the nice features include product attributes managers, template system, html editor for regular web page contents, built in coupon code system, ability to select what credit cards you accept, and more. An issue with Zen Cart right now is the Easy Populate contribution which would let you import products from an Excel sheet does not work yet. So if you need this feature we recommend the other shopping carts.

Besides, Zen Cart has No licensing fees, Stable, Many contributions from Oscommerce already installed, and Nicer looking default designs pre-installed.

My Main Concerns:
  1. not possible to use Oscommerce contributions, they must be converted to Zen Cart
  2. Admin interface is a little messy in certain areas because there are so many contributions installed

As one of the choices, I use opencart. It is very easy shop script. I was try magneto demo page and my opinion is - slowly admin system. It isn’t good way if you have a lot of product units.