I need a good php shopping cart.  The cart doesn’t have to work with CI. I am asking here because I highly respect the opinions of developers that would use a framework like CI.

The cart doesn’t have to be open source, but of course that is preferred.

thx for the help.

Two good carts are:

* Virtuemart (open source and for Joomla)
* IXXO (commercial - for Joomla or standalone version or free limited, hosted version)

Thx wackywebs I’ll check those out.  Only issue is that I never used joomla.

Anybody have opinions on any of these?
magentocommerce.com
oscommerce.com
zen-cart.com (fork of oscommerce)
cubecart.com

oscommerce.com - don’t even think about it, the code is a mess, seriously, it will make you cry!
My manager thought it would be a great idea to use oscommerce for a project - I’ve spent more time fixing bugs and fixing the horrendous HTML than it would have taken me to start from scratch. I’ve told him I’ll resign if I ever have to go near the damn thing again.

another option is wfcart, it’s very basic, but it’s very easy to understand how it works, and you can easily expand on it. http://www.webforcecart.com/

Only one worth anything, IMO, is Magento (www.magentocommerce.com)

I tried Zend, OSCommerce, and CubeCart, and they’re not nearly as nice.

the main draw for magento with me was how they do their design / templating system. Really logical and clean.

I can’t comment on magento, but I’ve worked with Zen - which is supposed to be the nicer, smarter fork of OS Commerce - all I can say is I wouldn’t touch either Zen or OS with a 10 foot pole.

I also worked with cubecart about 2 years ago and found it much easier to arm-wrestle into doing what I wanted. That said, I wouldn’t say it was ‘brilliant’ or ‘clean’, just better than the OS Commerce/Zen world.

Worth noting: If you want endless features-out-the-whazzoo, disregard my advice and have fun with Zen

welzie - 07 April 2008 12:06 PM

Thx wackywebs I’ll check those out.  Only issue is that I never used joomla.

Anybody have opinions on any of these?
magentocommerce.com
oscommerce.com
zen-cart.com (fork of oscommerce)
cubecart.com

All are good except for OSCOMMERCE! do not use it! If you are looking for a CMS and Shopping cart, use Joomla with Virtuemart or Magento.

Opinions are so mixed with osCommerce it’s a hard one to judge.  The fact is if you need a quick and simple cart with the basics, then it’s actually not all that bad.  however the oscmax project is decent and combines quite a bit of commonly asked for extensions into one package. I’ve used oscmax for 7+ shopping carts and in the end it’s fine really, of course it could be better but one can only complain so much before they just rebuild the wheel themselves.  Here was my most recent oscmax project:

http://fashionfish.biz

In the end it’s not worth the effort if you’re just going to mod the heck out of it, however it’s a good jumping off point for a simple cart.

At this point it would be silly not to choose magento or amazon webstore for merchant sites.  The rest just can’t compare.

I’ve used oscommerce and cube cart before. I’m not impressed with either. X-Cart (commercial) has always been my cart of choice for production sites, but I have been evaluative Magento for a couple of weeks now for an upcoming project. I can’t tell you how Magento will hold up in a production environment, but from what I’ve seen so far I think it’s the most well thought out cart I’ve ever seen. It’s still new, so there are a few bugs here and there, and it’s missing a few of the features (like google checkout integration) that I really like, but overall it looks light years ahead of anything else I could find, open source or commercial, on the market.

hybriid - 18 April 2008 08:59 PM

.. It’s still new, so there are a few bugs here and there, and it’s missing a few of the features (like google checkout integration) that I really like…

Maybe you didn’t see that they released v1.0 for production a few weeks back.  google checkout level two is fully supported   of course there will be many little bugs and random findings, however it’s a very solid tool and all the developers I know using the system are very excited about it.  I jumped into the dev community for magento around v0.6 and the progression has been fantastic.  the guys spearheading that project are doing a fantastic job. i just secured a few production cart projects and am going to use this, i’ll post my review using v1 when they’re complete.