I’ve been thinking at taking another look at Free and Open Source PHP shopping cart applications, and my list came down to osCommerce, ZenCart and CRE Loaded.
If anyone’s Googling this post looking for answers, they’re likely to be as disappointed as I was. There seems to be no up-to-date comparison between them, beyond some superficial forum posts, and seeing as I haven’t yet used any of the three, I’m not going to add much to the debate.
However, at a superficial glance I was quite disappointed. CRE Loaded interested me the least, it seems to be little more than osCommerce with a few addons installed (at least the free version – there’s also a Pro version which interests me even less). CRE Loaded doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry, which is indicative of extremely low levels of community activity.
osCommerce has always intrigued me. I’ve heard differing tales: a number of developers I know who’ve worked with it swear by it, raving about the code, while others have said it’s awful. It seems the actual developers of the project tend towards the latter view, as progress has halted for an inordinately long time while they embark on a complete rewrite. So much so that the latest stable version of osCommerce still requires register_globals to be on, which, in PHP terms is quite shocking. The big advantage of osCommerce seems to be the support and vast number of community contributions, but with such a flaw, and the likelihood of the contributions not working with the new version, there seems little point. At least, I’ll wait for the next version. A little more looking too revealed what seems to be one active developer for the core code, so perhaps the community is skewed towards users and contributers of a few hacks.
That leaves ZenCart, and I’ve heard differering opinions about the level of community support and activity in the project. The developers seem more active though, and community support seems reasonable at a glance, so it’s probably top of my list to try.
Well Ian, I have the same problem as you. I am just trying to decide which cart to use, and the final choice is between osCommerce, Zen Cart, and CRE Loaded. As I have gone trough blogs, articles and differente pages my reseach leaves this:
– osCommerce perhaps is the best option if you have a lot of time for developing your store and also if you have high knowledge in PHP, HTML, SQL and other type of tecnical things. This due to its flexibility, support, and customizable add ons.
– CRE Loaded seems to me like a type of mercenary product that they are just waiting any moment to charge you with a release. Also there is no much info on the net.
– Zen cart has some gread add ons, but not that much as CRE Loaded, but the development for this tools seems to be better and also perhaps would have a great future.
I am thinking in puttin also at the en Zen Cart, but perphaps try both. I will post later what I find out.
Why don’t you take a look at cubecart? It sounds like good alternative. Would be interesting to know what shopping cart you settled with and how it goes.
In case you want to switch fm your shopping cart to a different one – try online service cart2cart. It automates data transfer, offers assisted migration, etc. http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com
I personally feel x-cart is the complete shopping cart, though its a bit difficult to understand.