on Jul 2nd, 2008The Shopping Cart Curse
I have been, for over a year now, trying to start a business (Alcove Alley) which will sell many items online. I think that it would be a great supplement for us when Carolyn can’t work anymore due to her pregnancy.
However, every shopping cart I’ve tried either required a HECK of a lot of hacking and bashing to get it to do what I want or it just … won’t work right.
OSCommerce was my first attempt. It has a strong user base and is probably one of the oldest of the carts I know of. Very robust and is probably the most professional. However, it is a pain in the can to try and get to work correctly with anything. The theme structure is really not geared for humans.
WP E-Commerce was the second attempt. I love WordPress, and having the ability to sell items via the WP admin was such a great feeling I couldn’t wait to try it and see if it would work for me. As soon as it was installed I got more and more excited. Nice features, ran well, very SEO friendly. Wait .. ok, how do I do that … ok, no documentation … post in forums. All I got was a link to another thread that wasn’t really related. Ok … let’s try … no, can’t do that … how about … mm, no can’t do that either.
Magento Commerce was the very last attempt and probably the BEST looking cart ever. Had every feature under the sun and then some with a very large user base with a lot of community support. Very cool. Let’s download … the 36mb file. Holy snot that’s huge! Ok, let’s do some things. Let’s import a CVS of product, shouldn’t be too taxing, right? Uh .. ok, will only import 20 items at a time (problem for a 3400 item list). And, I found, that it completely over shot my database limit but about 15mb (I have a 100mb limit on all databases … kind of weird, but hey). So, that’s a bust. Can’t get it to work, too large of a database …
I’m at my wits end here folks. I’ve not tried ZenCart - mostly because I’m not impressed with how it looks. I once used PHPShop, but it was so hacker friendly that I didn’t want to deal with that problem again. And it looks like the last community post was a while ago.
Any ideas? I need basically something that can import a lot of data, SEO friendly, easy to maintain, can handle coupons and discounts, use a percent for calculating shipping on the subtotal … basic stuff. And be secure. I’ll use PayPal as my payment gateway - eventually using the API for direct processing rather than redirecting to the PayPal site.
So yeah - what am I missing? Is these features available on a simple system that I don’t know about? Am I losing my mind?
