Online cart

[sweetbeats]

Advice?

I only have a few products, but I need to get info from the customer for each one. At the moment I'm using paypal (button), which is crap. I can't work out the best way to do it.. ie a form and then checkout on page after the form..

I have looked at mals ecart adn so on but dont feel confident about setting it all up. Also ezimerchant.

[eBusiness Buddy]

Google Checkout, maybe?

Or what about a hosted solution? The plus side is that it's easy to set up and all the complex stuff is in the hands of the provider, but the downside is that the store is separated from your website as opposed to an integrated onsite shopping cart. Volusion, Shopify, and BigCommerce are a few examples that come to mind.

[sweetbeats]

I've used bigcommerce before, but I was really disappointed by the lack of Australian support for stuff like ebay integration. Ie, when I couldnt integrate iwth ebay, they said oh sorry we dont support Australian ebay and currenlty have no plans to fix this..

I've actually perservered a bit with Ezimerchant and it turns out it is super easy PLUS i've emailed them like 6 times asking for help and they've responded within the hour each time ( very patiently). Ezimerchant is free too! but with premium upgrade (i've forgotten at what point youneed to get the upgrade). I'm not sure about their credit card integration though, I think they can just take the credit card payment but then the merchant has to process it manually but I may be wrong

[help_from_ingenyes]

There are a lot of open source (free) shopping carts that are all pretty fantastic. Here's my pick in order of preference. All of these have demos on their websites. So you can check them out to see if they do what it is you want. You can use Paypal or a credit card with them all (you will need a Merchant Account and an SSL certificate for CC)

These all have the advantage of being cheap (i.e. free) and they all have a good community around them for advice and support.

There are alos plenty of developers and companies that specialise in one or another of these carts and they will set it up for you for a small fee (but shop around and get someone reputable!)

Since they are free you can download and install them for a test run. "Try before you buy!"

OScommerce
http://www.oscommerce.com/about

ZenCart
http://www.zen-cart.com/

Magento
http://www.magentocommerce.com/

Hope this helps - Ingenyes

[sweetbeats]

thanks for that, that's great!

[Phillip]

We develop in both Oscommerce and Magento.

Once you get your head around Magento its a lot more powerful than oscommerce... if you only have a few products and running wordpress a estore plugin works perfectly!

[v2Media]

The biggest, gnarliest, most confounding database query I've ever written was for Magento. It's a great cart for features and functionality out of the box, but if you need features customised, you'd better have deep pockets. Magento can also be easily installed on a shared server and this gets a lot of people in trouble. Magento is not so easily updated on a shared server - insufficient ram.

ZenCart hasn't been developed on since October last year. It's dead in the water as far as I know. OsCommerce 3 might be interesting; at lease there's some activity in it's development.

My flavour of the month for carts is cubecart.